First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2,000 years
www.bbc.co.uk
The document charred by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius is being 'unwrapped' using X-ray scans and AI.

It’s a 10m papyrus scroll from Herculaneum, one of the cities buried by Vesuvius’ volcanic ash in 79 CE. It’s fully carbonised but they’re using a synchrotron to create a 3D model of the scroll without damaging it. Then they’re using AI (pattern recognition AI, perhaps?) to detect signs of ink, so they can reconstruct the text itself.

The project lead Stephen Parson claims that they’re confident that they “will be able to read pretty much the whole scroll in its entirety”. And so far it seems to be a work of philosophy.

  • outerspaceEnglish
    3·
    20 hours ago

    Just assume the “vocally anti ai” people are actually anti openai etc.

    • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyzOPEnglish
      2·
      18 hours ago

      I wouldn’t be so eager to assume so - the vocally anti-AI people resemble a lot the “AGI is coming!” crowds:

      • neither analyses rationally the [merits | demerits] of the technology
      • both assume applications to be [bad | good] solely on their usage of AI, with no regards to why and how
      • both flip from decent reading proficiency to “I dun unrurrstand, I is so confusion…” mode once someone voices an argument they can’t handle
      • both assume that, if you say something that might be superficially understood as against their view, you must be among in the other group thus you must be a shitty person

      And they’ll do it even if you casually mention to be running locally some LLM or diffusion model, with no ties to the GAFAM + “Open”“A”“I” slop.