191–200 of 218 posts
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> $700k is a life changing amount of money Probably ~half of that will go to taxes?
Not 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.
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"Spot robot dumpster dives in landfill and finds 100,000 bitcoins in discarded hard drive"
"We're working hard to figure out what this 'bitcoin' is, exciting times!"
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I actually participated in the challenge for a little while and this was the approach I took before I dropped out to do a few other things. However, what I did was a bit different -- instead of looking for a crackle, I surmised that that 'crackling' effect actually is just of course slices of the data over different rifts in the parchment, and that the data of the ink lay on the manifold of that crackling and bending…
I, for one, would be interested in the code.
I hope to post a perhaps more cleaned up version of at least the dataset code, the aligmnent code is extremely messy and in the discord server (licensed under 'free to steal as many ideas as you want from' basically).
See also Nat’s twitter announcement: 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.
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?".
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Where do they say that the winners used that cluster?
It is an assumption based on the fact that the codebase uses cuda and the main backer of the project owns the cluster.
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Do you have any counter cites? Because it seems pretty close! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_plates
Primary sources. The only references to Egypt are in relation to the language, not actual Egyptians: https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/search?query=egyptians&typ... i.e. the plates were written in a language reformed from original Egyptian -- which makes sense, as ancient Hebrews would sometimes write in Egyptian characters when enscribing was difficult (metal plates!) because the Egyptian script was more concise. It…
That’s almost complete nonsense. You give me a chisel and I’ll carve Hebrew in Aramaic square script or paleo-Hebrew much faster than hieroglyphs. A angular hieratic might be a draw, but that’d also be needlessly complicated. The small part that’s not nonsense: some early Semitic texts are written in a simplified form of hieroglyphs that would later evolve into the alphabets we use today, including the usual scripts used to write Hebrew. But those writings weren’t any more concise by using simplified hieroglyphs verses another script.
This Mormon Sunday-school myth is born out of a misunderstanding of how Egyptian hieroglyphs work that impeded their decipherment from late antiquity until the early 1800’s. Namely, that hieroglyphs were some deep allegorical language where a single symbol could be emblematic of entire sentences or more. Joseph Smith apparently believed this, as evidenced by his attempts to translate Egyptian funerary texts as “The Book of Abraham.” We have interlinear manuscripts showing him translating entire sentences and paragraphs from single symbols.
This misunderstanding is further reflected in 1 Nephi 1:2, “I make a record in the language of my father, which consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians.” There are ways to read that line that don’t implicate the widespread misunderstanding of how hieroglyphs work, but the misunderstanding is the one that was generally held at the time the Book of Mormon was published and continuing to today.
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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
https://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2023/04/06/the-puzzled...
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Primary sources. The only references to Egypt are in relation to the language, not actual Egyptians: https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/search?query=egyptians&typ... i.e. the plates were written in a language reformed from original Egyptian -- which makes sense, as ancient Hebrews would sometimes write in Egyptian characters when enscribing was difficult (metal plates!) because the Egyptian script was more concise. It…
> Then as for scam artist -- I suppose that is a matter of personal judgment, since no fair trial ever occurred or made a guilty verdict before he was murdered. It's mildly impressive that in the same sentence where you mention there was no guilty verdict "for scam artist", you say Joseph Smith was "murdered", a thing for which there was also no guilty verdict: the five men indicted for the killings were acquitted.
Treason against Illinois? Polygamy? Declaring Martial Law? Being kicked out of Missouri after a war named after your religion? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1838_Mormon_War]
All while running for President of the United States, and just before being lynched by an angry mob?
And with no convictions for those accused?
Truly an overachiever.
P.S. One of the best quotes I've ever seen - Missouri Gov. Boggs had an attempted assassination, and during the trial of the most likely suspect - Smith associate Porter Rockwell - Rockwell successfully defended himself with, among other things, (per wikipedia) his reputation as a deadly gunman and his statement that he "never shot at anybody, if I shoot they get shot!... He's still alive, ain't he?".
Amazing.