Tool book of a Nuremberg knight from 1505

Posted by edwardog 2 hours ago

Comments

Comment by BlackRabbit1 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by moffers 54 minutes ago

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.

Comment by gradus_ad 46 minutes ago

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.

Comment by yababa_y 26 minutes ago

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.

Comment by QuantumNomad_ 18 minutes ago

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.

Comment by esseph 22 minutes ago

> 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.

Comment by wise_young_man 32 minutes ago

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?

Comment by tropicalhunter 29 minutes ago

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

Comment by iamacyborg 18 minutes ago

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.

Comment by lionkor 46 minutes ago

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

Comment by Gabriel54 21 minutes ago

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.

Comment by 47 minutes ago

Comment by lelandfe 43 minutes ago

Is the author qualified to verify this book?

Comment by 49 minutes ago

Comment by Isamu 9 minutes ago

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.

Comment by amelung 38 minutes ago

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.

Comment by katzenq 57 minutes ago

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.

Comment by 27 minutes ago

Comment by vehemenz 54 minutes ago

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?

Comment by 1 hour ago

Comment by FoundTheRetard 1 hour ago

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Comment by Gabriel54 43 minutes ago

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.

Comment by cwillu 9 minutes ago

“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.

Comment by amelung 28 minutes ago

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.

Comment by Gabriel54 17 minutes ago

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.

Comment by shevy-java 34 minutes ago

> 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).

Comment by Gabriel54 22 minutes ago

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.

Comment by PgThePedo 31 minutes ago

[flagged]

Comment by peri-cl 1 hour ago

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...

Comment by dustfinger 5 minutes ago

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?

Comment by ithkai92 12 minutes ago

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.

Comment by lelandfe 6 minutes ago

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

Comment by kreyenborgi 1 hour ago

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

Comment by PgThePedo 55 minutes ago

[flagged]

Comment by FoundTheRetard 1 hour ago

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Comment by WillAdams 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by 24 minutes ago

Comment by jimmySixDOF 28 minutes ago

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.

Comment by 1 hour ago

Comment by 24 minutes ago

Comment by suboto 21 minutes ago

TAG: VIBECODED

Comment by shevy-java 36 minutes ago

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

Comment by giantfrog 34 minutes ago

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

Comment by pronghorn 11 minutes ago

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