[HN Gopher] Gemini 3.0 Deciphered the Mystery of a Nuremberg Chr...
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Gemini 3.0 Deciphered the Mystery of a Nuremberg Chronicle Leaf's
Author : kilroy123
Score : 50 points
Date : 2026-01-01 18:08 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.gdeltproject.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.gdeltproject.org)
| jgeralnik wrote:
| I think there's something very interesting here and would be
| interested in hearing more about the date discrepancies- it's a
| shame the article is mostly just the raw output of gemini instead
| of more commentary
| game_the0ry wrote:
| This is how you use AI.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I mean its not.
|
| There isn't verification, and its based on the assertion that
| this marginalia is a mystery. None of which appears to be
| backed up.
|
| It then doesn't actually do any analysis of the output, any
| verification, just pastes the dumps at the end, with no attempt
| to make it readable.
| layer8 wrote:
| For populating blogspam?
| BigTTYGothGF wrote:
| "several experts who reviewed the page were unable to discern
| their meaning and thus their purpose had remained elusive"
|
| I find this a little hard to believe.
| brokensegue wrote:
| why?
| why-o-why wrote:
| Because the experts weren't cited, and without provenance or
| review this is just "fancy slop".
| brokensegue wrote:
| this isn't a peer reviewed journal article though. do you
| have expertise in the field to say whether an expert would
| be able to decipher this?
| SirSavary wrote:
| The book is written in Latin, not exactly a dead
| language.
| dhedberg wrote:
| I make no judgement on this particular claim, I have not checked
| it out.
|
| But what immediately comes to mind from reading the title are all
| the "AI solutions" for the as-of-yet undecoded voynich manuscript
| that are posted with surprising (and increasing) frequency to at
| least one forum. They're all incompatible and fall apart on
| closer inspection.
|
| A collection of them can be found at
| https://www.voynich.ninja/forum-59.html .
| ajross wrote:
| One probably important distinction is that the Voynich
| manuscript was deliberately obfuscated. Puzzling it out
| requires context that may not even exist anymore (consider
| discovering an intact TLS log a thousand years in the future,
| without the private cert you'd never know it was just someone
| posting to HN!).
|
| The notes in the linked article are presumptively-legible notes
| made in good faith, just not with enough detail for someone-
| who-is-not-the-author to understand . AI training sets are much
| broader than mere human intuition now.
| fresh_broccoli wrote:
| I find it worrying that this was upvoted so much so quickly, and
| HN users are apparently unable to spot the _glaring_ red flags
| about this article.
|
| 1. Let's start with where the post was published. Check what kind
| of content this blog publishes - huge volumes of random low-
| effort AI-boosting posts with AI-generated images. This isn't a
| blog about history or linguistics.
|
| 2. The author is anonymous.
|
| 3. The contents of the post itself: it's just raw AI output.
| There's no expert commentary. It just mentions that unnamed
| experts were unable to do the job.
|
| This isn't to say that LLMs aren't useful for science; on the
| contrary. See for example Terence Tao's blog. Notice how
| different his work is from whatever this post is.
| OGEnthusiast wrote:
| Given how quickly it got upvoted, I also wonder how much of the
| upvoting itself may be from AI bots.
| roywiggins wrote:
| I'm especially suspicious of the handwriting analysis. It seems
| like the kind of thing a vLLM would be pretty bad at doing and
| very good at convincingly faking for non-experts.
|
| Gemini 3 Pro, eg, fails very badly at reading the Braille in
| this image, confusing the English language text for the actual
| Braille. When you give it just the Braille, it still fails and
| confidently hallucinates a transcription badly enough that you
| don't even have to know Braille (I don't!) to see it's wrong.
|
| https://m.facebook.com/groups/dullmensclub/posts/18885933484...
|
| As far as I can tell, Gemini 3 Pro is still completely out of
| its depth and incapable of understanding Braille at all, _and
| doesn 't realize this_.
| steve-atx-7600 wrote:
| Happens too often these days. Also, express an unpopular
| opinion and get downvoted.
| macinjosh wrote:
| You are anonymous too, so...
| fresh_broccoli wrote:
| I am not announcing a scientific breakthrough.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| This is literally a "my two cents' worth" answer from Gemini Pro.
| It's a straightforward inference from the fact that "Anno Mundi"
| means "in the year of the world", thus especially in the "year
| since creation", and that the main text references Abraham's
| birth with conflicting dates. It's nifty that we now have
| automated means of extracting a sensible scholarly consensus of
| "what could this possibly mean" but there's absolutely no mystery
| here.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| tldr gemini asserts they are converted dates.
|
| My colleagues do this as well with AI and it fucks me right off.
|
| They just present the raw output, in its long form an expect
| everyone to follow the flow. Context is everything, damn it.
|
| Looking into it further there isn't really a mystery as to what
| they are, or at least none that I could find suggesting that its
| unknown. Especially given the context of the page.
|
| Its great that gemini can do this, its a shame that lots of the
| ancillary "analysis" about the writing doesn't appear to be
| correct (humanist minscule I would suggest is too new, too
| heathen and too Italian for a german manuscript of the time
| https://medievalwritings.atillo.com.au/whyread/paleographysu...)
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(page generated 2026-01-01 23:01 UTC)