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First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

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201–210 of 218 posts

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

#201

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.

Or a customer complaint: https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/complaint-tablet-to-ea...

> What do you take me for that you treat me with such contempt? …

Apparently "What do you take me for" is an extremely old phrase. Funny how things stick around. I wonder if that's a result of translation though.

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

#202
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Those 5 men were acquitted, but he still died from being shot multiple times by a mob. How could that not be murder?

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

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, for one, would be interested in the code.

I ended up cleaning it up to share it and got sucked back into the project. >:'(((( Spent 2 hours today in RawTherapee trying to improve scan contrasts :'(((( 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).

whisper post the dirty code whisper

Unless you've, like, named all the variables with ethnic slurs, you're not going to get in trouble because you've just copied and pasted the same subroutine twelve times instead of refactoring it into something clean.

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

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think "myth of Jesus the Christ turns out to be, say, a cipher of the re-execution of Alexandros I, the son of Herod the Great and Mariamne I" is at all likely? I read a theory once that Jesus Christ was a reinterpretation of Julius Caesar that was adopted by Romans after the former imperial cult fell out of favor. That seems farfetched, but more likely than this - at least it provides a better explana…

>What makes you think "myth of Jesus the Christ turns out to be, say, a cipher of the re-execution of Alexandros I, the son of Herod the Great and Mariamne I" is at all likely? It's not just Nicholas of Damascus that would reveal such information. Gaius Asinius Pollio, a multifaceted Roman figure known for his connections with literary giants like Virgil and Horace as well as Augustus himself, mentored Alexander, the…

Can you suggest a good book on this topic?

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

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're talking about what is required for your theory to work. You have no idea about it because you've never thought it out.

Your theory requires a massive conspiracy because otherwise the surviving documents we have that criticise early Christianity blow your theory out of the water.

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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. Those 5 men were acquitted, but he still died from being shot multiple times by a mob. How could that not be murder?

If you can read this [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_plates] and not get the same conclusion for 'Scam Artist', then I'm truly impressed.

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

#207

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.

Or a customer complaint: https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/complaint-tablet-to-ea...

If you like the Ea-Nasir story, there is a whole subreddit dedicated to it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ReallyShittyCopper/

Also: https://xkcd.com/2758/

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

#208

How can they be sure that the results are actual words from the scroll and not just hallucinations of the neural network? If the scrolls are in such bad condition that the data is almost only noise then what stops their high-tech deep learning model from just.. making it all up?

As long as the model doesn't know about words, and finds letter sequences that correspond to words, we can conclude that it found actual writing.

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

#209
> In early August, contestant Casey Handmer, an ex-JPL startup founder and polymath

interesting terminology, I've never been given accolades for being a multifaceted human being.

I've gotten "generalist" and "after much consideration, we have decided not to proceed with your candidacy "

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

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hardening clay is relatively simple (just as any other pottery) but optional - you can choose to keep the clay unbaked if you want to reuse it (it would dry out but can be made wet again), but you can also make them permanent.
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