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First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

bbc.co.uk

21–30 of 95 posts

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#21
post #19
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additional backstory: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student - 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 - Feb 2024 (216 comments)

That CS student was Luke Farritor -- now part of the infamous DOGE team.

[flagged]

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#24
post #19
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additional backstory: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student - 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 - Feb 2024 (216 comments)

That CS student was Luke Farritor -- now part of the infamous DOGE team.

I 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?

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You 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

well, that's cursed knowledge

Why? Is the guy suddenly not sharp and talented anymore?

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#26
post #7

> 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…

College 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.

Exactly. Science is a process not an ideology.

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#27
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That CS student was Luke Farritor -- now part of the infamous DOGE team.

I 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?

Who is saying he isn’t intelligent? And can’t smart people do bad things?

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#28

> 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…

I completely agree. They even have a picture of the light source used to do the scans as if that's more important than the people who did the actual work. I can't understand the editorial bent in this article. I think editors believe scientists to be vaunted and inaccessible creatures that live in the rarefied climbs of "science mountain." Meanwhile it's just some kid down the block who would love to be interviewed b…

I'm pretty sure Luke has a lot more things to worry about right now than being interviewed by the BBC, lol.

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, that's cursed knowledge

Why? Is the guy suddenly not sharp and talented anymore?

It'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)
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