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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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