YHK - yet another hacker news clone

That's hardly relevant here.

You could say that about recent slew of CVEs as well.

And such findings are usually praiseworthy and valuable.

It's vibes all the way down.

You've heard about humans doing pattern recognition based on established baselines? Hold my beer when I blow your mind about recent developments in computing.

Especially billionaire islands, those need high resolution scanning just like everyone's living rooms. Let's make it happen @therealelonmusk

Don't give SpaceX ideas

Yeah I agree. There’s a lot of assumptions coming out about what the structures are and what it looks like that give me pause. Very cool to have found this site though. The actual archeology involved though will be slow as it’s a science done layer by layer. It will be interesting to see if any predictions made by the AI match up to the facts.

I'm certainly not one to defend AI bros, this guy's writing is insufferable (and reads like slop to me), but did you read TFA? The LIDAR image (based on measured data, not AI) clearly shows human-made structures, and the Mexican government's response said that it's not registered. The chatbots just found it. Unless he's completely lying about the whole thing, this seems genuine. Now all the bits about what sort of site it probably was and the slopified image of what it might have looked like are garbage, but the find itself doesn't look to be.

I'm sceptical too. Perhaps he verified, but from his blogpost, he doesn't imply that he cross checked anything and instead trusted all agentic output. For example, after getting the patch of ladar with the site, did he manually check NASA's resources to make sure there was no hallucination there? Maybe his agents are really good, but submitting this to INAH after only chatting with the agents is really bold.

Again, maybe he did cross verify things and just left that out of the storytelling, and congrats because this is really cool.

TBH the Academic reaction to this could likely be to gatekeep it into oblivion over bad faith or ideological reasons given the perceived hostile takeover of their domain by 'amateurs'.

We saw this with the Dead Sea Scrolls where exclusive control was given to a select group of academics who monopolized the research to the point of refusing to release photographs or transcripts for nearly 40 years. The Huntington Library eventually had to force their hand by releasing their microfiche copies.

Again, we saw this with both the Ochtendung Skull Fraud and the Piltdown Man fraud - systematically falsifying results for clout is an exclusively human pre-occupation.

More to the point, in May 2025 YouTuber MrBeast was allowed to film inside the off-limits areas of Mayan Temples; something banned for both locals and normal tourists.

Academics posit that strict peer review is necessary so as not to allow the hoarding and gatekeeping of knowledge. However in matters of verification, faslification, and justification, they are derelict in their duty to the other half of that contract. The field only has itself to blame if other fields start organically superseding their usefulness and eroding their domain exclusivity by proxy of poor governance and ways of working.

He asked authorities, as stated in the article

“INAH replied: they checked their records and found no registered archaeological site at that location. To be clear, it's not official yet. But as far as anyone can tell, nobody had put this one on a map before.“

Am I missing something to your post?

I’m the same for a couple of reasons. First I want to say it is refreshing that AI is being used for discovery instead of an AI arms race, or something else that just feels dystopian. I understand this is happening but it’s rarely what is shown.

1. They said there is no site there, does that mean no one knew it was there?

If this is official lidar data, I find it hard to believe that this is a true discovery, I assume that it just can’t be claimed as a discovery until someone goes there which can be expensive and requires government oversight.

No universities have created an application to detect irregularities in this dataset, that was possible with ML years ago.

2. Personally I want people to Start sharing how much it cost the agent to do a task, because it feels like cost is becoming the bottleneck. Yes it’s awesome it did X but does that mean this can be utilized by people, businesses, or just governments and big tech.

Also just because we’re skeptical doesn’t make us haters. Being a hater is speaking in bad faith.

But anyone can tell me if I’m wrong on this

Why? The technology is pretty new.

It would not have been realistic to have PhD students manually comb through thousands of square kilometers of LIDAR data, and crossreference everything with existing sites; LLMs have turned this into low-hanging fruit.

Can't expect every single scientific field to immediately use any new technology to its full potential, and it makes you sound like a prick, too.

Enjoy calling other people failures much? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X2...

I know what you're saying. At the same time, this is someone using the technical skills in wielding a technology to make, unverified sure, discovery in a wholly different field, but in which they are presumably interested.

So for me one key takeaway is how AI could possibly open up more interdisciplinary work in our heavily siloed world.

"Will the AI work better because it was "pointed" by a Google SWE?"

Usually yes? (vs pointed by a random vibe coder)

Also the more interesting bit to me here is, that you do not find the reference on the page at all, that the person works for google at all (I only found it mentioned in his X account). With the headline I initially thought this was a official google research project, but the blog reads like a personal project.

I think it matters because "I used 48 agents running for 72 hours" either means you invested $50,000 of your own money, or you work for a company that gives you unlimited tokens.

> Why is "Google SWE" relevant here?

Because it did not work the first two times this was submitted without mentioning "Google SWE": https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=pietromiotti.com

So I guess our revealed preference is that the outputs of AI prompts are objectively more interesting if the prompting is done by Google SWEs.

Now I'm curious if anyone has or might try to create an LLM that lacks all knowledge of the post-einstein/newton/plato world and see if it can figure things out. I imagine lack of training data would be a problem, but maybe it could be a way to reverse-engineer an effective prompt that can give us insight in the platos of our world?

There is no "final barrier", the goalpost will continue to change until you are not aware of what is going on anymore. This is already becoming true as the recently produced math research is not fully understood, CoT moves further away from looking like human reasoning and datasets become generated rather than collected from existing human data.

I am curious how this things perform compared to a "classical" neural networks. Tasks like image classification, feature extraction has been studied extensively and there were a lot of very cool applications before (medicine included). The biggest obstacle was always data but even that could have been partly automated with some semi-supervised learning schemes. Of course the Bitter Lesson applies here, given a big enough model, it can outperform specialised ones, but at this point it's not clear 1) By how much? 2) If this is even true in the first place or if we have the means to train much leaner networks

It is becoming a boring homogenous world where we are trading deep expertise with being able to query the magic box

Couldn't it be plain old AI, not an agent?

Too bad the pyramid was already mapped, just got lost in Mexican archives and wasn't accounted for. There's already literature on it.

Just wait until the religious people get a hold of this, Jesus will appear in every conceivable piece of material, not only toast.

Archeologists have been using Lidar equipped RC aircraft for quite some time now. With the way things are going it won't be too difficult to have a small swarm of UAVs doing the mapping soon.

the knowledge of these locations from the air should have some value in itself, no?

Given that treasure hunters and looters can also use the process outlined in this blog post, leaving it alone seems like a guarantee that it will be explored by looters first.

> The best way to protect a site is to leave it alone. If we start finding dozens or hundreds of sites it will be more than what archaeologists can excavate and protest.

Ain't the site itself the most important thing? As opposed to items: looters won't steal the site?

"archaeologists can excavate and protest"

protest (argue against) -> protect (defend against harm)

Well isn't it handy that recording lidar is really expensive, so we luckily won't be having large scale public access to data very soon

It can, but then it runs into the Google Maps issue - everything altruistic at the expense of some bad actor becomes a Security, Military or Legal concern - and the apathy issue.

This is partly why George Clooney abandoned his Project Sentinel - documenting atrocities from space means nothing if you cannot action on the people and financial networks enabling them.

My guess is that sonar would be better for that purpose.

Current scientific consensus is that Atlantis existed only as an invention in the writings of Plato.

It's relatively easy to find on the free streamers. For instance Pluto airs it on the Stargate channel.

Which is why he specifically didnt give a pushpin, and censored out the location and the region in the mail? Also whats stopping the bad actors from doing this work themselves (aside from the price, which im sure could be optimized for, if you don't have an unlimited budget of tokens), and then looting them while the real scientists are none the wiser?

Yes, because FiveEyes GEOINT will absolutely let that happen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik

Life is surrounded by nuances. The COVID pandemic was the best time to be alive if you were a tech worker and your family was safe and healthy. Now COVID is over, so does most of the value of our intellectual work.

But everyone's been fired and are out of jobs -- how is this the best time to be alive?

If you're a Google SWE with 7 figure comp, doing experiments with agent swarms you don't need to pay for, with healthy case of Dunning-Kruger... then maybe it is.

That line also made me do a double-take. No doubt this is cool and all, but that's a strange blanket take away.

It's been going on for years in the UK. https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/may/27/hobb...

The UK landmass is really quite small compared to central America. I'd be surprised if there are many substantial structures left - geophys has been around a long time.

The National Library of Scotland has LIDAR imagery for all of the UK. Go to https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/ then pick a LIDAR layer as the background. This motivated me to make my own high-res LIDAR images on my hobby site (https://solentmaps.uk/) of my home area using QGIS with free government data in order to uncover interesting things. It has old OS maps of the UK (1880s to date) with a LIDAR layer for my local area (south Hampshire).

1 Ai agent to search the Lidar; 47 to screw in the lightbulb

Well they had to look at lidar images from huge parts of Mexico. Seeing as 48 agents did it in 72 hours, presumably 1 agent would do it in 144 days.

Simple to enough to ask "how long would it take", see 144 days and reply "do it in 3 days" and the agent will happily spin up enough instances to cover it

edit: "presumably one agent could parallelize its analysis"

No, they said they didn't analyse with tool use it was literally agents "looking" at the images via multimodal input

I think especially the renegade science YouTubers who are purely hacking away for fun and content.

> The bottleneck will be data. Every possible signal out of publicly available datasets will be squeezed fast.

Exactly. The only blocker to us pulling this off ourselves is access to the LIDAR data.

This author has chosen to make their posts visible only to people who are signed in.

Now I'm very interested in seeing the transcript/session from what the agent actually did.

We already know since before that agents takes all sorts of possible shortcuts to find the answer they think the user was looking for. It doesn't seem impossible to me that the user asked something that made the agent feel OK with highlighting something that wasn't logged in the Mexican database as a novel discovery, even if it wasn't.

But again, transcripts/session logs would make it extremely clear exactly what has happened, and I'd take the author not publishing those as trying to hide something about how the agent actually approached this.

>remote sensing is difficult and any archaeologist knows to triple check before saying something is "new"

>Francisco was very kind and shared his publication image with me

...can she post the pdf?

Seems likely the google SWE that wrote the blog wouldn't have claimed this was new if there was a public way to access this information. I understand archaeologists have valid reasons to keep location details private, but complaining the OP didn't "check" thoroughly (when she can't link to the data he should checked in order to validate it was new) reads more like a shortcoming in how this knowledge is shared than a failure of OP to check.

Here is the referenced publication. Pages 13-14 show the structures. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X2...

So now this apparently amazing feat that was rushed into publication is actually just an out of date DB.

Peer review also protects the authors for making a fool of themselves. QED.

[I withdraw this comment.]

even if it was discovered, I'd say most of the accolades go to NASA and LIDAR, the fact that AI agents were used to discover it isn't a big deal.

The moral of the story is that if you thought you found something that was undiscovered: no you didn’t.

BUT, if AI thinks it’s undiscovered then its discovery might be poorly documented, so if you were to go to the site by yourself you might be able to explore it on your own and raid tombs, etc, and no one will notice.

To some extent it's still an interesting result: an independent validation of the original finding, and a proof of concept that this technique could make such a discovery.

Then the title is misleading, yes? Should be something like "Google SWE uses AI to find a pyramid site that was already discovered".

Not news.

Care to share the source without a paywall?

"This author has chosen to make their posts visible only to people who are signed in."

Those are both dead links...

> This author has chosen to make their posts visible only to people who are signed in.

I thought Bluesky was supposed to be better than X/Twitter, not worse. Bummer.

Ironic going to a blue sky link that is blocked by login.

This post can't be seen if you arent signed in.

For all we know, that's exactly what the agent did.

The AI craze is quite possibly the most annoying hype cycle I’ve ever witnessed.

Doesn't matter, the title is out there, news outlets will omit this little detail. Even here the post is gaining in popularity even after the top comment has questioned its validity.

it feeds into the typical egotistical nerd fallacy of "im smart in X, that translates to be smart at almost everything else with lower effort".

I myself have to keep my stinking paws from some projects at work due to realizing that AI was making me believe I could shit taller than my ass.

It's like revenge of the nerds, but this time the other nerds outside the AI craze are the target instead of the typical bully.

I don't see how the post displays blind faith. The author contacted the relevant authority in Mexico to ask if they already had a record of this village, and even after they said that they didn't, he was careful to hedge and not to claim that this was definitely an original discovery. He flagged the speculative part of the post as speculation, and as far as I can tell, the parts he was confident about have not been disputed.

And what exactly would that rigorous check be?

You pull up the lidar scan and see that there actually IS what clearly appears to be a human-made structure.

And he did. And there is. And then he rigorously contacted government authorities and verified that it is not a registered site.

There are other problems at play. But this is not one of them.

I highly recommend pi.dev for doing anything creative with agents and harnesses. It separates the harness from the model, so you need to BYOM keys and subscriptions.

You can build your own harness quite easily or use a harness something like pi.dev which offers a lot of flexibility in customization in terms of tools, models ised, resume sessions at a prior point in time, etc.

I have used pi.dev to easily start from a known context and goal and use it to compare the cost effectiveness, token isage, etc. of different models to reach the goal state.

I am sure there are many ways to do this successfully.

Type into claude code:

"Scan through publically accessible LIDAR data on <region of mexican jungle>, search for potential Mayan ruins and cross reference with published data to rule out existing finds

Work autonomously until the entire area is searched, prepare me a report detailing potential discoveries"

should more or less do the trick

Ha, yeah I had the same thought. People with money to burn have always been able to “just do things”. The author also considered “hiring a survey team” - ultimately concluding it was too expensive - but the fact that that thought even entered their mind indicates a certain level of expendable income.

Reading 1 more sentence down answers your question.