reSee.it - Tweets Saved By @anothercohen
reSee.it AI Summary
I shared a post about a software engineer collaborating with Elon Musk on DOGE to tackle excessive spending. It’s incredibly impressive. Then, I reflected on the frustration of wanting our brightest minds to improve government, only to see resistance when they actually try.
@anothercohen - Alex Cohen
This is one of the software engineers working with Elon Musk on DOGE to reduce our country's excessive spending problem. Unfathomably based https://t.co/F7UjAWoBUy
Video Transcript AI Summary
I've always been interested in history, especially the Roman Empire. Recently, I learned about burnt scrolls from Pompeii that no one could read. A competition was launched using CT scans to find writing in these scrolls, and I was eager to participate. I’ve been working on this project during my free time, using my laptop and some extra computers. After many hours of searching, I received a message about a new piece of the scroll. When I analyzed it, I discovered three Greek letters, marking the first time we detected writing. The word found was "prophoros," meaning purple, which was exciting because it has meaning. This project, aided by modern AI, is allowing us to read entire paragraphs from the scrolls, and the attention it has received has been overwhelming yet rewarding. The support from the University of Nebraska has been crucial in encouraging bold thinking in my work.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: So I've always been interested in history. Growing up, I learned Latin. I was never that good at it, but I was always kind of into that sort of stuff. Read a lot about the Roman Empire and things. And one day, I was just listening to a podcast back in March.
It was with Nat Friedman. He just kind of got on the podcast, explained, like, there are these burnt up scrolls that were buried in the Pompeii eruption. No one knows how to read them, but some professors have created CT scans of these scrolls, and they uploaded the data on the Internet as a competition to see who could find writing inside of these scrolls. And when I heard that, I was just immediately, like, oh my goodness. This is such a cool project.
I have to work on this. I just went home from work that day at the end of the day, and I've been working on it evenings and weekends ever since. I run most of the things from my laptop. It's just a normal MacBook. Don't worry.
But then I've just got, like, 5 surplus computers in here. This is what I do most of my work from. The Wake School and just the University of Nebraska as a whole has provided a great educational background where I can then, you know, take these skills that I've learned and apply them to problems like this. I just spend hours upon hours staring at flattened pieces of the scroll like this, trying to find these patterns which are, part of the writing. At the start of the challenge, we had not been able to find any writing at all within these scrolls.
There are 100 of these scrolls that are from the mansion. We've scanned a couple of them, and no one had been able to find any writing in them using these methods. Late one Saturday night, I was sitting at a party at a friend's house in Omaha, and I get a text from another person on the challenge team, and he says, hey, I've just uploaded this new kind of piece of the of the scroll. You should take a look at it. I remotely accessed my computer, I type into it like, please run the algorithm on this new piece of scroll.
And then I just kind of start it. I pull out my phone again, just nonchalantly like, hey, I wonder how that went. And there are 3 Greek letters on the screen. The letters I'd never seen before. It was, really cool because it's like, oh my goodness, like we actually detected new writing in the scrolls using AI.
That was the moment I realized like this is actually gonna work. Like we were probably going to read the scrolls. And I completely freaked out. My friends were there and I was cheering, jumping up and down. You know, screaming, crying, all the stuff.
I, you know, took a picture of the results and I sent them to my mom. She called me and she's like, hey, these look great, you know. It was a really special moment. Yeah. So this is the the word that I actually found.
It's right here. It's the word prophoros, which translates to purple. It's the first word we found in the scrolls. It was reviewed by a committee of kind of Greek scholars, but it's the word purple. And I'm glad it's not the word in or the or and that we found first.
We actually found, a word that has meaning. This would not be possible without modern AI and modern scanning text techniques. People wanted to read these books for 100 of years, and this seems like the only way that's where it's really possible to do that. Now we're reading entire paragraphs from the scrolls, and hopefully, we'll be able to read the entire book and read the hundreds of other books that were buried in this condition as well. When we found this first word, you know, we went public with it.
And I think everyone has been very pleasantly surprised by the amount of attention it's gotten. As a college student, it's definitely been overwhelming in the best way possible. But it's been really cool to get to kind of, you know, talk about my findings and, you know, share what I wanna do in the future with so many people. So it's been overwhelming in the best possible way. The University of Nebraska does a really good job of encouraging their students to think boldly, and I think that's played a pivotal role in my, work on this project.
@anothercohen - Alex Cohen
"Why don't we have our smartest and most ambitious people working to fix our government??" >Smart and ambitious people sign up to fix our government "No! Not like that!!!"
