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  • Hacker News
  • 85 years untouched and then three people solve it in the same afternoon. Please do the writeup
    by abelyagubyan
  • What a great read, I generally associate substack with verbose, low quality content, but definitely not the case here!
    by dgellow
  • > They are worse at coming up with new ideas of their own. What seems to work best is if they are placed on the boundary between two disciplines

    This is a fantastic concept. This is where the blacksmith and the baker alone will never come up with the idea for a new furnace that seems rather obvious if you knew both trades.

    by SV_BubbleTime
  • Good read! How many pages of text were in scope? I'm not sure if the 1615+1629 pages were the total or just a subagent.

    If they were the total I would say it was arguably more impressive the author was able to narrow it down to just 3000 pages than it was to find the dodo mention amongst those!

    by early_exit
  • My dad died and had many many notebooks of his journals with very hard-to-read handwriting. Is it worth the effort to scan all of these so I can feed them in and go to work. Seems like so much minutia is out there, ready to be meta-understood.
    by jamienk
  • I didn't realize that Dodos only lived on Mauritius. I thought they were everywhere for some reason. I guess little meat footballs that can't fly were never going to colonize the planet.
    by Neil44
  • Last week I used Opus 5.5 to decipher a number of Waffen-SS Truppenschlüssel messages from 1941 that had never been broken. It was a similar approach, I used it to find, transcribe, and process over 10K images from various archives of WW2 material. Within that material was text I could use to help break day ciphers, to use as cribs, and so on. Opus didn't find a new vulnerability in these 85 year old ciphers, but it allowed me to process data at scale in languages I don't speak, and to write a dozen solvers in the time it would have taken me to write one or two by hand. Took what would have taken a research grant, three assistants and a year of time and turned it into a weekend project.
    by Twiin
  • > Epistemological weirdness

    > They are also notably bad at judging the historical significance of what they find.

    I use LLMs for some things that are outside the more common use-cases (in my case 3D design for 3D printing) and one thing I've noticed is that the errors it makes are so completely unlike human errors that they are hard to anticipate.

    It will do things like build perfect snap catches but put them so the the pieces they are connecting are rotated 90 degrees from how they should be. It's "dumb" error, but hard to say the model itself if dumb because it does other very hard things so perfectly.

    > seven chord groups

    This sounds a lot more like Opus 5.0 than Opus 5.5 TBH. I wonder if that was an earlier investigation because 5.5 has improved that kind of language a lot.

    by nl

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