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First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years
- manymany 2y ago[flagged]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago[flagged]
- fambalamboni 2y ago[flagged]
- lexicality 2y agoPresumably yes, if they were written on papyrus, set on fire and then buried in volcanic ash for a thousand years first. Possibly more efficient options are available...
- JoeDaDude 2y agoYou may, or may not be asking in jest. In any case, I think you are alluding to the fact that Luke Farritor, winner of the Vesuvius challenge in 2023 and former SpaceX intern, is now employed by Elon Musk in the Department of Government Efficiency, ostensibly to find waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpflT8XuSyg&t=11s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpflT8XuSyg&t=11s
- lexicality 2y agowell, that's cursed knowledge
- SV_BubbleTime 2y agoWhy? Is the guy suddenly not sharp and talented anymore?
- mattigames 2y agoIt's likely that the talents needed to solve a technical challenge such as finding text in CT scans of heavily burned pages using machine learning doesn't mean he will have the same level of success when dealing with insights about socioeconomic issues in both the local and global scale and all the politics that such endeavor needs, specially when there is a heavy bias to an existing decision, the decision to reduce funds (meaning, even if he concludes that there is one particular endeavor where the government should spend more, it would be frowned upon by his boss and peers)
- mattigames 2y agoJust the cutting of everything USAID shows how little he understands of politics, the soft power that such organization earns for the country cannot be overstated, but in the business context Musk knows best there is really not equivalent, so he thinks such spending counts as "inefficiency", turns out countries are not companies and Musk and friends are in for a rude awakening and the country is the one who will suffer because of it as it increasingly alienates it's allies.
- decremental 2y ago[dead]
- bboygravity 2y agoSo you're saying the kid who digitally unwraps Vesivius scrolls is not smart enough to write automated systems to detect that Covid payments to literal "Free money LLC" are likely fraudulent? Just to name an example.
- ben_w 2y agoWithout comment on the guy himself — I assume he's enthusiastically trying to do the best for the world, like most people — there's a huge gap between "let's find and stop very obvious fraud" and "let's cancel all soft power spending everywhere immediately because I don't know what value it has and don't want to spend money for the time it takes to find out". The former is police work. The latter is a practical demonstration of Chesterton's Fence, which is the "conservative" part of the word "conservative".
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- generalizations 2y ago> The document, which looks like a lump of charcoal, was charred by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD and is too fragile to ever be physically opened. > But now scientists have used a combination of X-ray imaging and artificial intelligence to virtually unfurl it, revealing rows and columns of text. "scientists" They talked to the head of the vesuvius challenge, which is the actual project that figured out how to read the scrolls, the head of the library that holds the scrolls, and the guy who runs the xray machine. But the people who solved this weren't scientists. They were largely college kids. This has a lot more interesting detail. https://scrollprize.org/ https://scrollprize.org/
- gkbrk 2y agoCollege kids can be scientists. Anyone doing science is a scientist. There are even middle-school kids doing science. Or random adults with non-STEM jobs collecting data as a hobby for Citizen Science. We should be careful not to gatekeep the words science or scientist. The more mad scientists we have throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks, the more things we can discover.
- generalizations 2y agoI absolutely agree, and the (possibly badly said) intention was to highlight that credit is not being given where credit is due. "scientists" being a way to obscure the actual people who pulled this off.
- moonlet 2y agoYup as long as it’s done in a scientific way and published under peer review doesn’t matter who did it - that’s the great thing about blind publication review in a lot of fields
- throwaway48476 2y agoExactly. Science is a process not an ideology.
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- dang 2y agoRecent and related: News from Scroll 5 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42955356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42955356 - Feb 2025 (3 comments)
- NaOH 2y agoAdditional backstory: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37857417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37857417 - Oct 2023 (210 comments) Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39261861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39261861 - Feb 2024 (216 comments)
- Erwin 2y agoThat CS student was Luke Farritor -- now part of the infamous DOGE team.
- ksenzee 2y ago[flagged]
- SV_BubbleTime 2y agoI get the ideologues here being mad… but I don’t get mad to the point where people need to pretend this guy isn’t highly intelligent. Doesn’t it make it better that there are really sharp people on the “DOGE” team. Shouldn’t people be more mad at dummies doing it?
- ryeights 2y agoWho is saying he isn’t intelligent? And can’t smart people do bad things?
- SV_BubbleTime 2y agoAre things you disagree with bad by definition or assumption? Or because you were told… because unless you have a front row seat, everything you know is because someone else already parsed that info for you.
- focusgroup0 2y ago[flagged]
- unit149 2y ago[dead]
- dark__paladin 2y ago[flagged]
- 52-6F-62 2y agoSeriously. Working overtime…
- shark_laser 2y ago[flagged]
- muglug 2y agoWhat are you talking about? The BBC doesn’t get any USAID funding. The BBC News website is supported by UK television license payers, and for non-UK folks it has banner ads which help pay for hosting and other costs. There's a separate non-profit, BBC Media Action (formerly the BBC World Service Trust) with a completely different remit to the BBC that receives some USAID funding, but is mainly funded by the UK government.
- dmolony 2y agoLuckily they explained what papyrus is. The BBC is now doing ELI5.
- ben_w 2y agoYou say that like 6 year olds regularly use papyrus. Despite that it was once common, very few people today have any more reason to know about it than they have to know about silphium or electrum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrum
- userbinator 2y agoIn the future, perhaps we may see "first glimpse inside burnt floppy disk after 2k years"?
- HPsquared 2y ago"Electron microscope image of partially-melted optical disc"
- mmooss 2y agoHow do we know the AI output is accurate? What observable evidence is there? From the article: > Inside this huge machine, which is called a synchrotron, electrons are accelerated to almost the speed of light to produce a powerful X-ray beam that can probe the scroll without damaging it. ... > The scan is used to create a 3D reconstruction, then the layers inside the scroll - it contains about 10m of papyrus - have to be identified. ... > After that artificial intelligence is used to detect the ink. It's easier said than done - both the papyrus and ink are made from carbon and they're almost indistinguishable from each other. > So the AI hunts for the tiniest signals that ink might be there, then this ink is painted on digitally, bringing the letters to light.
- LegionMammal978 2y agoThe ML ink-detection models aren't spitting out Greek text. They're just predicting ink locations, which can be calibrated and cross-checked by manual inspection with the original. (E.g., an earlier article showed how ink particles showed up as a shift in texture.) They operate on a lower level than letters and words, so if the ink does correspond to Greek letters that come out to recognizable Greek words forming sensible passages, it's good evidence that the output is correct. Presumably, it's possible for errors to slip through, but human labelers can similarly make errors.
- mmooss 2y ago> Presumably, it's possible for errors to slip through, but human labelers can similarly make errors. That's often an argument for AI systems: Is it better than humans (than avoiding car accidents, reading text, reading x-rays, etc.). But in science we need observable evidence.
- StableAlkyne 2y ago> But in science we need observable evidence. The observable evidence here is the raw x-ray data. Based on the article, what is being done here was using ML to process that X-ray data, to create another set of output that the humans could analyze. I understand jumping on the anti-AI bandwagon, but this ain't ChatGPT. Using ML to process complex instrument output has been used since at least the 70s. This is much closer to statistics based approaches than it is to some random startup trying to sell your manager on some snake oil AI-assisted whatever. I don't know your background, so I'm sorry if I'm assuming anything. Any chance you articulate what specifically you don't like about the method they used to process the data, other than "It's ML?"
- baruz 2y agoThey said that the work was a Greek Epicurean work, but described it as finding fulfillment in the pleasures of life. The Greek Epicureans were of the opinion that avoiding pain and suffering was the object of ethical philosophy, which is not the same thing, at all.
- t_mann 2y ago> Epicureanism ... declares pleasure to be its sole intrinsic goal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism What the OP actually says is 'fulfilment can be found through the pleasure of everyday things' which is very much in line with Epicurean thinking.
- OJFord 2y agoThis is largely all new to me, but this section defining pleasure within your link does seem to align with what GP is saying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism#Pleasure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism#Pleasure > Epicureans had a very specific understanding of what the greatest pleasure was, and the focus of their ethics was on the avoidance of pain rather than seeking out pleasure. So whether the description of the work (as GP critiques) is correct, really comes down to whether the definition of 'pleasure' used is as in Epicureanism. Certainly someone unfamiliar would misunderstand it.
- declan_roberts 2y agoIsn't reading a wrapped scroll with AI what one or the DOGE guys is famous for? Is this his same technology or something different?