So glad to see color photographs of the site.

One thing I'm not so glad to see is one paragraph that starts with this sentence:

"The distinction is important. Archaeological maps..."

That "The distinction is important" smells like AI writing... but maybe we all just have to accept that now?

We all have to accept that people will look at perfectly innocuous, clear, well-written prose and assume that AI wrote it.

Yeah its getting annoying how people discuss endlessly how some text is AI or not... like some extra imaginative points are awarded to those who spot the most. People seem to keep getting triggered by little insignificant things in the text.

LLMs average human writing thats out there, its not making up new expressions or language constructs so just move on if you (anybody) can and put that little obsessive pedantic part of you behind you.

I couldn't care less, why be a prick and not just enjoy & discuss the content, not this ultra focus on the form. If content is crap then thats another story altogether. I wish there would be some plugin/feature to just block those rather empty subthreads.

One can still suspect that something might not have been uttered through some AI assistance. There might even be still some living humans outside, who knows.

Remember the "IDunno" of archeology - "It most likely served ritual and cultural purposes" .. i wonder if AI adapts such a thing

As more people start using AI for research, they'll probably adopt AI'isms in their writing too, even if they don't use AI itself to do the writing.

Subconsciously we all pick up patterns that we regularly encounter.

I've had that happen to me. I actually recently wrote a draft blog and looked over it, and it felt AI generated. My writing style has definitely changed.

I've definitely picked up 'lever', I scrub it every time that I notice I write it but it's in there.

“blast radius” for me

Maybe we need our AI to only respond in bullet point lists.

With emoji for the bullets, natch.

Just put "Don't use emojis" into the prompt.

Pass it as a memory or a system prompt and watch it forget 3 agent messages later.

what frontier models are this bad these days?

I can't name one but I can tell you these models keep getting stupider as they keep existing and their system prompts get inflated with what not to do. I have experienced this happen with Qwen 3.8 Max Preview where for the early days it was blasting through Rust code fine and then before the release it silently got replaced and started to suck hard. Claude still has the "blue button" problem so it is probable that a casual chat with it could have this exact outcome of forgetting what to do. I saw some models also have this thing where when you tell them a text restriction they first ignore it in thinking, creating the full text and then apply them in their thinking rewriting it fully causing your output tokens to be inflated.

- The

- Distinction

- Is

- Important

I have the opposite, I can pick up AIsms much more now and they stick out like a sore thumb. A couple of years ago I had no such intuition, it just sounded like normal writing to me, but now if I try to use AI to write any prose it just sounds absolutely terrible.

This is the load-bearing result

This distinction is important.

Ran it through several testes, only one flagged a few sentences as AI, including the one you mention. Fair enough, it's unlikely that English is the (turkish in this case?) author's first language and a little AI help can't hurt here.

I learned a great lesson for a gamedev youtuber this summer: Use AI to give you a summary what you have to implement, what functions you'll need, what edge case you missed and then write it yourself. Putting this into practice helps me to refine the ticket I'm working on. With the last ticket I had to persuade the AI (Atlassian's Rovo in my case) that a new data model wasn't necessary and we can do it more elegantly with less code.

Many of us still have to figure out how AI fits into our workflow, letting it do all the work isn't it but asking AI to point you towards the goal and let it review/refine your work sounds a lot more acceptable to me.

>testes

teehee

> and a little AI help can't hurt here.

Wrong wrong wrong.

Bad writing makes the reader stop thinking about what you wanted to convey. As unintuitive as it is for most people in this forum, AI writing smell is as bad as bad grammar. Doesn't matter how you get rid of it. Maybe even more AI can clean those up, but those unintuitive phrases that pop up in AI writing are going to be a hindrance for many people who would love for the focus to be on what they're presenting, not the sloppy way they've written it up

4400 years ago! Check whats happening in the rest of the world and its pretty primitive in comparision.

I imagine they've done some tweaking before publishing (also appears the rock substrate has flaked off), was hoping to be able to pull some more detail out of the images with a vibe coded decorrelation stretch app I made from a post last week:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49645437

https://github.com/nburns/DecorrelationStretch

There's also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49648775 which points to https://shan.mp/decorrelation_stretch/

I was thinking about that article as well, were you not able to pull any more detail out the images?

If I understand this finding correctly, it now means we have proof that ancient Egypt was not a life in black-and-white.