Huh? Plenty of places have geology where the rocks were formed under ancient oceans and are full of sea fossils.

Maybe some geology buffs can correct me, but as I understand it there has been three periods with ocean on top of the crust we call Pakistan today. The Proto-Tethys, Paleo-Tethys, and Tethys Ocean. Many hundreds of millions of years of being ocean.

Because the repo includes the tool authored for, and discussed in, the "blog"?

Not saying its a good idea, but blogging on github has been a thing for much over a decade by now.

Among a strong field, this is the single most depressing comment I’ve ever read on Hacker News. Several grim components but it’s the “I don’t understand why” which seals the deal.

I trust a proper solution (even though I can be certain how accurate it is), which compares to a known dataset much more than just giving it an AI. For identifying current living species it is probably fine but this is something to nice for an AI to be trustable. Also this path is much more fun and you learn sonething along the way!

but, from my understanding what the author was really wanting was an adventure and to learn new things. he gained so much more than just learning what type of shell it is

Maybe he's not an idiot?

Who says the whole analysis isn’t AI inspired?

Is this example of vector search not "AI" enough?

The AI would confidently give him the wrong answer, since it has no way to provide the correct answer, and doesn't know its own limitations. (Or however you wish to describe "hallucinations", which is about as accurate as my description ;))

And he would think he has the right answer, perhaps write up an essay about his findings, which later AI bots will read and learn from, propgating the mistake...