It's really surprising to me that we have these language fragments that exist without any samples referencing the language itself.

I suppose for very young languages there wasn't a lot of need to specify that something was written in one vs the other given that any reader could just plainly see it with their eyes and perhaps didn't have a lot of cause to have "well, in Russian they X whereas in Japanese they Y" conversations.

But like...imagine a remote future in which we have only SMS fragments that read "you dtf" and "sup" and this weird purple thing with a green tip we're certain was a vegetable next to what we're absolutely convinced is a rendering of a butt and that's the entire corpus of the ancient XIZZY103.4 langauge.

There is all sorts of amazing science happening in the world right now, and as a layperson I have a "hot list" of probably a dozen different topics that can make me jump up and down when there's a new announcement. But the Herculaneum scrolls, for some reason, are a special case. I get just unreasonably excited whenever they make any progress.

I know that in the end this is "just" an ancient library of Epicurean philosophy and will probably have a bunch of redundant copies of stuff that is really only of interest to (the very few remaining) classicists. But I have looked at a lot of data in my time, and I just keep thinking that the data set is big enough that there will be a few outliers -- maybe one copy of a previously lost Aristophanes comedy that a friend sent the librarian as a joke or birthday present or something and was stuck in the back under a pile of philosophy.

I love the human sense (or vision) that we could find these in the 1750s as carbonized logs and know that we should keep and protect them - that we miiiiight be able to read them someday.

Amazing.

> I am Liam Warner, from northern England. I’m a freelance software engineer/consultant that has worked in areas such as video games, healthcare, and broadcasting technology.

> I am Nicola Bodill from Australia. I have a BA in Latin and Ancient Greek, and am a current MA student at the University of Sydney, working on a critical edition of a 2000-year-old Gandharan Buddhist birch-bark manuscript.

Congrats to Nicola and Liam!

I'm reminded of the human genome project here - in that case there was a geometric ramp-up that meant we went from 1 or 2% sequenced to 100% really quickly. This sort of doubling when you can get it is pretty magical.

I'd like to imagine that we'll get something similar here sometime in the next ten years -- I understand there are (tens of?) thousands of these scrolls still to be scanned much less unrolled. Just an incredibly cool thing to be doing.

"Sufficiently advanced technology" indeed

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws)

It’s amazing that they can reconstruct any text at all from those scrolls.

Amazing work. Makes you wonder what else is out there holding a record of the past, with us too primitive to read it.

While reading, I thought it might be a 306B parameter model until I say 2000 years ago

Pherc 306B A12B when?