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by nickalaso21 hours ago |
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upvoteby epistasis21 hours ago|
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Well the Google SWE didn't make a mistake, the media made a mistake in misreporting it, and we at HN are making a mistake by giving it undue attention.

We are reading this article because it continues and amplifies the AI hype machine, and no other reason. If a motivated amateur had made the discovery through any other means, and motivated amateurs do things like this all the time, then it would never have gotten an article, never shown up on the HN feed.

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upvoteby pdpi18 hours ago|
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> never shown up on the HN feed.

While I appreciate and broadly agree with your bigger point, I'd argue this particular bit is a bit uncharitable. Articles about nerds doing interesting, unusual things do make the front page pretty often.

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upvoteby hirako200014 hours ago|
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They do but the point point is that this post made it because of the AI hype. Not the discovery itself which should grant more attention than that of a machine doing archeological "work" that happens to misinform.
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upvoteby jryle7018 hours ago|
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Huh? AI hype? Nothing in the article was hyped. The site was found independently from the other source, using Lidar data. Without AI it may take much longer to find this site. Now enthusiasts can use the same technique to find other sites, which may not yet be found. That's what makes it interesting.

At some point such discoveries won't cause as much stir, similar to how reusable rocket drew such fervent attention 10 years ago.

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upvoteby anonymous_user915 hours ago|
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> Now enthusiasts can use the same technique to find other sites, which may not yet be found. That's what makes it interesting.

This is the hype. The interesting thing is always in the future.

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upvoteby jryle7014 hours ago|
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You lost me.

> They turned the lidar strips (about 1,200 km² of jungle) into images, and 48 agents went through them one by one like very patient archaeologists, looking for pyramids, platforms, and plazas while filtering out natural hills, sinkholes, and roads. There was no special model or classifier involved: the agents literally looked at the pictures, following a precise guide.

That isn't in the future. Anyone can do that today, and with clever judgement and luck, can find some other sites today. Not in the future, although future will likely be easier.

He didn't say wait until next year for Gemini Dysprosium. That'd be hype.

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upvoteby defrost13 hours ago|
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It's also the past - we as humans have been flying multi instrument platforms and crawling through traces for decades now.

Australia's been criss crossed with mag, gravity, lidar, gamma spectrometer, et al. since the 1970s and human operators have scrubbed glitches, filtered data, and composed maps leading to mineral discoveries, impact crater finds, unexpected structures found, etc.

Elsewhere, Angkor was scanned back in 2012 leading to revelations and new structures w/out the use of AI- https://www.siemreapbest.com/temples/blog/angkor-lidar-lost-...

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upvoteby 14 hours ago|
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upvoteby bloppe18 hours ago|
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I mean, if this were a true novelty, it would have been newsworthy regardless of AI involvement, but ya it does ride the hype train a bit
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upvoteby AlotOfReading19 hours ago|
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I would be very surprised if LLMs were adequate for doing archaeological lit review. My experience is that you often find sites documented halfway through a stack of undigitized records in a physical archive somewhere, and it's usually a verbal description that's difficult to localize to a specific location. Heck, I've even contributed to the problem by finding new sites as we're packing up camp, when I didn't have time to properly document them outside field notes.
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upvoteby chasd0018 hours ago|
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my brother in law did a lot of research in paleontology as a grad student. He said a lot of fossil discoveries take place in basements or storage rooms. Unknown things that were collected but never documented.
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upvoteby engineer_2218 hours ago|
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Why burn compute on that? He reached out to the Mexican Government and asked them if they knew about it - they said they didn't have it in the database. The discovery is relatively new (2025) so maybe sitting in a queue at the central office waiting to get into the system, not necessarily anyone's "mistake". On the contrary, the excitement gives visibility to the active research going on in this area, which is a positive outcome.
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upvoteby biggc20 hours ago|
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And then another agent swarm to make sure that the research swarm didn't hallucinate any false positive matches!

LLMs are great, and they keep getting better, but I'm so tired of current shortcomings being blamed on the prompter "holding it wrong".

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upvoteby hirako200014 hours ago|
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You are supposed to use at least one LLM as judge for all output, in xhigh reasoning. Also important, is to run regular sample validations of output vs predefined input to ensure the model doesn't regress on your kind of data.

That process won't catch everything, but is worth it. that's how to "hold it right".

/s

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upvoteby proxyscore17 hours ago|
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Yeah we devs call that deduplication.

Not so fable, this llm thing if it's missing a literal pyramid in the room

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