benbreen (u/benbreen)

benbreen commented on Show HN: Gemini 3 imagines Hacker News as a HyperCard stack in 1994 hyper-card-hacker-news.ve... · Posted by u/benbreen

TMWNN · 4 days ago

Magnificent! The number of in-jokes and sage references is astounding.

I understand Gemini created the code itself, but did it also write the text?

benbreen · 4 days ago

Mostly, I gave it some feedback and steered it a little but it's 99% percent Gemini 3. It would be interesting to make something like this "live" in that it could simulate each day of 1995 (say) anew, updating each morning.

benbreen commented on Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now dosaygo-studio.github.io/... · Posted by u/keepamovin

thomasm6m6 · 4 days ago

Here it is: https://sw.vtom.net/hn35/news.html

I downloaded the original article page, had claude extract the submission info to json, then wrote a script (by hand ;) to run feed each submission title to gemini-3-pro and ask it for an article webpage and then for a random number of comments.

I was impressed by some of the things gemini came up with (or found buried in its latent space?). Highlights:

"You’re probably reading this via your NeuralLink summary anyway, so I’ll try to keep the entropy high enough to bypass the summarizer filters."

"This submission has been flagged by the Auto-Reviewer v7.0 due to high similarity with "Running DOOM on a Mitochondria" (2034)."

"Zig v1.0 still hasn't released (ETA 2036)"

The unprompted one-shot leetcode, youtube, and github clones

Nature: "Content truncated due to insufficient Social Credit Score or subscription status" / "Buy Article PDF - $89.00 USD" / "Log in with WorldCoin ID"

"Gemini Cloud Services (formerly Bard Enterprise, formerly Duet AI, formerly Google Brain Cloud, formerly Project Magfi)"

Github Copilot attempts social engineering to pwn the `sudo` repo

It made a Win10 "emulator" that goes only as far as displaying a "Windows Defender is out of date" alert message

"dang_autonomous_agent: We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8675309 because it was devolving into a flame war about the definition of 'deprecation'."

benbreen · 4 days ago

Love the faux Nature article: https://sw.vtom.net/hn35/pages/90098000.html

Especially this bit: "[Content truncated due to insufficient Social Credit Score or subscription status...]"

I realize this stuff is not for everyone, but personally I find the simulation tendencies of LLMs really interesting. It is just about the only truly novel thing about them. My mental model for LLMs is increasingly "improv comedy." They are good at riffing on things and making odd connections. Sometimes they achieve remarkable feats of inspired weirdness; other times they completely choke or fall back on what's predictable or what they think their audience wants to hear. And they are best if not taken entirely seriously.

benbreen commented on Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now dosaygo-studio.github.io/... · Posted by u/keepamovin

benbreen · 4 days ago

Was going to say - it would be fascinating to go a step further and have Gemini simulate the actual articles. That would elevate this to level of something like an art piece. Really enjoyed this, thank you for posting it.

I'm going to go ask Claude Code to create a functional HyperCard stack version of HN from 1994 now...

Edit: just got a working version of HyperCardHackerNews, will deploy to Vercel and post shortly...

benbreen · 4 days ago

Here is the working version: https://hyper-card-hacker-news.vercel.app

Enjoy!

I also asked Opus 4.5 to make a "1994 style readme page" for the GitHub: https://github.com/benjaminbreen/HyperCardHackerNews

benbreen commented on Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now dosaygo-studio.github.io/... · Posted by u/keepamovin

pseudosavant · 4 days ago

This is one of the greatest LLM creations I've ever seen. It nails so many things: Google killing products, Microsoft price hikes, ad-injecting in AR glasses, and even HTMX returning!

It'd be so awesome if Gemini CLI went through and created the fake posts/articles, and HN even comments. Perhaps a bit much to ask of it?

benbreen · 4 days ago

Was going to say - it would be fascinating to go a step further and have Gemini simulate the actual articles. That would elevate this to level of something like an art piece. Really enjoyed this, thank you for posting it.

I'm going to go ask Claude Code to create a functional HyperCard stack version of HN from 1994 now...

Edit: just got a working version of HyperCardHackerNews, will deploy to Vercel and post shortly...

benbreen commented on Kids who ran away to 1960s San Francisco fieldnotes.nautilus.quest... · Posted by u/zackoverflow

benbreen · 7 days ago

I read Ulysses Grant's memoirs awhile back, and loved his description of being in San Francisco in the 1850s. (Another tidbit I loved is that he imagined an alternate path for his life where he would have settled down in the Bay Area and become a math teacher):

"The immigrant, on arriving, found himself a stranger, in a strange land, far from friends. Time pressed, for the little means that could be realized from the sale of what was left of the outfit would not support a man long at California prices. Many became discouraged. Others would take off their coats and look for a job, no matter what it might be. These succeeded as a rule. There were many young men who had studied professions before they went to California, and who had never done a day's manual labor in their lives, who took in the situation at once and went to work to make a start at anything they could get to do. Some supplied carpenters and masons with material—carrying plank, brick, or mortar, as the case might be; others drove stages, drays, or baggage wagons, until they could do better. More became discouraged early and spent their time looking up people who would 'treat,' or lounging about restaurants and gambling houses where free lunches were furnished daily."

benbreen commented on I have been writing a niche history blog for 15 years resobscura.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/benbreen

libraryofbabel · 8 days ago

Question: How would you characterize the response to LLMs across the historical profession as a whole? Do you expect LLMs to lead to major changes in how historians approach research in the next ~5 years, or do you think they will be used by just a minority of people?

benbreen · 8 days ago

I think the median response is something between revulsion and mild dislike if it's spoken about in the context of the classroom. But there are also a pretty significant group of people who find it interesting as a potential research tool. (Also the question of what "it" is matters a lot here - if you asked people in history about ChatGPT, the response would be massively different than if you asked about machine learning tools for OCR and data mining historical documents, which there is a lot of support for).

Personally I think it absolutely will lead to major changes in historical research. The transcription and translation abilities of transformer models alone are already leading to significant changes and advances. For instance, I'm working on a post about new transformer based OCR tools like Leo that are geared specifically for historical research and led by historians (https://www.tryleo.ai - I'm not involved in the project, just an interested observer).

IMO AI tools will definitely still be used by a minority of historians in a 5-10 year horizon. Historical research is not like some STEM fields where there is a lab-base culture oriented around adopting new tech and finding applications quickly. It's a lot more of a solo, idiosyncratic process of personal research and that is partly why I like it, but it also means that uptake of new tools is much slower. That said, historians do use technology and digital tools all the time and are not inherently adverse to it. It's interesting reading history books from the 1970s, like the works of Lawrence Stone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Stone) and seeing the footnotes about how the data was encoded in punchcards and analyzed by mainframes. I expect we will be seeing history books by the end of the 2020s that use custom data analytics and tagging tools developed by the historians themselves using vibe coding.

Thanks for the question, will be writing more about this. Feel free to get in touch any time.

benbreen commented on I have been writing a niche history blog for 15 years resobscura.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/benbreen

libraryofbabel · 9 days ago

Ex-historian here, now an engineer. Ben is one of the few historians really thinking in depth about the implications of LLMs for historical research and teaching: both the good (wow, they are really great at transcribing difficult handwritten documents now; you can use Claude Code to vibe code up quick visualizations for your research or teaching that would have taken weeks of work before), and the bad (students submitting AI-generated essays). Highly recommended reading.

It's also nice to see a working historian who posts to HN. (If there are any others, please raise your hand!) Our community is richer for the wide variety of non-engineering professions represented here, from medical doctors to truckers to woodworkers to pilots to farmers. Please keep posting, all of you.

benbreen · 8 days ago

Thank you! So glad people here are reading (I'm the author of the post). I'm doing student meetings and grading all day but happy to answer questions or discuss anything historical with the HN community in between!