Using LLMs to trace alchemical knowledge and decode 17th century letters (resobscura.substack.com)

40 pointsby benbreen3 hours ago8 comments

loufe an hour ago

I've been using AI to help with my genealogical research, and it's been fantastic. I am loving pushing the family history back and catching mistakes that someone who many others share as a common ancestor have made.

aleksiy123 an hour ago

I also have been doing this every round of models releasing.

Thanks for reminding me to try this new round of models.

I wonder if there are some good tools/apis that can help here.

A lot of information is often login gated

vintermann 40 minutes ago

I'm very interested in this topic. I have been using AI for genealogy, but not in ways that have been able to push family history back or catch mistakes (yet).

So how do you use the models more specifically? I have so far used them to write a - in some ways - better genealogy program, with some features I've sorely missed especially with respect to DNA genealogy. I've also tried to use them to help with the tedium of transcribing horrible handwriting, but the results have been so poor and with such a high level of hallucinations that I've not tried that for a while.

z_rho_one an hour ago

Great use case of AI. Almost 4 years after the sensational release of GPT3.5, the best use case of AI is still being a powerful search engine that can gather information from all corners of the digital world.

dr_dshiv 25 minutes ago

FWIW, I have tried my best to make the 10s of thousands of books on https://SourceLibrary.org ergonomic for both agents and people. All feedback welcome.

To date, it is the largest collection of agent-accessible translations on the web. The mcp pulls texts and illustrations — and the API provides access to the embeddings. It’s free.

We are based at the Embassy of the Free Mind in Amsterdam, a UNESCO-recognized library of alchemy, magic and mysticism (among other related topics)

And, it’s worth saying, I’m very much inspired by Res Obscura’s line of curiosity-driven humanist inquiry…

Dive into some historical mysteries, there are so many!

riazrizvi 2 hours ago

This is a strong application of LLMs IMO. They are idea machines. Historical ways of thinking give us different paths to explore the world through.

whythismatters 2 hours ago

Great post, thank you! So, let's resolve ancient Near East chronology and determine an absolute date for the sack of Babylon?

b112 2 hours ago

I'm guessing it wasn't Claude 5.5, not with the "dangerous" nature of this work.