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- Hacker News
- I built Ars Astronomica to make historically important works on astronomy, calendrics, and related sciences accessible in modern English. The project combines OCR, AI-assisted translation, editorial review, and publication into a workflow that can handle book-length works while preserving diagrams, mathematical notation, and references.
The site currently includes English translations of rare Hebrew and Latin works, including texts that have never previously appeared in English and others that survive only in manuscript form. All editions are released under a Creative Commons license.
I'm interested in feedback from historians of science, classicists, medievalists, digital-humanities researchers, and anyone interested in AI-assisted scholarly publishing.
by sweisman - I don't belong to any of those categories of people but I'm glad that you took the effort to build this site. I didn't know about those texts and I will at least skim through a few of them now. Thanks.by pmontra
- Hey, man. Great work and thanks for sharing this as CC.
- Don't get me wrong, this is awesome, but it could be better by adding Greek and Arabic, and possibly Sumerian documents?by mondainx
- Thank you. I have considered Arabic, as there a couple works I am interested in.
My queue of Hebrew and Latin works is already lengthy, and this is my focus for now.
by sweisman - Why was the comment of the author of the translation-site that explains the methodology flagged / dead?
The mere fact that the translation was AI-assisted shouldn't be a reason to flag a comment. AI translations, especially supervised translations, can actually achieve a reasonable level of quality.
Disagreement on AI philosophy shouldn't be a reason to flag a contribution.
by domschl - A professional book editor and Hebrew translator said the translation of the one work he checked out was "impressive".
Others have responded equally positively to the Latin translations.
AI as a panacea is overwrought, but there are genuine positive uses of it. Would critics rather have NO translations of these pivotal works?
by sweisman - > AI translations, especially supervised translations, can actually achieve a reasonable level of quality.
That may be true, but also not really what i'm worried about. With AI on an ancient book written from a world view very different from the contemporary one, i'd worry more about misleading translations.
by bawolff - "Disagreement on AI philosophy shouldn't be a reason to flag a contribution."
Amen!
by kensai - As a jew: it would be better to put up a site which does not risk to create the false impression of somehow comparable contribution of early european astronomers and medieval (and not so medieval) rabbis.by deluvenec
- Could you tell us more?: How are those groups not comparable in this context, and what do you see as the downside? And what is dishonest about the presentation?by mmooss
- David Gans, in Nechmad v'Na'im, the first book I translated, states as a matter of fact that any wisdom obtained by the nations regarding astronomy came from the Jews. Ralbag's treatise was so significant the Vatican commissioned a Latin translation.
In any case, my email is on the site and in every book. Feel free to contact me privately to continue the discussion.
by sweisman - "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).
by dwohnitmok - Yes. The rules vary worldwide. Do your own research. I did, before asserting copyright.by sweisman
- Solely the direct output of an LLM? Not in the US, no, according to the copyright office. Can a human edited and corrected text in which a human adds authorship (corrections, style, diction, editing, composition etc) to LLM output? Yes. Though simply making singular mechanical edits/corrections wouldn’t meet that bar; this seems like more than that.
An original human-authored translation is a derivative work that can hold copyright, but it is the human-authored parts that give it protection.
No amount of human authored pipelines that are automated (no human input) would give it this status as that is not human authorship (the pipeline itself can be however). The prompts for the LLM can also be copyright (again…human authorship), however they would be difficult to enforce since the direct output can’t be copyrighted.
by therealpygon - Nice project, but I think the PDF format could be improved. I'd prefer having landscape layout and original text and translated text side-by-side or keep the portrait layout and do a line-by-line translation so that it is easier to review and spot translation errors.by bflesch
- Thank you.
Your suggestion makes sense, and you are not the first to offer it.
Maybe someday, although probably not CC licensed.
by sweisman - 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 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-pipelineby us-merul
- 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.
by sweisman