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...
Remember that even junk food is more food than junk and you can survive on it for years.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Just calling the progression while we're on it.
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)
Using Opus 5.5 to discover a new eyewitness record of the dodo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49926917 - Oct 2026 (79 comments)
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.
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.
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
I bet it works great in chrome tho
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.
If you know what you're looking for in it, you're not obliged to read a book in order either.
> 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.