Yet another Hacker News

Tool book of a Nuremberg knight from 1505

111 points edwardog 3 hours ago 53 comments

kreyenborgi 2 hours ago | parent

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

WillAdams 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 1 hour 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.

QuantumNomad_ 52 minutes ago | parent

There’s nothing delusional about what he said.

AI is being used for the most part to shit out as much “content” as possible in order to show ads, sell courses and other products (bonus points if what is sold is itself also pure AI slop), or to finish tasks at work with as little effort as can be done, so that boss man is impressed by the velocity. “Who cares about quality? This is 2026, bro.”

The actual thoughtful use of AI is the minority case. Not the default. We humans are lazy, and when we can get away with less effort we put as little effort as we can into things.

boredatoms 21 minutes ago | parent

Any amount of slop makes the whole thing feel fake

esseph 56 minutes ago | parent

> It's like I'm a cow being milked on an industrial engagement farm.

Always were, just now this signal makes people aware of it and they don't like how it makes them feel.

doug_durham 20 minutes ago | parent

Wow. This is the exact opposite of what that the site is. It is very clear that the author of the web site cares deeply about the material and has put a lot of effort into the work. You are letting your personal biases color your view. That is your right, but check to see if it is making you happy.

jacquesm 14 minutes ago | parent

Note that (1) this is just your opinion and (2) that he has put a lot less effort into it than others have put into similar endeavors which as a result have a different level of authenticity.

> You are letting your personal biases color your view. That is your right, but check to see if it is making you happy.

Why the free psycho analysis? GP just made a statement.

boyohboy2026 3 minutes ago | parent

>(2) that he has put a lot less effort into it than others have put into similar endeavors which as a result have a different level of authenticity.

What an idiotic baseline. How could you even know this, for one? And the measurement is "effort"?

"Your work is not valuable because others have put more in more effort."

This place is getting so bad.

scrollop 11 minutes ago | parent

1 point by scrollop 0 minutes ago | parent | next | edit | delete [–]

"The problem with AI generated content is, it tells me you didn't care enough about the work to do it yourself."

It may be the translation, however, this project is a passion for him. I would guess the passion is the book itself, and though he wants to share his passion, I imagine creating the actual page for others is tedious compared to the work of discovering the book. I have had the same issue.

If an AI can save you time so you can continue with your passion, I say go for it. No one has paid you to create the page, he's not vying for an award. If people are interested they can read it.

There are likely many people out there doing remarkable work but they can't be bothered creating a website to share with others.

If AI can do that, fantastic - even though some people will moan. There are always people who complain.

boyohboy2026 5 minutes ago | parent

>it tells me you didn't care enough about the work to do it yourself.

Oh, wow, what an original top comment on HackerNews.

Thankfully the people with this mentality will eventually be ignored. We are using AI, get over it. Slop is slop; yours isn't better because you wrote it yourself.

Judge the work on its merit.

>Interacting with AI content makes me feel like I'm consuming something that was created purely for engagement farming

Cool, good luck with that.

lionkor 1 hour 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 1 hour ago | parent

Is the author qualified to verify this book?

wise_young_man 1 hour 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 1 hour ago | parent

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

iamacyborg 52 minutes ago | parent

From the first tool page. Clearly LLM slop.

> Löffelholz does not open his book with a showpiece. He opens it with a practical tool you can adjust: choose a size, clamp it, work.

boredatoms 19 minutes ago | parent

Our job isnt to review the work of LLMs for free

jacquesm 13 minutes ago | parent

It's all over.

scrollop 15 minutes ago | parent

Maybe he is translating to English. Maybe he is translating himself and this is an artifact of German.

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

Perhaps he is taking the time to translate it for you, otherwise you'd have to do it yourself.

Gabriel54 55 minutes ago | parent

Using AI to go through an old manuscript has nothing to do with writing up those same results with AI. These are completely separate concerns.

amelung 1 hour 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.

Isamu 43 minutes ago | parent

I feel that obvious LLM content like this adds value, and I wasn’t entirely put off by this. I see the text as plausible, I just would need to research anything here before repeating it or referring to it in some way.

Gabriel54 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 56 minutes 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 1 hour 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.

Gabriel54 51 minutes ago | parent

That thought certainly crossed my mind, but having worked with people using LLMs for this purpose successfully, this instead comes across as taking a simple idea and asking {model} to expand this two or three sentence idea into a web page.

cwillu 43 minutes ago | parent

“carefully checked and corrected” is also the sort of thing that llm's like to insert when you tell them to carefully check and correct in the prompt, and isn't otherwise really a natural thing to write.

scrollop 13 minutes ago | parent

If an AI can save you time so you can continue with your passion, I say go for it. No one has paid you to create the page, he's not vying for an award. If people are interested they can read it.

shevy-java 1 hour ago | parent

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

jacquesm 12 minutes ago | parent

Definitely, but also shorter and a lot more violent. And then there were the diseases...

giantfrog 1 hour 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”

pronghorn 45 minutes ago | parent

You'd have to first get past the crowds of people outside talking about how bad the picture frames are.

jimmySixDOF 1 hour 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.

suboto 55 minutes ago | parent

TAG: VIBECODED

ithkai92 46 minutes ago | parent

The author is transparent about the use of AI, but so many negative connotations in the site!!

      >I still have not found a place where truly every page of the Codex is described      and interpreted in detail. I want to change that. But as a single person, I can only take on a project this big with AI as a tool.

lelandfe 40 minutes ago | parent

Or enlist others or do a little bit at a time or…

jacquesm 7 minutes ago | parent

> But as a single person, I can only take on a project this big with AI as a tool.

That's so not true though. One of my uncles did work like this and it usually took a year or two to fully research a project and write a book but it is definitely doable to do this sort of thing - and much better, frankly - as a single individual. AI makes it a matter of days, but it also makes it next to worthless.

The biggest contribution here is to an otherwise lesser known book.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%B6ffelholz-Codex

(Couldn't find an English wikipedia page on it)

dustfinger 39 minutes ago | parent

Can anyone tell me how they would have made the paper and the pigments used in the drawings (or would these be called paintings)? Is this water colour? Is it reasonable for me to make my own paper and paints following the same receipts that would have been used to make this book and its contents?

YrRight2PushBac 34 minutes ago | parent

As interesting as this appears, I've developed such a strong allergy to LLM writing that I simply cannot consume any of this content

fakefish 18 minutes ago | parent

Glad I'm not the only one...

kornork 25 minutes ago | parent

Lots of comments about the general use of AI here, but in particular I think the AI renderings are counterproductive and especially misleading in this application.

The original drawings have ambiguities in them; they are well done but perspective and scale are off, and there are lots of questions about particular details of the drawings. The AI drawings simply take these particular questionable details and render them as "real."

There should be real life artifacts for many of these tools. LLMs can just as easily go search the web for images of those as create completely unreliable, fictional renderings of the same.

mcbishop 15 minutes ago | parent

FYI: The one tool page I checked out included a real life artifact.

intended 16 minutes ago | parent

I wouldn’t know if the whole thing was AI or not at a glance.

jacquesm 16 minutes ago | parent

The LLM aftertaste is terrible but the idea is very nice.

If it's worth doing, why not do it well? This is a tiny book by book standards and writing this text would be a matter of a few weeks at most. And that way it would be much more valuable (and less off-putting)

scrollop 9 minutes ago | parent

Perhaps he is busy, and this is a passion project.

As he says, he doesn't have much time to research the entire book.

You think he has "weeks" to write it up for others?

I imagine there are thousands of interesting projects people are doing solo and can't be bothered creating website to share with others for.

If AI can do this- fantastic! Let people moan if they can't see the positives of this. He's not trying to win an award or is paid to create a site for the public.

jacquesm 7 minutes ago | parent

It's not a passion project if you make it with AI.