Here's a summary of the themes expressed in the Hacker News discussion:
The Power of Non-Destructive Ancient Text Analysis
A significant portion of the discussion revolves around the advancements in technology, particularly AI and imaging, that enable the non-destructive reading of ancient, damaged texts. The Vesuvius Challenge, which uses text analysis on ancient scrolls, is highlighted as a prime example.
- mkmk: "Broadly, makes me wonder if there are other categories of 'lost' information that will emerge in the years ahead as imaging tools and AI analysis improve."
- verditelabs: "I am on the Vesuvius Challenge team. We came across this press release back in July and were quite impressed! It's great to see other groups using non destructive means to read ancient documents."
The Risk of Information Loss Due to Destructive Methods
Conversely, some participants express concern that past attempts to decipher ancient texts might have inadvertently destroyed valuable information. The underlying idea is that if retrieval methods were less advanced previously, destructive techniques might have been employed, leading to irreversible data loss.
- stavros: "It makes me wonder how much information we lost because we thought that retrieval methods were as good as they were ever going to get, and we destroyed the material trying to read it."
- neom: "Tangential but even stuff like this bothers me in that regard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf1GvrUqeIA"
AI and Linguistics: Challenges with Small Datasets and Undeciphered Languages
The conversation touches upon the application of AI in deciphering ancient languages, noting both successes and significant challenges. The difficulty lies in situations with small corpora and the absence of known parallel texts (like a "Rosetta Stone") for training AI models.
- mkw5053: "Unsupervised models have partially cracked Ugaritic and Linear B [0], and Pythia/Ithaca restore Greek inscriptions at scale [1], but Linear A or Proto-Elamite still stall because the corpora are too small and there is no bilingual ‘Rosetta Stone’."
- HexPhantom: "AI is great at pattern recognition, but when the sample size is tiny and there's no known language to anchor it to, it’s like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing and no idea what the final image looks like."
The Nature of Religious Practice and "Karma Hacking"
A large segment of the discussion diverges into the philosophical and practical aspects of religious practices, particularly Tibetan Buddhism, and the concept of accumulating merit or "karma." This includes a critique of using technological or procedural shortcuts to gain spiritual benefits, often referred to metaphorically as "karma hacking" or "gimmicks."
- Frummy: "I bought a tibetan prayer wheel on auction. It's a common thing. You press it to your forehead, say om mani padme hum, then spin clockwise, every spin counts as saying everything written in the wheel once, if it has 50 000 prayers written out that's 180 * 50000 mantras per minute, 9 000 000 mantras per minute. You can see how a lot of good karma is accrued. It's more like an exponential system than a linear one so yeah. A big number system. Many layers to the world, many reincarnation levels, big time spans. High level beings live for a very long time. But not permanently."
- Almondsetat: "Even if prayers were real, this sounds like a huge gimmick. Reciting a prayer while holding a book equals reciting the entire book at once? How absolutely convenient. Who thought of that, a door-to-door salesman?"
- moomoo11: "Man searching for God is like a hacker trying to find super user on some remote system. Turns out someone else made both :P"
- npteljes: "All depends on the prayer quota. If one can do '9 000 000 mantras per minute' easily, then maybe what's needed for betterment is a totality of a quintillion prayers in one's life."
- notahacker: "In all seriousness, I don't think the average person could have actually read the books when the concept was conceived anyway, so automating the trick of the recipient receiving all the blessings in the book without someone having to read them out would have saved a whole lot of monks' time...."
- vasco: "Reminds me of kosher electric appliances to pretend you didn't turn on the light or whatever on fridays. If there is a god he must chuckle at these things."
- grues-dinner: "The original idle clicker. With modern materials, vacuum pumps, and magnetic bearings for the mechanics and lithography for the writing, we can pump those numbers up!"
- krzat: "Reminds me of bitcoin for some reason. There are some logical reasons for these things to exist, but from outside perspective, it's just more advanced ant mill."
- thrance: "Related, I highly recommend the short story The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke."
- Imustaskforhelp: "Basically if I truly see things from a more religious perspective, even then theoretically one should just live a good life as much as he can and not wonder or worry about the rules set by other religious people since they themselves had crafted their own rules and you should too. TLDR: Just be a good person as much you can without pushing yourself to limits and then to me personally, I will much rather go into hell by not following god but following good than go into heaven by following god but not good."
- throwaway290: "FYI there's no "good karma" in Tibetan buddhism. There is just karma. Karma is not good because it will cause samsara."
The Poetic and Philosophical Aspects of Uncovering the Past
Beyond the technical and religious discussions, there's an appreciation for the symbolic and poetic nature of modern technology being used to connect with ancient human intentions and beliefs.
- HexPhantom: "There's something poetic about modern tech being used to uncover ancient hopes and intentions"
- HexPhantom: "Wild that they found Sanskrit grammar in a Tibetan mantra. Just goes to show how fluid and interconnected these traditions really were"
- deadbabe: "If we are the ones who can read the prayers, maybe it’s because we’re the ones meant to answer them."
Technical Nitpicks and Accuracy
A minor but present theme involves precise technical terminology.
- s0rce: "Small nitpick and they got it right in the next sentence but "3D X-ray topographical scanner" should be tomographic not topographic. X-ray topography is something else unrelated."
- laex: "hard to gauge significance without carbon dating of the scrolls. Why leave that out ?"