Thread

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

174 points · 44 comments · benbreen

dr_dshiv · 1790286608 · focus · HN ↗
FWIW, I have tried my best to make the 10s of thousands of books on <a href="https://SourceLibrary.org" rel="nofollow">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!
1. stillpointlab · 1790374398 · focus · HN ↗
  This is a brilliant idea and I've had the idea for gathering the worlds spiritual texts in a similar fashion.
  One question I would have, why not put the extracted English txt contents onto github or some other repository? The API and MCP are definitely awesome features, but providing an LLM ready repository seems like it would be very useful as well. Your service then still serves the purpose for original scans/images/illustrations but the bulk of the content is then immediately searchable by an agent locally using the standard cli tools (grep/rg, etc).

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