he has apparently translated one word according to the only documentation we have. "my untrained amateur friend with no experience in the field has solved a hundreds of years old puzzle. no, trust me!" gets old real quick.
this isn't an achievement, it's yet another amateur crank claiming he solved a famous puzzle, without a paper and without any critical review. many people have claimed to decode Linear A before. just because this guy used an LLM doesn't make it more credible
He has a working draft of a manuscript that may form the basis of a scholarly article, it has been shared with experts, and there is an excerpt of the paper in my blog post. I have also seen and read the paper with my own 2 eyes, I can't publish it though, Tom wants to keep that under wraps while it's reviewed by linguistics experts.
But the entire corpus for Linear A is tiny, you could backfill a "translation" that has no actual similarity with the real language when properly tested against novel examples. How was this tested?
who at Rutgers and Cambridge? did he just email some random linguistics profs? why not classics? and did they respond out of genuine interest or just trying to let an enthusiastic amateur down gently?
i am sorry but "crank" is the correct term for the many amateurs who routinely email mathematicians, physicists, and apparently linguists with their special theories without having any academic experience in the field. for every anecdote where it panned out there are thousands of cases where it did not.
All of those would keep on existing if Meta died today, so who cares? Are you saying we have to keep permitting Meta to help governments oppress people and enable teen suicides just in case we get another React? that is silly
> All of those would keep on existing if Meta died today, so who cares
Try second order thinking or thinking into the future. This company that built much of the modern web and created trillions in value. It's like the communists that just nationalize companies and institutions after they come into power thinking that wealth is just something that spontaneously comes into existence and can be captured with no ill effects.
> permitting Meta to help governments oppress people
Oppressive governments often ban Meta and other social media. But somehow Meta helps these governments.
Try and create a consistent world view that doesn't devolve to [company] bad
Or, Meta disappears and all the talent goes to other places where it does other neat things that we all benefit from. We aren't going to accept that Meta has some magic that makes bright kids do better work.
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