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See also Nat’s twitter announcement: https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1712470683207532906 https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1712470683207532906 $700
by sillysaurusx 3y ago
See also Nat’s twitter announcement: https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1712470683207532906 https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1712470683207532906
$700k is a life changing amount of money. I admit, it’s tempting to drop everything and go devote myself like a monk to the pursuit of ancient enlightenment via modern ML. I wonder where we’d start…
It’s also funny that the scroll might just be a laundry list.
- chakintosh 3y agoOr a customer complaint: https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/complaint-tablet-to-ea-nasir-the-oldest-recorded-customer-complaint https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/complaint-tablet-to-ea...
- Wojtkie 3y agoWhat I love about the Ea-Nasir story is the tablet was found in a pile of other tablets, suggesting that Ea-Nasir saved them. Why? Who knows, maybe he found them funny.
- vimax 3y agoI heard somewhere it was common practice to reuse tablets. It was easier to scrape the surface clean than to make a new tablet. You'd save any tablets you have, and might wait until you need it to scrape it clean. In Mesopotamia there was a period where it was fashionable to use a more rare softer red clay on top of the white clay. Your stylus would cut through the top layer leaving nice white letters on a red background. It made it easier to scrape clean and reuse, but much less durable over time.
- jdminhbg 3y agoYes, the clay tablets were used over and over. The ones that are preserved have what was written on them when they were fired, accidentally, by being in a building that was destroyed by fire.
- cheese_van 3y agoYeah, and a large number of clay tablets found were training tablets. At any given time, there may have been more students working on properly learning the mechanics of writing on tablets then tablets in circulation so a surprising number of what is found is, basically homework, or apprentice practice.
- daveevad 3y agoThat's fascinating to this lay clay tablet thinker. It had never occurred to me that clay tablets were reused. In fact, it nearly fundamentally changes my estimation of them as a long-term durable storage medium.
- PeterisP 3y agoHardening clay is relatively simple (just as any other pottery) but optional - you can choose to keep the clay unbaked if you want to reuse it (it would dry out but can be made wet again), but you can also make them permanent.
- user3939382 3y ago> You'd save any tablets you have, and might wait until you need it to scrape it clean. The 3.5” floppies of yore.
- spiritplumber 3y agoThe first meme dump.
- wut-wut 3y agoWell done.
- dmix 3y ago> What do you take me for that you treat me with such contempt? … Apparently "What do you take me for" is an extremely old phrase. Funny how things stick around. I wonder if that's a result of translation though.
- omoikane 3y agoIf you like the Ea-Nasir story, there is a whole subreddit dedicated to it: https://www.reddit.com/r/ReallyShittyCopper/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ReallyShittyCopper/ Also: https://xkcd.com/2758/ https://xkcd.com/2758/
- 0xf00ff00f 3y agoA laundry list with something purple...
- empath-nirvana 3y agoit might cost more than $700k in compute.
- latchkey 3y agoIt certainly did. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36312385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36312385
- cosmojg 3y agoWhere do they say that the winners used that cluster?
- latchkey 3y agoIt is an assumption based on the fact that the codebase uses cuda and the main backer of the project owns the cluster.
- nyssos 3y ago> It is an assumption Then don't say "certainly"
- latchkey 3y agoWhy not? If they had bought the compute themselves, it might cost more than $700k.
- BHSPitMonkey 3y agoI am absolutely certain that the compute might have cost more than 100 trillion dollars.
- mr_toad 3y agoMany amateurs compete in Kaggle, most of them use whatever hardware they have to hand, and a lot of them will use CUDA directly or indirectly.
- terhechte 3y agoThis is one of more than 600 scrolls that could be read afterwards if the method becomes scalable. What's more: "excavations were never completed, and many historians believe that thousands more scrolls remain underground." [0] [0]: https://scrollprize.org https://scrollprize.org
- ssnistfajen 3y agoBeing able to virtually unroll the scrolls within reasonable time/effort/cost will hopefully encourage the Italian government to approve further excavations of the villa for more papyri. If Vesuvius erupts again we don't know how much of the present excavation will survive.
- radarsat1 3y ago> if the method becomes scalable the machine learning stuff is cool, but it's important not to discount the apparently pretty manual labour still involved in the virtual unwrapping: > Early in the summer, a small team of annotators (the “segmentation team”) joined our effort. They began mapping the 3D structure of the scroll using tools initially built by EduceLab and improved by our community. By July we had segmented and “virtually flattened” hundreds of cm2 of papyrus. So, it sounds like it was about a month or two of work, for a single scroll. Although, it probably could be partially or fully automated too, with some effort. Already they developed some tools to help, and I guess it's the kind of task that gets easier after you do it the first time.
- versteegen 3y agoActually it's much worse than that. Only a very small fraction of the first of the two scanned scrolls has been segmented/unwrapped after 5 months, and it's the easiest parts that are done -- about 1000cm^2 across something like 100 layers of papyrus 10cm wide. Only 50cm^2 of scroll 2 is done. Where the sheets are right against each other is much harder.
- gojomo 3y agoBut at the same time: scanning tech & software automation just keep getting better, including via spillovers from other unrelated projects. The ability of an ML system to learn to mimic what the manual "virtual unrolling" process is doing, from a small number of examples-to-follow, is growing. Each bit of success, once confirmed by other experts or correlation with other texts, improves the training data. Eventually a fully-software pushbutton pipeline of "raw imaging to likely texts" should be possible. And if, say, some of the scrolls are sufficiently 'read' nondestructively to embolden teams to risk destructive techniques – such as incremental ablation while reading the exact chemicals at every coordinate – even higher-resolution data could become available.
- jdminhbg 3y ago> It’s also funny that the scroll might just be a laundry list. Most likely not, I believe they're starting with scrolls that were readable on the outside, which we know are minor works of Greek stoic philosophy. Also a laundry list would be written on a reusable wax tablet, rather than costly papyrus.
- michael_nielsen 3y agoIt's likely somehow a reference to the Emperor. Purple cloth was extremely rare and expensive, and it was the colour worn by the Emperors. Indeed, it eventually became a capital crime for people outside the Emperor's family to wear it. I don't know if that was yet true at the time of Vesuvius, although Wikipedia claims Caligula may have had someone killed for wearing purple.
- Arete314159 3y agoThe other word visible is "oino", wine. Wine can be described as purple.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoWhile modern people make that connection, that is culturally dependent. The color terms available to speakers of a language, and what objects those terms can be associated with, change over time. In the case of the Greek word for "purple", it was connected to a dye and therefore used for clothing, but one shouldn't expect it to be used for wine.
- fsckboy 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea_(Homer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea_(Homer) "Wine-dark sea is a traditional English translation of oînops póntos (οἶνοψ πόντος, IPA: /ôi̯.nops pón.tos/), from oînos (οἶνος, "wine") + óps (ὄψ, "eye; face"), a Homeric epithet. A literal translation is "wine-face sea" (wine-faced, wine-eyed). It is attested five times in the Iliad and twelve times in the Odyssey[1] often to describe rough, stormy seas. The only other use of oînops in the works of Homer is for oxen, for which is it used once in the Iliad and once in the Odyssey, where it describes a reddish colour. The phrase has become a common example when talking about the use of colour in ancient Greek texts."
- Ylpertnodi 3y agoSays you.
- dataflow 3y ago> $700k is a life changing amount of money Probably ~half of that will go to taxes?
- thrway63245 3y agoNot sure why this is downvoted. Yes, in California half will go to taxes and the rest is enough for a downpayment on a shack. Hardly life changing.
- lazyasciiart 3y agoPretty damn life changing, actually, for the vast majority of even gasp Californians.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoMust be nice to be a billionaire. I'm a fairly well paid engineer and I would certainly consider a $700k gift to be life-changing.
- hotnfresh 3y agoI make good, but not FAANG, money, and $350k after-tax, all at once, would still put me most of a decade ahead, financially, and give me some much better options for dealing with a bunch of stuff. Yeah, life changing.
- dataflow 3y ago> would still put me most of a decade ahead, financially I think that might be the kind of the crux of it. Saving this money to get a decade "ahead" might help your retirement life (assuming things don't collapse before then), but not your current life. Whether that's considered "life-changing" might be in the eye of the beholder.
- lazide 3y agoNo one can not consider that life changing in that context?
- jedberg 3y ago> It’s also funny that the scroll might just be a laundry list. Even if it were, a laundry list from 2000 years ago would be a fascinating read.
- KingLancelot 3y ago[dead]
- dclowd9901 3y agoI don’t think people in those days wrote bullshit. You had to know how to write, and if you did, no one was entreating you to write grocery lists.
- gambiting 3y agoThey absolutely did, we have plenty of proof of ancient romans and other cultures writing down jokes, little squabbles, "John was here" on walls etc, one of the oldest known pieces of writing is literally one merchant complaining to another merchant about some marble that wasn't as ordered.
- 1-more 3y agoon walls and tablets, but on papyrus? Papyrus was expensive.
- jakderrida 3y ago>I admit, it’s tempting to drop everything and go devote myself like a monk to the pursuit of ancient enlightenment via modern ML. I wonder where we’d start… I think you'd be shocked how well LLMs translate cuneiform in the CDLI notation. What's hilarious is my first attempt included examples in-context and Claude prefaced the translation by stating that there's nothing in my example translations about "bulls", "horns" or "grabbing" and that it will ignore that translation. I looked it up word-by-word and realized Claude was right. Blew me away. Yet Assyriology subreddits were as excited about my findings as lawyer subreddits are about LLMs. Not sure why, either. Just a bunch of, "So what? Does that mean it's useful?".