Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

Finding patterns and information using machines, in a seemingly random noise should no longer be a surpise, much the same way as lifting tonnes of weight using a crane is no longer a surprise.

A few months ago a post claiming an amateur deciphered Linear A hit the front page and quickly got almost 500 upvotes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48600107

https://aiclambake.com/clamtakes/linear-a/

Despite the announcement originating from a blog named "AI Clambake" covering "weekly, human-powered newsletter for advertising folks". Written by a personal friend of the author. Announced without any corroboration or commentary whatsoever from academics or subject matter experts of any kind. And, of course, not submitted to any peer reviewed journal or even Arxiv.

The author of the purported discovery was described as a "self taught AI engineer and amateur linguist". In the comments the friend insisted several times that a draft of the paper (not posted), was emailed to a top professor at Rutgers, giving it additional credibility that his friend wasn't another one of ten thousand cranks who has made the same claim over the years (seemingly unaware that cold emailing random professors found from a Google search is the first thing basically every crank does).

You would think this should have set of dozens of alarm bells for everyone, making the value of this announcement basically zero. And yet it hit the front page with the bulk of comments ecstatic that some random guy with Claude Code could do something experts in academia who spent their lives devoted to the problem couldn't.

I had become accustomed to the toxic optimism of this hype cycle in which even mild criticism leads to accusations of being a discredited "AI skeptic"/Gary Marcus/Ed Zitron type who was "coping" (?). But this was like something you'd see shared on FB linking to a .xyz domain by an elderly family member who recently drained their accounts buying Xbox gift cards to pay their IRS bill.

It feels a lot like the week or two when HN was overflowing with exuberance from the LK-99 room temperature superconductor "discovery ". You'd see post after post fantasizing about an imminent future with a world full of maglev hovercrafts, MRIs built into every phone, fusion reactors and more. But people pointing out none of that was scientifically plausible and evidence of LK-99 superconductoring was non-existent were accused of knee-jerk negativity and the typical HN cynicism and pessimism.

If we filter out the pep tone, it is doing something useful: framing.

Problem framing will always be important.

Framing adjusts how big of problem-solving guns we bring out at the gate (modern or hobby cryptography?), and how to interpret intermediate failures.

For simple but unsolved problems, we expect lots of hard failures, but that each hard failure just reflects that there are a lot simple combinations to try. I.e. we expect lots of zero progress, and then a fit.

Like finding the numbers to a combination lock.

For hard problems, if we don't make any progress it is a really bad sign. We should be learning something, even if it turns out to be irrelevant later.

Such as when we are trying to prove a tricky conjecture.

They use a small amount of land per MW used. The fact that space isn't a constraining factor in power demand, and demand for AI compute seems to be insatiable at the moment, means that there is less of a "land constraint" to use even more energy. If they actually required a lot of land they would be less viable and AI progress would be slower IMO. Just means even more data centre's will be built - this is where the Jevon's paradox actually is IMO. Seeing it in real life already with these things taking a significant portion of power demand and projected to take even more.

As you use more and more land as well the ability to provision renewables decreases - in general renewable power needs more land/resources per energy produced. You can't just mine it out of the ground; they just aren't as dense of a form of energy. Which means we either build less data centres to make room for renewables and transmission infrastructure associated with them, or more likely with lax regulation builders switch to more dense power sources (e.g. gas peakers, generators, etc) even if it is for supplementation.

I can see a future where data center wants are put ahead of communities paying tax on said infrastructure. In fact I think its happening in some places already.

Synonym is the word you’re after.