today at 7:24 PM
If I sat down to read just the Dutch East India Company pages myself, at two minutes a page, eight hours a day, five days a week, it would take me about 70 years. And that’s before the newspapers. My homebrew AI lab got through the entire archive in a single twelve-hour overnight run.
Makes me wonder how much the author himself learned about the Dutch East India Company. I suspect very little, if anything. Something about these exercises reminds me of junk food: empty calories and all that...
today at 9:25 PM
Surely more than if they read nothing at all because most of it would be tedious drudgery of minimal value.
today at 10:31 PM
>> Makes me wonder how much the author himself learned about the Dutch East India Company. I suspect very little, if anything. Something about these exercises reminds me of junk food: empty calories and all that...
> Surely more than if they read nothing at all because most of it would be tedious drudgery of minimal value.
It's an archive. It's all "tedious drudgery" until you figure out the value.
Sometimes figuring out the value means reading things until notice something, which could be a pattern or something dispersed.
today at 9:30 PM
today at 9:28 PM
I'm sure that if he didn't do what he did, he would lear about Dutch East India Company so so very much.
Remember that even junk food is more food than junk and you can survive on it for years.
today at 7:28 PM
You know you don't have to comment on everything you see on the internet, right? You're allowed to just keep scrolling when something isn't for you. I wonder how much joy you have in your life, I suspect very little, if anything.
today at 10:40 PM
If you believed the things you said, you would have left out that last sentence.
"OP has a point" turned into "they are the same".
today at 7:39 PM
I didn't mean to upset you, piratebroadcast. Like so many of us, you scratched a technological itch, and that is fine. However, now that AI tools have supercharged us, these scratches are easier to scratch, and their outcomes, made public, flood the aether.
today at 8:16 PM
The aether is 99% garbage thanks to entrepreneurs big and small, so anyone scratching any kind of real itch and posting it online improves SNR, ever so slightly.
today at 7:31 PM
You're missing the actual point sorokod has.
Specifically that these rabbit holes are useful to bring people to all sorts of new discoveries and skills.
It is important to point out that that's a real risk with such AI use. Of course, it is also true that it would likely not have happened at all otherwise. Both things can be true at the same time.
__
Oh I just realized that you're the actual author and this is not the only super-thin-skinned comment.
Man. Why do be like this.
today at 7:35 PM
I think the author learned a lot in the process. It exactly served the purpose of diving down rabbit holes.
today at 7:43 PM
Possibly, yeah, but the reactions here do not look like the learnings have been long-term-stable building blocks, tbh.
But anyway.
I am curious what else will show back up again when other people decide to hook up a clanker to one of the many piles of historic (and current) data we do not have the manpower to process for.
today at 8:18 PM
If OP followed the ideas of sorokod, there would have been no learnings at all.
If you know what you're looking for in it, you're not obliged to read a book in order either.
today at 8:39 PM
Probably a lot. I’ve never learned about so many disparate subjects as I have over the last two years with LLMs.
Why is it always these supremely weak arguments and rationalizations against LLMs that come from people that have been intelligent, at least based on their comment histories, for so many years. It’s radicalizing me. I want a data center everywhere and I want tokens to be so cheap they’re like electricity or water.
today at 10:46 PM
> Why is it always these supremely weak arguments and rationalizations against LLMs that come from people that have been intelligent, at least based on their comment histories, for so many years. It’s radicalizing me. I want a data center everywhere and I want tokens to be so cheap they’re like electricity or water.
What do you think the impact of "tokens to be so cheap they’re like electricity or water" will be? I think people who are intelligent will see the implications of that. Why pay intelligent people when you can use a model.
I guess it will free up smart people to finally take jobs that don't need intelligence, or sit around scraping by on minimum-wage-like UBI (if we're so lucky).
today at 10:37 PM
today at 9:04 PM
Soon they might be as cheap as electricity, even if token price doesn't change
today at 9:20 PM
At school i was made to read all of shakespeare. It wasnt about passing tests. Any LLM can read shakespeare and pass a test. I was made to read shakespeare so that i would appreciate language in the hope that i would strive to improve my own. That still counts.
I am a soldier and language is vital in every day of my job. Tone, word choice, cadence ... all of it conveys meaning in a way that an LLM simply cannot. Soldiers will not follow an AI up a hill, nor will they follow those they know use AI to pretend they understand a subject.
Want to sound smart? Watch blackadder. Want to win no-win aguements through wit? Watch Archer. Want to inspire your troops to do somthing unpleasant? read and watch shakespeare. An LLM can teach you nothing that really counts.
today at 9:29 PM
None of this is relevant to the argument above. There is no reason to believe these archives are equivalent to Shakespeare even if one were to agree with you that Shakespeare is that important to read.
> An LLM can teach you nothing that really counts.
Nothing you wrote supports that argument.
None of us can read everything. None of us can even read every novel published in a single month. So we filter. One way an LLM can teach you is as an excellent way of filtering information and give you a chance to read what really counts.
today at 10:08 PM
Ya. Try reading a few hundred pages of historical documents. Expertise does not come from the facts that an LLM can so easily integrate. It comes from understanding the mindset of the people who wrote those pages. Do it properly and you should start to speak and write like those people. The path to becoming an expert on the East India cannot be shortcuted via an LLM.
today at 6:46 PM
>To make this kind of research accessible, I’m open-sourcing the workflow I created for this investigation as a small toolkit, Antiquity, enabling anyone with a question and a coding agent to conduct similar historical archival investigations.
https://github.com/jessewaites/antiquity
today at 6:58 PM
There are also VOC archives at Cape Town, also in Kew (search for the letters of Loot) which were literally looted by privateers. All these are written in High Dutch some in German. How reliable are the translations?
today at 6:58 PM
IMHO: The rotating rhino, meteor impact, and animated flowchart is totally unnecessary cruft that makes it look almost satirical. If this keeps up, in time, this "AAA effects" stuff is going to look like the 90s "under construction" banner gifs.
today at 10:39 PM
Also all the fonts, its quite unreadable in general somehow even before the 'effects'
today at 7:07 PM
The effects are comically bad. I see the inspiration in scrolling effects that the New York Times put together, but the NYT was never dumb enough to obscure the copy text. Form follows function, and the function of a web page is to be read, not to obscure what is to be read with some stupid effect that's supposed to remind one (I suppose) of a volcano's cloud obscuring one's vision. At least "under construction" banners didn't obtrude upon the copy text.
today at 7:05 PM
What's wrong with the 90s, we had great fun.
today at 7:25 PM
It was fun - until it was cringey, then it became fun again due to retro-fandom
Just calling the progression while we're on it.
today at 10:20 PM
I say we bring back this kind of whimsy like we had with early GeoCities where things could be "bad" but fun instead of "quality" but formal.
today at 7:04 PM
Maybe. But for now, for me, I find them amusing.
today at 7:06 PM
I loved it and it brought me joy.
today at 7:10 PM
I mostly agree, I still read and enjoyed it but part of me kept snagging on the fx and wishing it was way way turned down.
today at 9:30 PM
I didn't read it beyond few fragments about meteorite. But I enjoyed the rhino.
today at 7:56 PM
Except for the rhino, I must admit I liked the effects.
today at 10:36 PM
Sorry he found an unrecorded volcanic eruption in some records? He found "A new eyewitness record of the extinct dodo" that's 400 years old? These seem to me to be rather dubious claims.
today at 10:45 PM
The final dodos went extinct only about 400 years ago, so not that surprising.
today at 7:55 PM
That was a fascinating read, I really enjoyed it. Literally like exploring lost knowledge. Great work and a great write-up.
I also liked the aesthetics of it and the little effects (meteorite and volcano, but please fix the rhino and the text flowing around it while it rotates).
I wonder what else could be found in such archives. Some ideas: - Locations or routes of sunken ships and their missing cargo?
- Some pirate stories, maybe about a now-forgotten but once-legendary pirate captain?
- Unusual weather events, like snow in the summer?
(edit: formatting)
today at 7:23 PM
Recent and related (by HN's own https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=benbreen!)
Using Opus 5.5 to discover a new eyewitness record of the dodo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49926917 - Oct 2026 (79 comments)
today at 6:54 PM
Very cool.
I'm working on a similar project for contemporary political opinion media. Every podcast, blog, oped, or show cut into little pieces with the structure, speaker, quotes and nouns pulled out and cross-referenced. I bring it up because I wonder if this kind of heavy-weight preprocessing is worth bringing to historical documents as well. It would be much more expensive, initially, but afterwards allows questions get answered even cheaper than they are in your current system. It may be worth collecting interested parties and co-investing in the structured parsing.
Also modern transcription and historical document scanning have a similar shaped problem - dealing with misspelled words and trying to infer their corrections from context.
today at 7:03 PM
>Also modern transcription and historical document scanning have a similar shaped problem - dealing with misspelled words and trying to infer their corrections from context. Very true in my case on similar problems, my major issue was OCR relics. Reasonable mispelled words say by an uneducated person, are not that much of an issue. For the OP VOC work most letters were written by educated scribes and less of a problem. Anything before 1650 had very different calligraphy though.
today at 7:47 PM
Please just make sure to keep the ethical implications of any such work in mind.
I do not know what exactly it is you're building, but the shape also fits "weapon", and weapons do not really care about the good intentions of their author.
today at 9:46 PM
I hear you, I think on balance it's good which is why I'm working on it. It makes elite opinion legible and helps detect organized disinformation dark matter. It's not like the intelligence and advertising markets needs help from me about how to surveil downwards.
today at 7:18 PM
today at 7:59 PM
I love this, one major friction I’ve seen to human coordination and advancement has been the journals in different languages
Many people don’t notice, but even Wikipedia has no normalization between articles in different languages. The language button there acts like its showing you a translated version of the article but its actually a completely different Encyclopedia and community of editors with no cross reference to the other language’s article and references at all. Articles that are stubs on the English page may be massive fully fleshed out articles in another language, and nothing native to the site or anything I’ve seen will tell you that there is more information in one variant
LLM’s can find the word associations and compare them in all languages, even if it itself doesn't innately know language
and there would be so much low hanging fruit here like this engineer found
today at 11:36 AM
today at 7:24 PM
Okay, for those of you that do not enjoy fun, I just added a button at the top of the page to turn off the special effects.
today at 8:17 PM
Scrolling on mobile is very slow, even with the effects turned off.
today at 7:35 PM
I liked them! Can't please everyone though.
today at 7:36 PM
I honestly primarily enjoy my browser performance not tanking on this $5000 workstation and actually bailed out while scrolling because it wasn't really usable.
I bet it works great in chrome tho
today at 8:45 PM
i wish a button where a human would have written the text
today at 7:26 PM
today at 7:53 PM
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