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First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

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Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#121

Post by nataliste »

Amezarak wrote: post #107
nataliste wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you even on about? I'm talking about widespread suppression of Jews, whether Christianized or not, that is documented before and in the aftermath of the first Jewish-Roman war, which occurred 68-74AD. There's no empire-spanning conspiracy lasting centuries, but a continual massage of what came before to justify the current status quo, an extremely similar dynamic as what is recognized by biblical scholars wh…

Christianized Jews and Jews generally were spread throughout and beyond the empire. The persecutions, even postwar, were terrible but relatively localized and there is no reason to believe it involved the mass redaction of all existing documents (not even possible!) and then-unwritten oral histories (which then everyone, antisemites, Christians, pagans, all alike decided to maintain silence about even though they wou…

I still have no idea what you're ranting on about, but it's clearly not related to anything I've said. Cheers.

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#122

Post by thaumasiotes »

Terr_ wrote: post #94
michael_nielsen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'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.

> Indeed, it eventually became a capital crime for people outside the Emperor's family to wear it. Similarly, various Emperors far away in China had a similar enforced color-monopoly, except it was on yellow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_in_Chinese_culture#Yello...

Under traditional Irish law, there was no significance to any particular color, but the number of different colors you could wear simultaneously was determined by your status.

The general phenomenon of legal protections on status signifiers goes under the name "sumptuary laws". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumptuary_law

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#123

Post by thaumasiotes »

Arete314159 wrote: post #37
michael_nielsen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'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.

The other word visible is "oino", wine. Wine can be described as purple.

Only if you assume that whoever scribed the scroll wasn't too concerned about what order the letters in a word should be written in.

The image is annotated OIWN and the article tentatively identifies the word as OMOIWN, meaning "similar".

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#124

Post by thaumasiotes »

lexicality wrote: post #38
alanbernstein wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely they will be public domain by now??

It is disgraceful that the ancient Greek authors won't see an obol that these so called "translators" and "historians" make from reselling their work. They should sue! /s

This could revolutionize the state of the Greek budget!

https://satwcomic.com/bully-fail

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#125

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #46

"He found a few dozen ink strokes - and some complete letters - that could be labeled and used as training data. Before long, the model was unveiling traces of crackle invisible to his own eye. Soon, these traces began to form letters and hints of actual words." This does not sound like a "Large Language Model (LLM)" or other large set of training data, like the sort hyped by so-called "tech" companies; this sounds r…

He made $40,000 without needing a large data set. No proprietary, corporate LLM needed.

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#126

Post by daveevad »

jdminhbg wrote: post #18
vimax wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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 backgr…

Yes, 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.

That'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.

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#127

Post by stevula »

Arete314159 wrote: post #37
michael_nielsen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'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.

The other word visible is "oino", wine. Wine can be described as purple.

I see “oiōn” (οιων), not “oino” (οινο or οινω). I don’t see how it could be read as “wine”. οιων could be several things off the top of my head:

1. the beginning of some form of of οἰωνός “omen”

2. genitive plural of οἶς, meaning “of sheep”

3. a genitive plural of some other word with a stem ending in -οι-, but with the beginning of the word missing. For example, the demonstrative τοίων “of such”, relative οἵων “of which”, or ποίων “of a certain kind”. Or, as speculated in the article, ὁμοίων “same”.

The 3rd option seems most likely to me without any further context. ὁμοίων seems especially plausible since the preceding characters do resemble "ΟΜ".

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#128

Post by huytersd »

carapace wrote: post #22
jdminhbg wrote: post #16

This is the 21st-century equivalent of living through the opening of Tut's tomb. Incredible to think there's a very real chance that in the medium-term future you might be able to buy a copy of a newly-translated work on Amazon that hasn't been read for millennia.

Why the ad for Amazon?

Why not?

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#130

Post by lazide »

dataflow wrote: post #100
hotnfresh wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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.

> 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.

No one can not consider that life changing in that context?
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