alt Hacker NewsMy AI agents found an unmapped Maya site?
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This and spotting cancers are some of the best uses of AI.
Why is "Google SWE" relevant here? Shouldn't the evidence speak for itself? Will the AI work better because it was "pointed" by a Google SWE?
Also, I think we're long past the days when "Google SWE" carried special weight vs the rest of the industry.
There’s this error that SWEs sometimes make where they imagine that geosensing or research datasets are just… a natural phenomenon in the world, lying around like ore studded with diamonds (or… however mining works). If a layperson (or lay-agent) can gawk at the thing and see the obvious, that’s not “being an archaeologist,” that’s “somebody who’s an archaeologist figured out the right way to conduct the survey, and did so, so as to make what they’re looking for obvious in the first place.”
I take something much darker from this story: expect the raw corpuses of data to start being locked away. It was fine to let the LIDAR surveys flop around in public when only qualified research groups really knew what to do with it. You could let people rummage and report, and hold just the coordinates confidential, as this guy did in his report. Now, the sensing data tell any guy with two sentences’ worth of interest where to go pillage for antiquities…
It’s still actually valuable to give the archaeologists time to schlep out there and excavate properly before the TikTokking hordes go mog all over it for clout or novelty or whatever the ephemeral currency is these days. The only possible reaction is for the people who labor to produce these data to start locking them away within the guild—much like the way you’ve gotta show your good-guy credentials to use Mythos for bug hunting…
How do we know that this is a good thing? Putting a "Ruin here!" pushpin on a map and leaving the actual archeology to others sounds more like a vanity boost than an achievement, and at worst the opportunity for the site to be desecrated before anyone serious has a chance to study it.
It's like the new drive-by pull requests I'm getting in my open source repositories. No consideration for the people doing the actual work.
In a few days:
You're totally right! I led you to believe there's an undiscovered pyramid in Mexico, and I am sorry for this.
On a serious note — it's really cool to see people applying LLMs to other domains and yielding great preliminary results.
You've heard about vibe coding, but have you heard of vibe archeology?
After OSS maintainers, archaeologists will be the next ones now to be swamped with AI generated reports...
I did this two months ago with Claude. Google engineer forgetting Gemini is pacing the frontier
https://bakerbench.substack.com/p/i-went-looking-for-lost-ci...
How is this AI, and not just Lidar?
There’s no shortage of Lidar found lost city stories on HN over the past decade.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
This is cool but I mean "model finds ruin from lidar dataset" is sort of like the par for the course for this sort of data and modelling. Been getting headlines like this for years now. It isn't something that ai now enabled. AI just let you put out another paper using this method when you could have used methods 1-662 as well to put out a paper where you find an unmapped pyramid among lidar data.
> I was traveling in Peru, Gemini-ing about the history of the place, when I learned about Hiram Bingham, the American explorer who "discovered" Machu Picchu in 1911. [...] "Imagine if Bingham had our tools," I thought. "What would he do?"
Well, pretty much this: "discover" a Maya pyramid.
@openai @anthropic @google @spacexai: can you please proceed with scanning the entire planet and let us know what you found?
Regards, — The world
We got vibe archaeologists before GTA 6
Me: OK, what should I do?
Me: OK, how do I contact INAH? How does the reporting process work?
Me: OK, please do the report.
If this is what people's sessions look like, no wonder everyone is so paranoid about getting replaced.
> At this point, we should probably lidar the whole planet and let the agents discover the rest.
Or! Maybe we should not look too close, because you never know what you will find!
AI driven UAP detection incoming ;) It's SETI/BOINC all over again!
mentioning num_agents in the headline or writeup is so deeply revealing, like hearing someone calling a codebase "the codes"
Launch a cancer agent too. Find a cure, deliver a breakthrough.That will be impressive
Regardless of how technologically impressive this is, the article and its author are completely insufferable. "I asked Gemini to imagine how it looked back then" ask Gemini to imagine you getting pussy
What Would Indiana Jones Do?
Did he go check it for gold, before posting about it online?
> No
lol, kids these days.
Lol. This seems like an onion article.
Why only 48?
It's often easy to find what nobody has been looking for.
Amazing!
So this is now another proof that Graham Hancock and Giorgio Tsoukalos are totally right. Right? Right?
hola alex
hola alex matate
> You can just do things.
I’m sorry, but you didn’t do much. The work was done by clankers.
hollaaaaaa
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I have to be frankly honest -- I have a gut feeling -- regardless of what Pietro reported to the Mexican gov't, the binary response professionally is likely "Sorry, we didn't find it".
There is no reason for them to provide confirmation for internal inventory that Pietro passionately fingered from afar.
Which I think would make sense, ultimately. But now from the Mexico perspective, wouldn't they elicit more concern for others just mapping their terrain after a blog post like this goes viral?
Very meticulous, exciting work, nonetheless. I'm all for 3d lidar scanning the plannet!
What a failure of archeology, they should have done that before.
People have been finding hidden constructions for a while. The large urban conurbations such as around Ecuador are perhaps the most impressive (https://apnews.com/article/amazon-lost-cities-ecuador-archae...). While Archeologists have been driving the process almost anyone who spends time with recent LIDAR data finds something much as how publicly available satellite data has uncovered geological oddities. This is not a big advance. Getting an official report completed and creating a compelling image of what the site might have looked like is impressive, but also consistent with what ordinary untrained people have been accomplishing.