YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Tool book of a Nuremberg knight from 1505

68 points edwardog 2 hours ago 23 comments

kreyenborgi 1 hour ago | parent

Would be interesting, but the ai images and writing makes me trust it less.

WillAdams 56 minutes ago | parent

An early project on my CNC machine was a basic set of inside/outside calipers:

https://community.carbide3d.com/t/locking-register-calipers-...

It would be interesting to see what would be involved in making the digital files which would allow re-creating each of these objects.

peri-cl 48 minutes ago | parent

https://loeffelholz-codex.org/en/codex/f076r.html

Reading this in between studying information theory makes a good laugh. This is the most inefficient code I've ever heard of. It's basically unary.

(For background, the first popular optical telegraph wasn't created until ~300 years later, and used 98 visually-distinct coding symbols).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappe_telegraph#Coding_and_de...

BlackRabbit1 48 minutes ago | parent

The entire website looks heavily LLM written/analyzed - and I'm not talking of the design which I'm fine with.

This devalues the scientific value a lot because every line must be checked for correctness and source.

The book itself is very beautiful and I'm thankful for the high quality pictures.

katzenq 36 minutes ago | parent

I at least appreciate the warning on unreviewed generated pages and excluding them from SEO until reviewed, but it's still all untrustworthy spam by default.

vehemenz 33 minutes ago | parent

There are, in fact, countless late medieval manuscripts just like this one. LLMs have been trained on many of them.

What scientific value are you looking for?

moffers 33 minutes ago | parent

The author says in the introduction that a certain amount of the book is verified. Presence of LLM-use doesn’t inherently make something of less value.

gradus_ad 25 minutes ago | parent

The problem with AI generated content is, it tells me you didn't care enough about the work to do it yourself. To understand it fully, to the point where you don't need or even want to hand the work off to an LLM.

Interacting with AI content makes me feel like I'm consuming something that was created purely for engagement farming. Not that human created content wasn't for engagement farming, but noticing an AI tell breaks the suspension of disbelief in a way. It devalues the relationship between creator and consumer, so that genuine care is not being shared. It's like I'm a cow being milked on an industrial engagement farm.

yababa_y 5 minutes ago | parent

Do you often experience persecutory delusions in front of screens?

Immense amount of human care goes into projects that use AI, and usually the human care goes into the aspects that matter most. AI helps pull projects like this from years into the future, into the present. Time travel leaves some scorch marks, sure. More effort will get attracted into the effort, or the idea will finish its expression and the host organism will move onwards.

esseph 1 minute ago | parent

[delayed]

lionkor 25 minutes ago | parent

OBVIOUS presence of LLM-use devalues something to the point that you have to wonder why a human is in the loop at all

lelandfe 21 minutes ago | parent

Is the author qualified to verify this book?

wise_young_man 11 minutes ago | parent

In ways it does though. There are telltale signs of AI writing that once you see it across sites repeatedly, it starts to be annoying to find.

Couple of immediate examples:

- The Codex has 154 pages. 127 of them have been reviewed, 27 not yet. - Each of the 154 pages gets a page of its own.

If an author doesn’t have time to write. Why should I give up my time to read?

tropicalhunter 8 minutes ago | parent

Can you point to any of those in the linked text?

amelung 17 minutes ago | parent

OTOH, it also seems to draw much from https://kdih.badw.de/datenbank/handschrift/49a/4/1 according to the information on "Sources", which sounds genuine.

rileymat2 6 minutes ago | parent

Isn’t the necessary to check it true of human generated content as well?

Gabriel54 22 minutes ago | parent

I am very happy to see people make use of AI to do previously impractical work, but the quality of writing on this page sounds like a poorly written middle school research paper.

> Not a diary, not a family chronicle - a tool book.

> As reliable as it says on each page - no more and no less.

> Pages without a special note have been editorially reviewed: carefully checked and corrected.

This sounds like an extremely interesting topic but the lack of care in the presentation is disappointing.

shevy-java 13 minutes ago | parent

> the quality of writing on this page sounds like a poorly written middle school research paper.

But that is typical AI quality. It is a fancified Babelfish 2.0 translator.

Some humans also use AI to "interact" with other humans. They don't seem to understand that this is a problem for some humans. When a human AI slops me, I stop all any every further interaction (assuming I can find out that this human did so. It is not always possible to find that out).

Gabriel54 1 minute ago | parent

I don't like to frame it in terms of, "this person is using AI, so I am no longer interested in communicating", because it is not really the AI that is the problem. It is the lack of effort put into communication with another human. AI can be extremely helpful for some people (e.g., proofreading text if one's native language isn't English). But this use case is almost never a problem if done carefully because the original ideas were all there in the beginning.

I focus my frustration on writing that is circular, vague, unnecessarily explanatory, etc. In my experience this is a symptom of the fact that there were no original ideas to begin with.

amelung 7 minutes ago | parent

Maybe this is because of the translation, I guess the author has written the non-English version first and then got it translated into English with AI, adding some additional explanations if necessary.

shevy-java 14 minutes ago | parent

The knights did not have to deal with AI back then. It must have been a simpler life.

giantfrog 13 minutes ago | parent

Imagine going to a history museum and there’s a sign outside that says “Some of the information here is totally made up”

jimmySixDOF 7 minutes ago | parent

for back in the day this knight had pretty decent 3D perspective rendering skills I mean you can knock the chair but there are a lot worse illustrations and devotional art from the time.

markkat 3 minutes ago | parent

These illustrations look AI generated to me.