• Hacker News
  • new|
  • comments|
  • show|
  • ask|
  • jobs|
  • nfujd7 1 hours

    4400 years ago! Check whats happening in the rest of the world and its pretty primitive in comparision.

  • jb1991 2 hours

    If I understand this finding correctly, it now means we have proof that ancient Egypt was not a life in black-and-white.

  • tym0 21 minutes

    How are things like that, that were preserved (I'm assuming) by the dry sand they were buried under, then gets preserved by archaeologist for the future?

    A lot of pigments react to oxygen, and the sandy winds must not be kind to this kind stuff so I'm curious.

    I know they've had to close Lascaux to the public for example.

  • sho_hn 55 minutes

    I'm giving a talk this Sunday at KDE's Akademy conference of our use of KDE software in research at the Great Pyramid, if anyone's curious. It's a short talk slot and I cannot go very deeply into detail, to keep expectations low, but you can see cool photos of robots.

    gloflo 48 minutes

    Will there be a video recording or slides?

  • NegativeLatency 3 hours

    I imagine they've done some tweaking before publishing (also appears the rock substrate has flaked off), was hoping to be able to pull some more detail out of the images with a vibe coded decorrelation stretch app I made from a post last week:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49645437

    https://github.com/nburns/DecorrelationStretch

    Towaway69 1 hours

    There's also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49648775 which points to https://shan.mp/decorrelation_stretch/

    pimlottc 2 hours

    I was thinking about that article as well, were you not able to pull any more detail out the images?

  • karmelapple 7 hours

    So glad to see color photographs of the site.

    One thing I'm not so glad to see is one paragraph that starts with this sentence:

    "The distinction is important. Archaeological maps..."

    That "The distinction is important" smells like AI writing... but maybe we all just have to accept that now?

    jimmygrapes 1 hours

    Worst thing is that because the smell is bad and you called it out, too comments are all about the smell vs the substance. I contribute, sadly. Maybe we should all be more judicious with when we say there's a smell, save that for when it's really rank? Like a polite thing. Yeah it stinks but maybe it's worth something beyond that. Not sure if this is the one, just thinking out loud.

    4 hours

    21asdffdsa12 1 hours

    Remember the "IDunno" of archeology - "It most likely served ritual and cultural purposes" .. i wonder if AI adapts such a thing

    st_goliath 51 minutes

    > the "IDunno" of archeology - "It most likely served ritual and cultural purposes"

    If all you know about archeology is from daytime television and clickbait articles, all you know about history is what you vaguely remember from school, you never met anybody working in those fields and actually don't even have a passing interest to engage with the subject, then yes, you might be inclined to believe that's how it works.

    TomK32 3 hours

    Ran it through several testes, only one flagged a few sentences as AI, including the one you mention. Fair enough, it's unlikely that English is the (turkish in this case?) author's first language and a little AI help can't hurt here.

    I learned a great lesson for a gamedev youtuber this summer: Use AI to give you a summary what you have to implement, what functions you'll need, what edge case you missed and then write it yourself. Putting this into practice helps me to refine the ticket I'm working on. With the last ticket I had to persuade the AI (Atlassian's Rovo in my case) that a new data model wasn't necessary and we can do it more elegantly with less code.

    Many of us still have to figure out how AI fits into our workflow, letting it do all the work isn't it but asking AI to point you towards the goal and let it review/refine your work sounds a lot more acceptable to me.

    protocolture 2 hours

    >testes

    teehee

    aprilthird2021 3 hours

    > and a little AI help can't hurt here.

    Wrong wrong wrong.

    Bad writing makes the reader stop thinking about what you wanted to convey. As unintuitive as it is for most people in this forum, AI writing smell is as bad as bad grammar. Doesn't matter how you get rid of it. Maybe even more AI can clean those up, but those unintuitive phrases that pop up in AI writing are going to be a hindrance for many people who would love for the focus to be on what they're presenting, not the sloppy way they've written it up

    pitkali 49 minutes

    > AI writing smell is as bad as bad grammar

    It sounds to me like you want to censor perfectly fine phrasing just because AI rolled the dice to use it. Let's not forget that AI learned to "speak" from people in the first place.

    Not to mention that as people shift their phrasing to avoid being accused of using AI, the AI will keep evolving, training on the new phrasing and then adopting it, too.

    I understand the language evolves, but evolving language just to sound different from AI feels like wasting effort better spent elsewhere. On actual substance of the message for example.

    azernik 2 hours

    We all have to accept that people will look at perfectly innocuous, clear, well-written prose and assume that AI wrote it.

    psychoslave 1 hours

    One can still suspect that something might not have been uttered through some AI assistance. There might even be still some living humans outside, who knows.

    kakacik 1 hours

    Yeah its getting annoying how people discuss endlessly how some text is AI or not... like some extra imaginative points are awarded to those who spot the most. People seem to keep getting triggered by little insignificant things in the text.

    LLMs average human writing thats out there, its not making up new expressions or language constructs so just move on if you (anybody) can and put that little obsessive pedantic part of you behind you.

    I couldn't care less, why be a prick and not just enjoy & discuss the content, not this ultra focus on the form. If content is crap then thats another story altogether. I wish there would be some plugin/feature to just block those rather empty subthreads.

    chmod775 25 minutes

    > LLMs average human writing thats out there

    Not really, and also they do not vary their writing like humans would. Human writers do not repeat the same pattern over and over as much as LLMs do. They'd get bored of their own writing.

    People as a whole are always going to be sick of whichever affectation current popular LLMs have, since they'd be reading a fair bit of that. As a writer you should steer clear of things that would elicit groans in a contemporary audience and "LLM prose" is just the latest addition.

    So, as the person you're replying to said, you'll have to get used to this being a new angle from which writing is critiqued. You'll live happier if you don't let your cortisol spike over it. If it is any comfort, writers will eventually adjust and you'll encounter less of it.

    1 hours

    0xpgm 7 hours

    As more people start using AI for research, they'll probably adopt AI'isms in their writing too, even if they don't use AI itself to do the writing.

    Subconsciously we all pick up patterns that we regularly encounter.

    debo_ 7 hours

    This distinction is important.

    joegibbs 3 hours

    I have the opposite, I can pick up AIsms much more now and they stick out like a sore thumb. A couple of years ago I had no such intuition, it just sounded like normal writing to me, but now if I try to use AI to write any prose it just sounds absolutely terrible.

    seer 29 minutes

    Hah absolutely, after of a very intense project I’ve undertaken with Claude agent teams for a few months now, I have caught myself using opus expressions, since they come to mind now naturally because that’s most of the text I’ve read since then … I’m catching myself so far, but in a year or two maybe I will not, fable doesn’t do as much “mannerisms” and speaks plainly, so maybe by then we will all be running fable level models on hour local machines and just not notice it anymore?

    hunter-gatherer 7 hours

    I've had that happen to me. I actually recently wrote a draft blog and looked over it, and it felt AI generated. My writing style has definitely changed.

    awesome_dude 3 hours

    This is the load-bearing result

    Razengan 43 minutes

    You're right to call it out.

    jcims 4 hours

    I've definitely picked up 'lever', I scrub it every time that I notice I write it but it's in there.

    rubicon33 1 hours

    “blast radius” for me

    youniverse 5 hours

    Maybe we need our AI to only respond in bullet point lists.

    evoluketion 4 hours

    - The

    - Distinction

    - Is

    - Important

    stavros 38 minutes

    Lucid only lets the AI give notes, not change your text: https://www.writelucid.cc/

    But I still find that I have to consciously fight the urge to sound like an LLM. It's terrible.

    erickhill 4 hours

    With emoji for the bullets, natch.

    4 hours

    TomK32 3 hours

    Just put "Don't use emojis" into the prompt.

    tacomagick 2 hours

    Pass it as a memory or a system prompt and watch it forget 3 agent messages later.

    mxmilkiib 1 hours

    what frontier models are this bad these days?

    tacomagick 1 hours

    I can't name one but I can tell you these models keep getting stupider as they keep existing and their system prompts get inflated with what not to do. I have experienced this happen with Qwen 3.8 Max Preview where for the early days it was blasting through Rust code fine and then before the release it silently got replaced and started to suck hard. Claude still has the "blue button" problem so it is probable that a casual chat with it could have this exact outcome of forgetting what to do. I saw some models also have this thing where when you tell them a text restriction they first ignore it in thinking, creating the full text and then apply them in their thinking rewriting it fully causing your output tokens to be inflated.