Hacker News: benbreenhttps://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=benbreenHacker News RSShttps://hnrss.org/hnrss v2.1.1Wed, 08 Apr 2026 05:47:47 +0000<![CDATA[Elizabeth I's Manuscript of Pierre Boaistuau's Histoires Prodigieuses (1559)]]>Article URL: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/histoires-prodigieuses/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47610593

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

]]>Thu, 02 Apr 2026 06:16:03 +0000https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/histoires-prodigieuses/benbreenhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47610593https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47610593<![CDATA[Photos from my time in Iran, 2017]]>Article URL: https://resobscura.substack.com/p/photos-from-my-time-in-iran-2017

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47587523

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

]]>Tue, 31 Mar 2026 13:59:26 +0000https://resobscura.substack.com/p/photos-from-my-time-in-iran-2017benbreenhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47587523https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47587523<![CDATA[Obsolete Sounds]]>Article URL: https://citiesandmemory.com/obsolete-sounds/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47526478

Points: 248

# Comments: 50

]]>Thu, 26 Mar 2026 03:54:27 +0000https://citiesandmemory.com/obsolete-sounds/benbreenhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47526478https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47526478<![CDATA[The Last Contract: William T. Vollmann's Battle to Publish an Epic (2025)]]>Article URL: https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/the-last-contract

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47526473

Points: 36

# Comments: 9

]]>Thu, 26 Mar 2026 03:54:13 +0000https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/the-last-contractbenbreenhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47526473https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47526473<![CDATA[When do we become adults, really?]]>Article URL: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/when-do-we-become-adults-really

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47526471

Points: 100

# Comments: 141

]]>Thu, 26 Mar 2026 03:54:04 +0000https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/when-do-we-become-adults-reallybenbreenhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47526471https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47526471<![CDATA[Desperately Seeking Space Friends]]>Article URL: https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2026/04/desperately-seeking-space-friends-review-the-pale-blue-data-point/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47526468

Points: 40

# Comments: 3

]]>Thu, 26 Mar 2026 03:53:47 +0000https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2026/04/desperately-seeking-space-friends-review-the-pale-blue-data-point/benbreenhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47526468https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47526468<![CDATA[When Do We Become Adults, Really?]]>Article URL: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/when-do-we-become-adults-really

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47461732

Points: 5

# Comments: 4

]]>Fri, 20 Mar 2026 22:43:06 +0000https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/when-do-we-become-adults-reallybenbreenhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47461732https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47461732<![CDATA[Measure of Justice: Covering the Cerîde-I Adliye Covers (2017)]]>Article URL: https://www.denizcemonduygu.com/2017/05/measure-of-justice/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47344696

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

]]>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:39:40 +0000https://www.denizcemonduygu.com/2017/05/measure-of-justice/benbreenhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47344696https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47344696<![CDATA[Cameras built to police Iranians became the regime's Achilles' heel]]>Article URL: https://royapakzad.substack.com/p/youre-welcome-mr-supreme-leader

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47263970

Points: 102

# Comments: 23

]]>Thu, 05 Mar 2026 16:49:05 +0000https://royapakzad.substack.com/p/youre-welcome-mr-supreme-leaderbenbreenhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47263970https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47263970<![CDATA[How important was the Battle of Hastings?]]>Article URL: https://www.historytoday.com/archive/head-head/how-important-was-battle-hastings

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47244274

Points: 85

# Comments: 62

]]>Wed, 04 Mar 2026 07:23:49 +0000https://www.historytoday.com/archive/head-head/how-important-was-battle-hastingsbenbreenhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47244274https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47244274<![CDATA[The remaking of Thomas Mann]]>Article URL: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/thomas-mann-magic-mountain-jensen

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47224949

Points: 18

# Comments: 2

]]>Mon, 02 Mar 2026 22:15:39 +0000https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/thomas-mann-magic-mountain-jensenbenbreenhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47224949https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47224949<![CDATA[The history of knocking on wood]]>Article URL: https://resobscura.substack.com/p/neolithic-habits-machine-age-tools

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47138213

Points: 54

# Comments: 10

]]>Tue, 24 Feb 2026 15:16:08 +0000https://resobscura.substack.com/p/neolithic-habits-machine-age-toolsbenbreenhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47138213https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47138213<![CDATA[New comment by benbreen in "Gemini 3.1 Pro"]]>One underrated thing about the recent frontier models, IMO, is that they are obviating the need for image gen as a standalone thing. Opus 4.6 (and apparently 3.1 Pro as well) doesn't have the ability to generate images but it is so good at making SVG that it basically doesn't matter at this point. And the benefit of SVG is that it can be animated and interactive.

I find this fascinating because it literally just happened in the past few months. Up until ~summer of 2025, the SVG these models made was consistently buggy and crude. By December of 2026, I was able to get results like this from Opus 4.5 (Henry James: the RPG, made almost entirely with SVG): https://the-ambassadors.vercel.app

And now it looks like Gemini 3.1 Pro has vaulted past it.

]]>Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:36:18 +0000https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47076513benbreenhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47076513https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47076513<![CDATA[New comment by benbreen in "What is happening to writing? Cognitive debt, Claude Code, the space around AI"]]>Thank you, this sort of insight is exactly why I've felt such kinship with what software engineers like Karpathy and Simon Willison have been writing lately. It seems obvious to me that there is something special and irreplaceable about the thought processes that create good code.

However, I think there is also something qualitatively different about how work is done in these two domains.

Example: refactoring a codebase is not really analogous to revising a nonfiction book, even though they both involve rewriting of a sort. Even before AI, the former used far more tooling and automated processes. There is, e.g., no ESLint for prose which can tell you which sentences are going to fail to "compile" (i.e., fail to make sense to a reader).

The special taste or skillset of a programmer seems to me to involve systems thinking and tool use in a different way than the special taste of a writer, which is more about transmuting personal life experiences and tacit knowledge into words, even if tools (word processor) and systems (editors, informants, primary sources) are used along the way.

Sort of half formed ideas here but I find this a really rich vein of thought to work through. And one of the points of my post is that writing is about thinking in public and with a readership. Many thanks for helping me do that.

I don't have a good answer to your question, but I do think it might be comparable, yes. If you had good taste about what to get Opus 4.6 to write, and kept iterating on it in a way that exposes the results to public view, I think you'd definitely develop a more fine grained sense of the epistemological perspective of a writer. But you wouldn't be one any more than I'm a software developer just because I've had Claude Code make a lot of GitHub commits lately (if anyone's interested: https://github.com/benjaminbreen).

]]>Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:21:20 +0000https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067224benbreenhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067224https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067224<![CDATA[What is happening to writing? Cognitive debt, Claude Code, the space around AI]]>Article URL: https://resobscura.substack.com/p/what-is-happening-to-writing

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061642

Points: 135

# Comments: 129

]]>Wed, 18 Feb 2026 14:59:16 +0000https://resobscura.substack.com/p/what-is-happening-to-writingbenbreenhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061642https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061642<![CDATA[Don't Trust the Salt: AI Summarization, Multilingual Safety, and LLM Guardrails]]>Article URL: https://royapakzad.substack.com/p/multilingual-llm-evaluation-to-guardrails

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47038032

Points: 225

# Comments: 88

]]>Mon, 16 Feb 2026 17:57:46 +0000https://royapakzad.substack.com/p/multilingual-llm-evaluation-to-guardrailsbenbreenhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47038032https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47038032<![CDATA[The Professor of the Lower Senses]]>Article URL: https://www.vittlesmagazine.com/p/the-professor-of-the-lower-senses

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47007406

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

]]>Fri, 13 Feb 2026 20:27:37 +0000https://www.vittlesmagazine.com/p/the-professor-of-the-lower-sensesbenbreenhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47007406https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47007406<![CDATA[Evaluating Multilingual, Context-Aware Guardrails: A Humanitarian LLM Use Case]]>Article URL: https://blog.mozilla.ai/evaluating-multilingual-context-aware-guardrails-evidence-from-a-humanitarian-llm-use-case/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46996258

Points: 33

# Comments: 2

]]>Thu, 12 Feb 2026 22:34:58 +0000https://blog.mozilla.ai/evaluating-multilingual-context-aware-guardrails-evidence-from-a-humanitarian-llm-use-case/benbreenhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46996258https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46996258<![CDATA[Evaluating Multilingual, Context-Aware Guardrails]]>Article URL: https://blog.mozilla.ai/evaluating-multilingual-context-aware-guardrails-evidence-from-a-humanitarian-llm-use-case/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878096

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

]]>Tue, 03 Feb 2026 22:14:59 +0000https://blog.mozilla.ai/evaluating-multilingual-context-aware-guardrails-evidence-from-a-humanitarian-llm-use-case/benbreenhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878096https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878096<![CDATA[Ashcan Comic]]>Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcan_comic

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46821488

Points: 55

# Comments: 20

]]>Fri, 30 Jan 2026 07:26:20 +0000https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcan_comicbenbreenhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46821488https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46821488