Hacker News: benbreen

The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

benbreen — Thu, 21 May 2026 20:51:36 +0000

Article URL: https://www.diffuseai.pub/p/the-structural-barriers-to-ai-lawyers

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48228728

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by benbreen in "What Is Happening to Publishing?"

benbreen — Thu, 21 May 2026 19:51:45 +0000

Author here - just wanted to clarify in case there is any confusion that those two (intentionally bad/weird) figures of speech about the echo and the trouts in the redwood roots were human written, by me! I wrote them as parody of an AI trying to do "literary" writing. The actual (probable) AI written excerpts are below that part.

I was thinking about the immortal Twin Peaks line "there's a FISH... in the PERCOLATOR" when I wrote the trout one.

What Is Happening to Publishing?

benbreen — Tue, 19 May 2026 20:23:44 +0000

Article URL: https://resobscura.substack.com/p/what-is-happening-to-publishing

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48199011

Points: 83

# Comments: 59

Russian–American Telegraph

benbreen — Mon, 18 May 2026 22:27:15 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian–American_Telegraph

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48186656

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Twilight of the Velocipede: Typesetting Races Before the Age of Linotype

benbreen — Sat, 16 May 2026 21:25:07 +0000

Article URL: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/twilight-of-the-velocipede/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163956

Points: 49

# Comments: 6

Why they stopped building wooden stupas: on survivorship bias in history

benbreen — Thu, 14 May 2026 13:40:29 +0000

Article URL: https://resobscura.substack.com/p/survivorship-bias-in-history

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48135240

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

Archivists Turn to LLMs to Decipher Handwriting at Scale

benbreen — Wed, 13 May 2026 16:27:47 +0000

Article URL: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-handwriting-transcription-transkribus-lecun

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48124083

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Notes on Tanya M. Luhrmann's Book 'How God Becomes Real'

benbreen — Fri, 08 May 2026 20:32:36 +0000

Article URL: https://michaelnotebook.com/luhrmann/index.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48068414

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Cooking the Hashish Cookbook

benbreen — Thu, 07 May 2026 20:03:20 +0000

Article URL: https://cookingthehashishcookbook.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054154

Points: 9

# Comments: 3

Sovereign AI: Control, Choice, and Why It Goes Beyond Geopolitics

benbreen — Tue, 05 May 2026 21:43:08 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.mozilla.ai/sovereign-ai-control-choice-and-why-it-goes-beyond-geopolitics/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48029021

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

The Thinking Plant's Man (2025)

benbreen — Mon, 04 May 2026 18:55:05 +0000

Article URL: https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/the-thinking-plants-man/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48013234

Points: 59

# Comments: 19

A statement about why RightsCon 2026 will not take place in Zambia

benbreen — Fri, 01 May 2026 18:38:55 +0000

Article URL: https://www.rightscon.org/rc26-statement/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47978386

Points: 105

# Comments: 48

Thoughts on Historical Language Models and Talkie-1930

benbreen — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 15:56:48 +0000

Article URL: https://resobscura.substack.com/p/are-vintage-llms-the-start-of-a-new

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47964404

Points: 17

# Comments: 3

The Last of the Lost Generation

benbreen — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 02:42:06 +0000

Article URL: https://porticoquarterly.com/book/the-last-of-the-lost-generation/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47898142

Points: 25

# Comments: 6

New comment by benbreen in "A Renaissance gambling dispute spawned probability theory"

benbreen — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 15:45:34 +0000

Just wanted to flag that the works of Ian Hacking, especially The Emergence of Probability (1975) and The Taming of Chance (1990) are excellent on this. Dense and challenging at times but also well written and the product of a very original mind.

The latter book has a Wikipedia page with some more info - was surprised to see Hacking not mentioned here since the featured article is partly based on his work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taming_of_Chance