Ars Astronomica – English translations of rare Hebrew and Latin astronomy texts

Post by sweisman » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 12:06 PM UTC

lordgrenville wrote: post #15

While it's really cool that this is possible now, this project seems to be a thin wrapper around running Claude. Presumably, someone who wanted to read one of these books could just run it through Claude themselves with comparable results. Sharing some artifact of your own added value, or things you learned in the process, would be more interesting to me than the output.

Post by sweisman » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 12:10 PM UTC

lordgrenville wrote: post #18

us-merul wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's more to it than that. It's a combination of extracting the text from the PDFs, resolving persistently tricky issues (especially numbers), and flagging issues for human review at scale. You can view lessons from the author on the GitHub repo: https://github.com/sweisman/translation-pipeline

Great, then rather post that! Although that repo looks like 100% AI artifact, not human intervention. (What does "flagging issues for human review at scale" mean in this context?)

Post by sweisman » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 12:13 PM UTC

us-merul wrote: post #20

lordgrenville wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, then rather post that! Although that repo looks like 100% AI artifact, not human intervention. (What does "flagging issues for human review at scale" mean in this context?)

I was referring to this bullet under Lessons Learned: "Manuscript translation is feasible but rough. A 14th-century Sephardic manuscript hand is readable at ~70–80% accuracy. The output is a useful rough draft, not a polished translation. Plan for a longer discrepancy report and more editorial review." Some of the samples I looked at had question marks or original Hebrew text throughout, which I took to mean marked u…

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 12:22 PM UTC

sweisman wrote: post #21

lordgrenville wrote: post #15

While it's really cool that this is possible now, this project seems to be a thin wrapper around running Claude. Presumably, someone who wanted to read one of these books could just run it through Claude themselves with comparable results. Sharing some artifact of your own added value, or things you learned in the process, would be more interesting to me than the output.

I can assure you this is not a thin wrapper. Even the public repo of the first workable version of it is not a thin wrapper. You are welcome to try. It is not rocket science, but what I developed would take much effort to reproduce. I wrote an origin story about how I got started: https://aicentral.substack.com/p/pipeline-to-the-past It describes some of the added value and lessons learned.

Post by sweisman » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 12:34 PM UTC

dwohnitmok wrote: post #28

"All translations in this collection are © Scott Weisman. All rights reserved, except as granted by the license below." Does copyright actually belong to Scott Weisman if all the words are outputs of LLMs? Is there any relevant case law here? I'm very curious about whether LLM outputs are copyrightable by the LLM user (I'm guessing potentially it varies throughout the world).