I was just going down a rabbit hole yesterday about the use of AI techniques (or lack of success) in deciphering still-forgotten languages. Unsupervised models have partially cracked Ugaritic and Linear B [0], and Pythia/Ithaca restore Greek inscriptions at scale [1], but Linear A or Proto-Elamite still stall because the corpora are too small and there is no bilingual ‘Rosetta Stone’. The most promising direction now seems to be hybrid pipelines that combine vision encoders to normalize glyphs with constrained decoders guided by phonotactic priors.
People have tried using modern AI to crack lost languages. In some cases it works a bit. For example, a model learned to match Ugaritic (an ancient Semitic language) to Hebrew with no “dictionary” at all. In another case, a system called Pythia can guess missing letters in damaged Greek inscriptions with higher accuracy than human experts.
But with truly lost scripts like Linear A or Proto-Elamite, we run into two problems: there are only a few hundred very short texts, and we don’t have any bilingual “Rosetta Stone” to anchor them. AI can spot patterns, cluster symbols, and even suggest likely word boundaries, but it cannot yet produce actual translations. The current hope is to combine image recognition (to clean up messy symbols) with language models guided by rules of possible sound systems, then loop in human experts to check or reject the guesses.
Turns out someone else made both :P
In all seriousness, I don't think the average person could have actually read the books when the concept was conceived anyway, so automating the trick of the recipient receiving all the blessings in the book without someone having to read them out would have saved a whole lot of monks' time....
These very manuals are now for sale on the open and dark web and anyone can buy one and start accumulation of karma points! FFS, the chant password has already been distributed and they changed nothing! There is no encryption, it's all plain text at rest. SMH.
There is no auth process. Anyone can walk up, grab a prayer turbine and start spinning it for all they are worth. I would not be surprised if I saw a motorcycle, on it's side, with the drive wheel touching a prayer turbine, and spinning it at 100s of RPMs.
Don't get me started on their callous handling of libraries that these texts reference or the complete lack of standards when new data is added. They just throw it into the pile and keep spinning. :|
They may have a handle on religion, but their data security sucks, frankly.
Buddhism has some very different ideas. Its also quite varied - Theravada is more different from Zen than protestant Christianity is from Catholic or Orthodox.
Most types of Christian prayer are about having in effect on yourself, so it would not make sense. Even intercessionary prayer is a personal request, so this sort of thing sounds wrong, but the prayer wheels arise from completely different beliefs.
You're claiming prayers are not real, but then seem not to be following through fully with this, by subsequently assuming that if they were real, it would be inevitable that they'd have to operate in some particular way. But that wouldn't automatically follow. I think this is the reply's point.
(Indeed, among Christ's criticisms of the Pharisees is that they had lost sight of the spirit of the law and reduced it to an exercise in OCD and appearing pious in public while their hearts remained impure. From the Christian perspective, the Mosaic covenant was fulfilled by Christ and superseded by the New Covenant in which such dietary laws are no longer needed, as they would have already served their purpose. Of course, Catholics do practice dietary restriction on Fridays and during Lent as a matter of canon law as a penitential sacrifice.)
Ritual, in general, is not some kind of superstitious witchcraft or casting of spells, but a matter of spiritual practice and a system of signs communicating unseen realities. Everyday life contains similar practices. We use signs to communicate truths that cannot be perceived through our senses all the time (think of all the gestures we use in everyday life). This is to be expected, as human beings are also corporeal beings, and we communicate through signs that can be perceived through the senses.
"Oh, no! Krisna sees through your little sin-transferral plan, Abu!"
And compared to saying it aloud by yourself it's orders of magnitude more. And when they cram the text into like neat folds with dense text, thats a few more. I just googled, yeah I still google because perplexity on comet is not my thing, 100 trillion prayers on a microfilm is an example I saw.
https://uselessetymology.com/2017/11/12/the-etymology-of-hyp...
All silent in the monastery except for the ultrasonic whine of thousands of prayer turbines.
Prayer ring gyros, encoding the prayers into ultra-fast laser pulses going round millions of turns of optic fibre may be a competing technology.
That said electric (and wind and water-powered) prayer wheels do actually exist, so there is some prior art.
It's essentially a robot built to believe things on behalf of its owner, offloading the tiresome burden of religion to a machine.
In the book it is explained as a natural evolution of other machines, like a dishwasher washes dishes for you, a VCR watches TV for you, an electric monk believes for you.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirk_Gently%27s_Holistic_Detec...
So I mean, If we really think about it from an atheist's point of view as to what happens after death, its essentially moksh.
Also I genuinely believe that if there is some spiritiuality in this world, then it would reward us for the work that we are doing by the amount of hard work.. ie, reading the 9 million mantras per minute was being that easy, and accruing karma was so easy, then even people who are more sinful than me can go to moksh because they can offset their karma by an insane degree by doing this thing and I feel like if the universe is from where we get our intelligence and we can deduce it that its kinda wrong, then ofc the universe knows that too and it won't be of much value.
Basically if I truly see things from a more religious perspective, even then theoretically one should just live a good life as much as he can and not wonder or worry about the rules set by other religious people since they themselves had crafted their own rules and you should too.
TLDR: Just be a good person as much you can without pushing yourself to limits and then to me personally, I will much rather go into hell by not following god but following good than go into heaven by following god but not good.
I mean no offense to religious people because i mean, I can understand you guys too. Life is truly scary. Even I want the comfort of a god or karma and even I pray sometimes when I truly feel desperate but the scientific part of me can't really let go of all the inconsistencies I feel like.
Not that it's a bad thing, people are allowed to enjoy reincarnation, and it probably beats being reincarnated in hell.
Armchair philosopher: But you have to define good before you can follow it. Even the Golden Rule falls apart if you're a masochist.
And to be honest, for me its also doing good not because you want others to know but in spite of it, you should rather live your life in that sense of secrecy but honestly, that's what I consider "based" and its definitely nothing wrong with telling what good you did, but I really suffer from this sense of oversharing everything so to me its really one of an ideals.
I get what you are saying and its a good point and I am sure that there is some better reasoning than this good than "what my soul feels truly satisfy with"
Honestly, I might sound kind of idk preachy but I want to live my life in such a sense that it can have an impact. A positive impact. That's it. If people say my name in good intention. But also, I don't want to work only for people to say that I have good impact but rather knowing that the good that I am doing even in secret might come some day out. I do doubt how many secrets I can carry to grave in this interconnected world. I'd much rather be an open book with some dark chapters but I'd try to still do some good. I am sorry if I confuse you because I think I am a little confused too. Because I don't know how my definition of good can stand time and ever changing people. I can't convince anybody something, everyone have their own livelihood and they were parented differently and so they value different things and they have different meanings of good. Putting the word's meaning into umbrella means that I am taking the freedom away. There is no objective good in my opinion, only things happening. Chaos and reactions. We are lucky to spawn in into such an complicated world, but we were bound to happen because we are what happens when luck hands correctly. We were bound to exist in the randomness. It doesn't have much native meaning itself, this world. I feel like it just has some scientific rules and I don't know why it has that, but I doubt if there is some moral code embedded into the universe. Its our own intepretation.
I guess I am going all over the places for sure, definitely not a clear thought but a rough sketch. I sometimes feel a little guilt thinking that I might be polluting hackernews with such long comments since they might take up visual space away from some meaningful content than myself. But maybe I overshare.
FYI there's no "good karma" in Tibetan buddhism. There is just karma. Karma is not good because it will cause samsara.
Maybe it is supposed to be a fun cheat to remove karma not "accrue good karma" but surely no one uses it seriously lol
I don't know the different buddhisms but checked wikipedia about karma in tibetan buddhism and it seems to say it too
The major innovation in Vajrayana would be an addition to the hierarchy you laid out, which is full Buddhahood in this lifetime and the tantric methods to get there. Nirvana/samsara are considered two perspectives of the same reality [2].
[1] starts about 20 min in, after the opening meditation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdYmiLvSzfY
https://web.archive.org/web/20241119222821/http://www.histor...
mkmk•5mo ago
[0] https://scrollprize.org/
stavros•5mo ago
neom•5mo ago
verditelabs•5mo ago