verditelabs

There is a large overlap in what we are doing with the medical field as well. A lot of the segmentation methodology and technology we use and adapt originally came out of the medical field for doing things like brain imaging.

Most of the evidence so far points towards carbon based ink. I am not sure if any of the scrolls we have scanned show strong evidence of iron gall based ink. I know that there are different types and preparation methods for different carbon based inks, but I do not know if it is possible to determine which kind(s) were used solely from inspecting the xrays.

I am, though, not a papyrologist, so historical ink making, preparation, and usage are not my field.

> places it in a Stoic context and dates it to the 2nd century _BC_.

Emphasis mine.

The input is 3d chunks of reconstructed CT data from our scans. I can't remember the specifics but maybe enough voxels for .5mm^3 at a time or so? They're all available for free from https://registry.opendata.aws/vesuvius-challenge-herculaneum... . Our trained models are all available at https://huggingface.co/scrollprize

Pherc1667 was quite small and just so happened to have readable ink, so it was easier than I expect most others to be.

Yes, it's quite possible for ML to hallucinate ink, though it is on a much more local scale, like predicting a slightly longer stroke, filling in more of a character than is actually in the data, etc. Perhaps enough to change a reading of a character or show where ink isnt. It is difficult for ink detection to hallucinate grammatical and idiomatic greek and latin.

I think it's a case of HN once again butchering the title. I submitted it as the exact title from our page on scrollprize.org, "An _Entire_ Herculaneum Scroll Has Been Read For The First Time", which is IIRC true.

Fortunately for anyone wanting to xray lottery tickets, you don't need the IIRC most powerful beamline in the world. A few years ago a Vesuvius Challenge Community member bought a benchtop xray machine for a few grand and scanned pokemon cards and was able to identify them that way.

I am a computer scientist. I studied CS in university, worked in the semiconductor industry for a while, got started as a participant in the challenge aspect of the Vesuivus Challenge. They were hiring, I sent in an application, interviewed, and was offered the job.

That's a tough one to give a strong estimate of. Some scrolls are easier or harder to unwrap and read for a multitude of different reasons, mostly due to how damaged the scroll was in the eruption, and how easy or not the ink is to read. IIRC from what we've scanned of the herculaneum collection, none of the ink is easily visible via spectrum alone, so we have to use a lot of ML and physically based rendering techniques to be able to find ink. That also requires unwrapping and segmentation _before_ any ink detection.

For iron gall ink with high enough iron concentration, the ink stands out in the xray volume through simply masking off low values, such as was shown in our campfire scroll experiment a few years ago. No herculaneum scrolls show similar ink.

I am unaware of those fragments in particular. Though we have scanned a dozen or so fragments, mostly to help guide ink detection, since the ink in them is often more visible in visible and/or near IR light, but can be hard to impossible to detect in the xray spectrum.

Yes. Sean, who was a co-winner of the 2024 prize, IIRC has no formal background in ML, computer science, AI, etc. He is one of our core researchers and the most productive team member.

I am not a papyrologist or a classicist, rather I'm a computer scientist, so my expertise is unfortunately not in _what_ the scrolls say, rather how we get there. That being said I think and hope that there will be a trove of things that has no known provenance at all, completely lost works that elude the public memory.

I am on the vesuvius challenge team that did the segmentation, unwrapping, and ink detection, so feel free to ask any questions.

> Vinland if you're nasty

?

It's not controversial that the Norse made it to modern day Newfoundland.

Qualcomm has had DSPs in its chips for a long time, providing a lot of NPU-like functionality before the term NPU had been coined. What Qualcomm currently calls its NPUs are just Hexagon DSP cores with specific instructions and abilities for matrix math and common inferencing datatypes.

I am on the Vesuvius Challenge team. We came across this press release back in July and were quite impressed! It's great to see other groups using non destructive means to read ancient documents.

They say they're hiring but I didn't even get an email back about my application and I've been awarded $20k through the vesuvius challenge and have 10 years experience in the exact job they're hiring for so I really don't know what they're looking for or if they're looking that hard.

I am an ex Qualcomm employee. We often called ourselves a law firm with a tech problem. QC doesn't actually have more lawyers than engineers, but I'd not be surprised if the legal department got paid more than all the engineers combined.

Same, these are all great points that I find as well. LLMs have made me a way more productive programmer, but a lot of that is because I already was an alright programmer and know how to take advantage of the strengths and weaknesses of the LLM. I think your last bullet point is most poignant, using Claude 3.5 I've been able to do tons of GUI and web programming, things I absolutely despise and refuse to do if I'm writing code by hand.

I sort of understand some of the vitriol that I see on HN but it is incredibly overblown. I don't really get a lot of the criticisms. LLMs aren't deterministic? Neither are humans. LLMs write bugs they can't fix? So do humans. LLMs are only good at being junior programmer copy paste machines? So are lots of humans.

My current project is training an LLM to do superoptimization and it's working exceedingly well so far. If you asked anyone on hacker news if that's a good idea, they'd probably say no.

The NPU is a Hexagon DSP with HVX, Hexagon Vector Extensions, and HMX, Hexagon Matrix Extensions. The core ISA and vector ISAs are pretty well documented and supported by upstream llvm, but AFAIK HMX is not publicly documented. Core ISA + HVX by itself can probably get you to 1/3 to 1/2 of so of the theoretical peak TOPS for Hexagon. It's been a bit since I've run code on device, but all the support code is in their SDK, and it's easy as pie to get it running on the simulator.

QCOM have said that up to ~13B LLMs will run at reasonable, and I think that's a pretty good peak for ~40TOPs and ~150GB/s bandwidth.

No writeup, but the code is here:

https://github.com/SuperOptimizer/supercompiler

There's code there to generate unoptimized / optimized pairs via C generators like yarpgen and csmith, then compile, train, inference, and disassemble the results

I've done some similar LLM compiler work, obviously not on Meta's scale, teaching an LLM to do optimization by feeding an encoder/decoder pairs of -O0 and -O3 code and even on my small scale I managed to get the LLM to spit out the correct optimization every once and a while.

I think there's a lot of value in LLM compilers to specifically be used for superoptimization where you can generate many possible optimizations, verify the correctness, and pick the most optimal one. I'm excited to see where y'all go with this.

I think I recognize the author of this from /r/localllama, where plenty of other people are building similar frankenstein rigs. This post only mentions Intel setups, but AMD Epyc Milan and Rome based rigs are also very viable alternatives. They're a bit more expensive, but much better perf/watt, and the incremental price increase after factoring in a lot of GPUs is fairly slim. With 7 PCIE bifurcators on a motherboard such as the AsRock ROMED8-2T and a 14 risers, you can get up to 14 GPUs at PCIE 4.0x8.

That's awesome! Thanks for taking the time to reply.

I am a young guy - just turned 30 last month - but I exclusively shoot and develop film and have my own mini darkroom. I enjoy the challenge and physicality of it all, plus I already spend enough time around computers and digital tech as a software engineer so it's nice to have some analog pursuits. An IMSAI is a bit before my time, but I have a soft spot for older CPUs like the similar z80 or 6502 from writing emulators.

For 35mm I mostly shoot on Canon FD, so while I recognize some of those classic design names I haven't shot on them. I haven't been able to shoot on the behemoth PO lenses as much as I'd like since they weigh nearly 60 pounds a piece and are a hassle to use, but I've jerry rigged a Graflex Crown Graphic to the back and can do a manual shutter with some ND filter and a quick on/off of the lens cap. They cover 4x5 or more at the distances I use them and are incredible lenses for portraiture.

My next projects are to mount both PO lenses together and put Graflex Speed Graphic 4x5 cameras behind each in order to make a massive binocular camera. I also have a Goerz 47" process lens that's got an image circle of nearly a meter, so my next shoot with that will be a 1:1 self portrait on xray film, since it's the only semi affordable option for such a massive exposure.

I assume that's the same Itek that made lenses for the Corona Spy Satellite program?

That's cool as heck. I am just a photographer, but I collect aerial lenses and own 2 Pacific Optical 18" f/3 lenses in 70mm format, serial numbers 6 and 13. I'll keep my eyes peeled for a surplus Itek 24" f/3.5 though :)

For me, "y'all" has multiple forms

"y'all" - explicitly addressing >1 person

"y'all" - explicitly addressing 1 person while implicitly addressing >1 people. I might say "how y'all doin" to a friend, implying "how are you and your family doing"

"all y'all" - >>1 person or addressing >1 person that was not included in the previous "y'all"

"y'all" - explicitly and implicitly addressing 1 person whom I have not made acquaintance with. If I were working as a server in a restaurant and had a single person come in, I may address them with "y'all". "What can I get y'all?" is the same as "what can I get you?" but the "y'all" gives it some extra politeness or an "emphatic southern accent"

I think you're right about the implicit group/family aspect in many cases. If I'm taking to one friend and say "how are y'all doing" then that friend's family or ingroup is certainly implied in the question.

The singular polite "y'all" I'm referring to is generally used when the other party is not known. F.ex. I regularly, though certainly not always, hear clerks, waiters, or other service industry workers using "y'all" singularly when asking "what can I get y'all to eat" or "y'all need anything else" when speaking to exactly one person, and I use it that way myself.

In my native Texan English, "y'all" can certainly act as a singular polite "you" (EDIT: though it is not terribly common). I often use "Howdy, how y'all doin?" as a polite greeting to people I don't know regardless of the number of people I am addressing, though switch to just "you" after making acquaintance. Funny enough, "howdy" is a contraction of the older "how do ye" and some people still consider it both a greeting _and_ an inquiry, so in some cases it's redundant, and others it isn't, depending on the listener.

I got one patent while I was a Qualcomm for some fairly inconsequential software thing. I was awarded $3k USD. Had the patent been filed in other countries and awarded, I would have been awarded I think 1.5k USD per country. This is/was the standard deal at Qualcomm when I was there (2013-2021). I would not be surprised if core researchers are awarded more for stronger and more applicable patents.