Kosturdistan

Track various "AI might be in trouble" indicators from the comfort of your own home. Mostly credit market stuff. Also: Michael Burry shorts (hahaha). Fun! Not financial advice.

One way to assess the validity of prior claims is to see how many words you can translate using their proposed system.

I'm not an expert on linguistics, but I will say that Crete at that time was polylingual. No one is saying that everyone on the island spoke this Minoan semitic language; only the semitic people on the island, and it was a diverse population.

I don't know if the agent ran the simulations or if the agent built software that ran the simulations. But Claude was used to run the simulations.

Skepticism is appropriate until the experts bless the work. I will point out however that all of the words Tom has translated provide strong support for his proposed phonetic values. And that's why I published the information prior to confirmation, along with the appropriate caveats.

Tom has entered the chat!

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.

You know you have cracked it because using the proposed system you are able to translate the uncracked language. Also helpful if your proposed system for Linear A makes sense relative to related languages that are not Linear A. Tom's proposed phonetic values work for more than one language.

The lack of discovered inscriptions does make deciphering it harder, but it is possible!

I have seen and read his draft article, he's not comfortable sharing it publicly yet since it's being reviewed by experts.

You look at the proposed sound values and compare it to other known languages. Languages from the same family share grammar and vocabulary.

I drilled down on this with Tom. He thinks that it might not have happened without Claude Code, but Claude was used to organize all of the symbols, and to run I think it was 100,000 simulations to assess whether or not he had an actual insight, or if he just randomly got lucky. Claude did NOT crack the code. Significant supporting role though.

Tom thinks he may be able to use his approach to crack more languages, but that's not confirmed.

I haven't talked to him extensively about how he learned his engineering skills, but he is I believe 100% self taught. His background is in copywriting.

Thanks, I hope Tom is right, but now it's in the hands of the pros.

Claude helped, it did not do the work. It would have taken Tom more time to crack on his own, and it would have been harder, but the key insights were Tom's not Claude's.

Tom knows I'm a freelance writer and decided to give me the scoop. He's more interested in linguistics than he is in journalism.

You are correct!

Claude helped, but did not do the work. This was a human dude who had a very helpful assist from Claude

Claude code was used to organize the material and to run simulations. The simulations were to determine the likelihood that the text was Semitic vs Tom got lucky. Tom has assigned probabilities to each of the syllables he has proposed sound values for.

The only write-up at the moment is my blog post, hopefully that changes in the coming weeks.

A lot of loonies make this claim, but Tom's work is credible enough that it's being reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge. Additional validation: his approach produces results. He's translated over 300 words, and that's never been done before, and his solution actually solves some problems in Linear B. Tom is an AI engineer, and Claude Code was key to his work. Disclosures: I know Tom socially, and I wrote the post at the link.