@bob even in those cases they are operating off things like photos, scans of photos, writing, transcription. secondary artifacts of actual things, mostly not created with the intent to wholly represent thing
@bob usually datasets are constructed to solve a narrow problem or answer specific questions, rather than to distill pure reality
Oct 15, 2026, 2:17 PM@thumphries for pretraining? not really. the standard datasets for vision like imagenet and COCO are just huge piles of photos scraped from the web, and when people do eg: object detection they start from a pretrained net trained on one of those datasets