proomt

Search

Search posts, papers, and topics

All posts

Hacker News front page

Using LLMs to trace alchemical knowledge and decode 17th century letters

Related reading

  1. How LLMs Can Find a Needle in a Haystack

    The post explains how retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) lets LLM‑based assistants answer questions from private corpora. It covers chunking documents into passages, embedding queries and chunks, similarity metrics, and the trade‑offs of different vector indexes (flat, IVF, HNSW). The focus is on practical design choices rather than new research.

    ByteByteGobytebytego.com12 min
  2. The Farnese letter

    The author reverse‑engineers a 1542 Italian cipher from a Farnese letter by combining digit‑frequency analysis with a beam‑search decoder guided by a five‑gram Italian language model, ultimately recovering the key and partial plaintext.

    Hacker News front pagesimonklee.dk42 minHN476
  3. How To Write With An LLM

    Simon Willison argues that LLMs should be used as copyeditors, not as writers, and proposes a strict rule never to reuse any phrase they suggest. He shares a prompt for building a personal LLM proofreading tool.

    Simon Willisonsimonwillison.net1 min