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Tool book of a Nuremberg knight from 1505

What HN thinks

A 1505 knight's lovingly drawn tool book, and 2026 can only talk about the prose smell.

AI writing ruins trust
Many found the LLM-written text and AI renderings off-putting and unreliable, saying every line now needs checking and the AI images present ambiguous drawings as fact.
Something beats nothing
Defenders argued it is an unpaid passion project, the author is transparent about AI use, and without AI this obscure codex might never have been presented at all.
Fascinating source material
Others engaged with the book itself, from crude signalling codes to period pigments, paper and recreating the tools on a CNC machine.

Consensus: Most agree the manuscript is interesting and worth exposure, but the AI-generated text and images undercut its credibility.

Recommended in the comments

De Kat ↗ (other): Suggested as a way to see how historical pigments were ground and understand their cost.
LLM UI Smells ↗ (other): One commenter feeds it to their agent to strip out slop markers, saying it works unreasonably well.

Summarised by Claude from the comment thread 19 hours ago.

Points: 148
Comments: 80
Best rank: #1
Posted: 2026-10-25 by edwardog
Category: Science

loeffelholz-codex history-of-technology manuscripts medieval-engineering nuremberg digital-humanities transcription

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Screenshot of britannica11.org: Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica (britannica11.org)

325 points by ahaspel 6 months ago | 107 comments

Britannica11.org is a structured online edition of the 1910–1911 Eleventh Edition Encyclopædia Britannica, browsable by articles, contributors, and topics.

encyclopaedia-britannica 1911-encyclopedia digital-humanities public-domain