YHK - yet another hacker news clone

That's hardly relevant here.

You could say that about recent slew of CVEs as well.

And such findings are usually praiseworthy and valuable.

It's vibes all the way down.

You've heard about humans doing pattern recognition based on established baselines? Hold my beer when I blow your mind about recent developments in computing.

Especially billionaire islands, those need high resolution scanning just like everyone's living rooms. Let's make it happen @therealelonmusk

Yeah I agree. There’s a lot of assumptions coming out about what the structures are and what it looks like that give me pause. Very cool to have found this site though. The actual archeology involved though will be slow as it’s a science done layer by layer. It will be interesting to see if any predictions made by the AI match up to the facts.

I'm certainly not one to defend AI bros, this guy's writing is insufferable (and reads like slop to me), but did you read TFA? The LIDAR image (based on measured data, not AI) clearly shows human-made structures, and the Mexican government's response said that it's not registered. The chatbots just found it. Unless he's completely lying about the whole thing, this seems genuine. Now all the bits about what sort of site it probably was and the slopified image of what it might have looked like are garbage, but the find itself doesn't look to be.

I'm sceptical too. Perhaps he verified, but from his blogpost, he doesn't imply that he cross checked anything and instead trusted all agentic output. For example, after getting the patch of ladar with the site, did he manually check NASA's resources to make sure there was no hallucination there? Maybe his agents are really good, but submitting this to INAH after only chatting with the agents is really bold.

Again, maybe he did cross verify things and just left that out of the storytelling, and congrats because this is really cool.

TBH the Academic reaction to this could likely be to gatekeep it into oblivion over bad faith or ideological reasons given the perceived hostile takeover of their domain by 'amateurs'.

We saw this with the Dead Sea Scrolls where exclusive control was given to a select group of academics who monopolized the research to the point of refusing to release photographs or transcripts for nearly 40 years. The Huntington Library eventually had to force their hand by releasing their microfiche copies.

Again, we saw this with both the Ochtendung Skull Fraud and the Piltdown Man fraud - systematically falsifying results for clout is an exclusively human pre-occupation.

More to the point, in May 2025 YouTuber MrBeast was allowed to film inside the off-limits areas of Mayan Temples; something banned for both locals and normal tourists.

Academics posit that strict peer review is necessary so as not to allow the hoarding and gatekeeping of knowledge. However in matters of verification, faslification, and justification, they are derelict in their duty to the other half of that contract. The field only has itself to blame if other fields start organically superseding their usefulness and eroding their domain exclusivity by proxy of poor governance and ways of working.

He asked authorities, as stated in the article

“INAH replied: they checked their records and found no registered archaeological site at that location. To be clear, it's not official yet. But as far as anyone can tell, nobody had put this one on a map before.“

Am I missing something to your post?

Why? The technology is pretty new.

It would not have been realistic to have PhD students manually comb through thousands of square kilometers of LIDAR data, and crossreference everything with existing sites; LLMs have turned this into low-hanging fruit.

Can't expect every single scientific field to immediately use any new technology to its full potential, and it makes you sound like a prick, too.

I know what you're saying. At the same time, this is someone using the technical skills in wielding a technology to make, unverified sure, discovery in a wholly different field, but in which they are presumably interested.

So for me one key takeaway is how AI could possibly open up more interdisciplinary work in our heavily siloed world.

"Will the AI work better because it was "pointed" by a Google SWE?"

Usually yes? (vs pointed by a random vibe coder)

Also the more interesting bit to me here is, that you do not find the reference on the page at all, that the person works for google at all (I only found it mentioned in his X account). With the headline I initially thought this was a official google research project, but the blog reads like a personal project.

I think it matters because "I used 48 agents running for 72 hours" either means you invested $50,000 of your own money, or you work for a company that gives you unlimited tokens.

Now I'm curious if anyone has or might try to create an LLM that lacks all knowledge of the post-einstein/newton/plato world and see if it can figure things out. I imagine lack of training data would be a problem, but maybe it could be a way to reverse-engineer an effective prompt that can give us insight in the platos of our world?

There is no "final barrier", the goalpost will continue to change until you are not aware of what is going on anymore. This is already becoming true as the recently produced math research is not fully understood, CoT moves further away from looking like human reasoning and datasets become generated rather than collected from existing human data.

I am curious how this things perform compared to a "classical" neural networks. Tasks like image classification, feature extraction has been studied extensively and there were a lot of very cool applications before (medicine included). The biggest obstacle was always data but even that could have been partly automated with some semi-supervised learning schemes. Of course the Bitter Lesson applies here, given a big enough model, it can outperform specialised ones, but at this point it's not clear 1) By how much? 2) If this is even true in the first place or if we have the means to train much leaner networks

It is becoming a boring homogenous world where we are trading deep expertise with being able to query the magic box

My respect decreased when he even asked AI what to do with the results.

In his defense, without AI he would've googled the question, now he "clauded" it.

And then he told AI to make a webpage about "his" great accomplishment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4OvQIGDg4I

Just wait until the religious people get a hold of this, Jesus will appear in every conceivable piece of material, not only toast.

Archeologists have been using Lidar equipped RC aircraft for quite some time now. With the way things are going it won't be too difficult to have a small swarm of UAVs doing the mapping soon.

the knowledge of these locations from the air should have some value in itself, no?

Given that treasure hunters and looters can also use the process outlined in this blog post, leaving it alone seems like a guarantee that it will be explored by looters first.

> The best way to protect a site is to leave it alone. If we start finding dozens or hundreds of sites it will be more than what archaeologists can excavate and protest.

Ain't the site itself the most important thing? As opposed to items: looters won't steal the site?

It can, but then it runs into the Google Maps issue - everything altruistic at the expense of some bad actor becomes a Security, Military or Legal concern - and the apathy issue.

This is partly why George Clooney abandoned his Project Sentinel - documenting atrocities from space means nothing if you cannot action on the people and financial networks enabling them.

My guess is that sonar would be better for that purpose.

Yes, because FiveEyes GEOINT will absolutely let that happen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik

Life is surrounded by nuances. The COVID pandemic was the best time to be alive if you were a tech worker and your family was safe and healthy. Now COVID is over, so does most of the value of our intellectual work.

But everyone's been fired and are out of jobs -- how is this the best time to be alive?

If you're a Google SRE with 7 figure comp, doing experiments with agent swarms you don't need to pay for, with healthy case of Dunning-Kruger... then maybe it is.

1 Ai agent to search the Lidar; 47 to screw in the lightbulb

I think especially the renegade science YouTubers who are purely hacking away for fun and content.