YouSaid · the spoken record

Nat Friedman

lines on the record: 118
first: 2023-03-22
most recent: 2023-03-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Really feel the texture. And I got it because I wanted to understand sort of what are these artifacts that we're working with. And so we made an attempt to simulate carbonizing a few of these. So we basically took a Dutch oven. Because when you carbonize something and you make charcoal, it's not like burning it with oxygen. You sort of remove the oxygen, heat it up, and let it carbonize. So we tried to simulate that with a Dutch oven, which is probably imperfect, and left it in the oven at 500 degrees Fahrenheit for maybe, I don't know how long these were, but our biggest attempt was like five or six hours. And they really, and so these things are incredibly light. And if you try to unfold them, they just fall apart in your hand very readily. I assume these are in somewhat better shape than the ones that were found because these were not in a volcanic eruption and covered in mud. I think the volcano was probably maybe that mud was hotter than my oven can go.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so papyrus is a papyrus and it's a reed. It's a grassy reed that grows on the Nile in Egypt. And for thousands of years, many thousands of years, they've been making paper out of it. And the way they do it is they take the kind of outer rind off of the papyrus and then they cut the inner core into these strips. And they lay the strips out kind of parallel to one another. And then they put another layer to 90 degrees to that bottom layer. And they press it together in a press or under stones and let it dry out. And that's papyrus, essentially. And then they'll take some of those sheets and kind of glue them together with paste made out of flour usually and get a long scroll. And you can still buy it. I bought this on Amazon. And it's interesting because it's got a lot of texture, those fibrous ridges of the papyrus plant. And so when you write on it,”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“May contain literary texts, historical texts, other things, and that it could be much larger. Now, I don't know how prone these classicists are to wishful thinking. It is a romantic idea, but they have some evidence in the presence of these partly evacuated sort of scrolls that were found in hallways and that sort of thing. So there are descriptions, you know, I've since gone and read a bunch of the first-hand accounts of the excavations and there are these heartbreaking descriptions of them finding like an entire case of scrolls in Latin and like accidentally destroying it as they tried to get it out of the mud and you know there were maybe 30 scrolls or something in there so there clearly was some other stuff that we just haven't got to”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the villa that the tunnels apparently had never excavated. And so at most a third of the villa has been excavated. Now, they also know when they were discovering these papyrus scrolls that they found basically one little room where most of the scrolls were. And these were mostly these philodemus texts. At least that's what we know. And they found apparently several revisions sometimes of the same text. And so they think the hypothesis is this was actually Philodemus' working library. He worked here, this sort of Epicurean philosopher. And in the hallways, though, they occasionally found other scrolls, including crates of them. And the belief is, at least this is what historians have told me. I'm no expert, but what they have told me is they think that the mean library in this villa has probably not been excavated and that the mean library may be a Latin library.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You'd think if you find this crazy villa that was owned by Julius Caesar's father-in-law that we just dig the whole thing out. But in fact, most of the exploration occurred in the 1700s through the Swiss engineers' tunnels underground. So it was never, the villa was never dug out and exposed to the air. You went down 50, 60 feet, and then you dig tunnels. And again, they were looking for treasure, not like a full archaeological exploration. So they mostly got treasure. In the 90s, some additional excavations were done kind of at the edge of the villa, and they discovered a couple things. First, they discovered this like, it was a seaside villa faced the ocean. It was right on the water before the volcano erupted. The eruption actually pushed the shoreline out by depositing so much additional mud there, so it's no longer right by the ocean, apparently. I've actually never been. And they also found that there were two additional floors.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we're like friends now. And I think we found that we think alike about this. And I think he's reached the point where he just really wants to crack the, you know, they've taken this right up to the one-yard line. Like, this is doable at this point. They've demonstrated, I think, every key component, but putting it all together, improving the quality, doing it at the scale of a whole scroll. This is still very hard work. And an open competition seems like the most efficient way to get it done.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's really funny because he was really pretty hard to get in touch with. So, like I emailed them a couple times, just didn't respond. And so I was like, so I asked my admin Emily to call the Secretary of his department and say, like, Mr. Friedman requests me. And then he knew there was something actually going on there. And so he finally got on the phone with me and got on Zoom. And he was like, why are you interested in this? I mean, I love Brent. He's fantastic.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I'm really excited, and I think my bet is there's like a 50% chance that someone will encounter this opportunity and get the data and get nerdsniped by it, and we'll solve it this year.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we're launching that this week. I guess maybe it's when this airs. I don't know. The stakes are kind of big. What gets me excited are the stakes. So the six or eight hundred scrolls that are there, it's estimated that if we could read all of them and somehow the technique works and it generalizes to all the scrolls, then that would give us approximately a doubling of the total text that we have from antiquity. This is what historians and classicists tell me. So it's not like, oh, we would get like a 5% bump or a 10% bump in the total ancient Roman or Greek text. It would be like, no, we get all of the text that we have again, multiple Shakespeare's is sort of one of the units that I've heard. So that would be significant. I mean, we don't know what's in there. We've got a few Philodemus texts. Those are of some interest, but there could be lost epic poems or God knows what.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the approach that we've settled on to do that is to actually launch an open competition. We're going to done a ton of work with his team to get the data into a shape and the tools and techniques and just the broad understanding of them. Smart people can kind of approach it and get productive easily. And then I'm putting up together with Daniel Gross a prize, sort of like an X prize or something like that for the first person or team who can actually read substantial amounts of real text from one of these scrolls without opening them”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tiny voxels, which they thought would be sufficient. And I thought this was like the coolest thing ever. We're using technology to read this lost information from the past and I sort of waited for the news that they had been decoded successfully. So that was 2020. And then I think COVID hit. Everybody got a little bit slowed down by that. And last year, I found myself wondering, I wonder what happened to Dr. Seals and his scroll project. And I reached out and it turned out they had been making really good progress. You know, they gotten some machine learning models to start to identify ink inside of the scrolls, but they hadn't yet extracted words or passages. It's very challenging. And I invited him to come out to California and hang out. And to my shock, he did. And we got to talking and decided to team up and try to crack this thing.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't know what's in these things. And obviously, people are trying to develop new ways and new technologies to open them. And I read about a professor at the University of Kentucky, Brent Seals, who had been trying to scan these using increasingly advanced imaging techniques and then use computer vision techniques and machine learning to kind of virtually unroll them without ever opening them. And they tried a lot of different things, but their most recent attempt in 2019 was to take the scrolls to a particle accelerator in Oxford, England called the Diamond Light Source, and to make essentially an incredibly high resolution CT scan of sort of 3D X-ray scan. And they needed really high energy photons in order to do this, and they were able to take scans at eight microns, so these really quite”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meter a day, something like that. In a typical scroll, I think could be 15 or 20 or 30 feet long, and managed to successfully enroll a few of these. And they found on them Greek philosophical texts in the Epicurean tradition by this little-known philosopher named Philodemus. But we got kind of new text from antiquity, which is not a thing that happens all the time. Eventually people stopped trying to physically unroll these things because so many were destroyed. And in fact, some attempts to physically unroll the scrolls continued even until like the 2000s, like 1990s, 2000s, and they were destroyed. So the current situation as we have, 600 plus kind of roughly in tax scrolls that we can open. And I heard about this, and I thought that was incredibly exciting. Like the idea that there was information from 2,000 years in the past.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we only have, it's estimated something less than 1%, less than 1% of all the writing from that period. And so to find underground hundreds of definitely not in good condition, but still present, you know, papyro scrolls were on a few of them. You can make out the lettering was like this enormous discovery. People immediately in a well-meaning attempt to read them started trying to open them, but they're really fragile, they turn to ash in your hand. And so hundreds were destroyed. People did things like cut them with daggers down the middle and a bunch of little pieces would flake off and they'd try to get a few letters off of a couple of pieces. And then eventually there was a monk named Piagio, who's an Italian monk, and he devised this machine kind of under the care of the Vatican to unroll these things very, very slowly, like half a centimeter.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They found all these treasures. And that was sort of the spirit at the time, was like looting. They were taking out incredible, if they encountered a wall, they would just bust through it. And they were taking out these beautiful bronze statues that had survived. And along the way they kept encountering these lumps of what looked like charcoal. They weren't sure what they were, and many were apparently thrown away. Until someone noticed a little bit of writing on one of them. And they realized they were papyrus scrolls. And there were hundreds, there may be even thousands of them. And so they had uncovered really this enormous library is the only library ever to have sort of survived in any form, even though it was badly damaged. They were sort of carbonized, very fragile, deformed. The only one that survived since antiquity. In the open air, these papyrus scrolls in like a Mediterranean climate, they rot and they decay quickly. And so they'd have to be recopied by monks like every hundred years or so.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it was also the home to a huge library of papyrus scrolls. And so when the villa was buried, the volcano actually it spit out enormous quantities of mud and ash, and it buried Herculaneum in particular in something like 20 meters of material. So it wasn't like a thin layer. It was a very thick layer. Those towns were buried and forgotten for hundreds of years. No one even knew exactly where they were until the 1700s. And so in 1750, a farm worker who was digging a well kind of in the outskirts of Herculaneum struck this marble paving stone of a path that had been at this huge villa. And of course he was pretty far down when he did that. He was 60 feet down. And then subsequently this Swiss engineer came in and started digging tunnels from that well shaft.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're calling it the Vesuvius Challenge. And this is just this crazy and exciting thing. I feel like incredibly honored to have gotten caught up in. But a couple of years ago, I was reading, it was the midst of COVID, and I think we were in lockdown. And like everybody was sort of falling into internet rabbit holes, and I just started reading about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Italy about 2,000 years ago. And it turns out that when Vesuvius erupted, it was AD 79, it destroyed all the nearby towns. Everyone knows about Pompeii. But there was another nearby town called Herculaneum, and Herculaneum was sort of like the Beverly Hills to Pompeii, so big villas, big houses, fancy people. And in Herculaneum there was one villa in particular that was enormous, and it had once been owned by the father in law of Julius Caesar. And so well connected guy. And it was full of beautiful statues and marbles and art.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have six hundred plus kind of roughly in tax scrolls that we can't open. And I heard about this and I thought that was incredibly exciting, like the idea that there was information from 2,000 years in the past. We don't know what's in these things. We could read all of them. Then that would give us approximately a doubling of the total text that we have from antiquity. There are thousands more papyrus scrolls in there, and we now have the techniques to read them, then there's gold in that mud. And it's got to be dug out. I just fundamentally don't believe the world is efficient. And so if I see an opportunity to do something, I used to, but I no longer have a reflexive reaction that says, oh, that must not be a good idea if it were a good idea, someone would already be doing it.”
2023-03-22 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source