Top all-time · #6498
Benjamin Breen
Personal blog · resobscura.substack.comhistoryscienceai
Benjamin Breen writes Res Obscura, a personal blog at resobscura.substack.com about history, science and ai. Since 2023, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 74 times, most often “LLM-based educational games will be a big deal”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Benjamin Breen's Substack on medieval and early modern history, including Darwin's children's annotations, Fibonacci, the Voynich manuscript and LLMs in history teaching.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Notes on the history of technology, medicine, science, art, drugs, and empire. Also: AI in research and teaching. Click to read Res Obscura, by Benjamin Breen, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
Most-linked posts?
- LLM-based educational games will be a big deal3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-05-14
- Onfim's world: Child artists in history2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-04-16
- Simulating History with ChatGPT2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-09-12
- AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-05-07
- All Souls exam questions and the limits of machine reasoning2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-08-13
- Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-07-22
- Wilfrid Voynich: Bookseller, Revolutionary, Cryptologist… Suspected Spy?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-07-18
- Thoughts on Historical Language Models and Talkie-19302 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-04-29
What Hacker News says?
Author of the original Appendix article here (the one about Darwin's kids) - I think it got on HN today because I linked to while discussing Onfim here: https://resobscura.substack.com/p/onfims-world-medieval-chil...
Comment linking /p/onfims-world-medieval-child-artists
on “Darwin's children drew all over the “On the Origin of Species” manuscript (2014)”Submitted AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder as a story · 279 points
HN discussionIt was in a thread discussing LLM's, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44893522 ( "All Souls exam questions and the limits of machine reasoning (resobscura.substack.com)" —35 comments) https://resobscura.substack.com/p/all-souls-exam-questions-a...
Comment linking /p/all-souls-exam-questions-and-the
on “UK government states that 'safety' act is about influence over public discourse”Submitted I have been writing a niche history blog for 15 years as a story · 257 points
HN discussion> Presumably people were doing _something_ in 13th century math classes? What were they doing? Glad you asked. This is what one such endearing 13th century kid was doing in class https://resobscura.substack.com/p/onfims-world-medieval-chil...
Comment linking /p/onfims-world-medieval-child-artists
on “Fibonacci's Real Mathematical Legacy”Submitted Using generative AI as part of historical research: three case studies as a story · 252 points
HN discussionThanks for doing this. We should talk! I am a historian and have been exploring using LLMs in teaching ( https://resobscura.substack.com/p/simulating-history-with-ch... ). I love this idea. I’m fairly sure at this point that history education will be one of the fields most positively impacted by LLMs, just because there is so much potential for redeploying primary sources in creative ways like this.
Comment linking /p/simulating-history-with-chatgpt
on “MonadGPT – What would have happened if ChatGPT was invented in the 17th century?”Submitted 2k-year-old wine and the uncanny immediacy of the past as a story · 244 points
HN discussion> So how can I regain my ability to focus? Read. Not the zennial definition of listen to a podcast – actual books. Here's how to reboot your reading. Do this during a break, when you have a couple weeks. Or schedule a couple hours in the evenings. But make the time be a "habit" block that you require yourself to do. (Something else has to give – consider letting your streaming queue get longer for a bit. And replace…
Comment linking /p/quality-non-fiction-books-are-the
on “It's getting harder to focus every day”Submitted Using Opus 5.5 to discover a new eyewitness record of the dodo as a story · 229 points
HN discussionLoses some credibility with this footnote; https://resobscura.substack.com/p/what-is-happening-to-publi... > I suspect the hum obsession has something to do with LLMs “awareness” that their “physical selves” exist in data centers.
Comment linking /p/what-is-happening-to-publishing
on “What Is Happening to Publishing?”Submitted Using LLMs to trace alchemical knowledge and decode 17th century letters as a story · 174 points
HN discussionForgetting context is a problem, for sure. One thing I've found that works fairly well is to include a request for a "status bar" in your prompt. I.e. you ask it to remind itself with each response 1) who it is pretending to be 2) what the date is 3) what the setting is 4) what is in their NPCs "inventory" (which it intuitively understands because LLMs seem to have a natural affinity with MUDs). You can even have it…
Comment linking /p/simulating-history-with-chatgpt
on “Role-playing with AI will be a powerful tool for writers and educators”Submitted When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI as a story · 167 points
HN discussionI feel like we’re waiting for Benjamin Breen to write his promised Ethel Voynich follow-up: https://resobscura.substack.com/p/wilfrid-voynich-bookseller...
Comment linking /p/wilfrid-voynich-bookseller-revolutionary
on “Voynich Manuscript”Submitted On 17th century "cocaine" as a story · 161 points
HN discussion> how this link ended up in HN the submitter writes https://resobscura.substack.com/ which is also occasionally featured on hn and is generally well received.
Comment linking /
on “The most unusual magazine ever published: Man, Myth and Magic”Submitted OpenAI's "Study Mode" and the risks of flattery as a story · 137 points
HN discussionSubmitted Margaret Mead, John von Neumann, and the Prehistory of AI as a story · 134 points
HN discussionSubmitted A deep history of Halloween as a story · 132 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why did clothing become boring? as a story · 104 points
HN discussionSubmitted All Souls exam questions and the limits of machine reasoning as a story · 84 points
HN discussionSubmitted Centuries of Childhood as a story · 84 points
HN discussionSubmitted The (history of) spice must flow as a story · 71 points
HN discussionSubmitted Post-postal: What did we lose when we stopped writing letters? as a story · 68 points
HN discussionSubmitted Drug history is a backdoor to cultural history as a story · 53 points
HN discussionSubmitted When the Sackler brothers studied LSD as a story · 45 points
HN discussionSubmitted Onfim's world: Child artists in history as a story · 37 points
HN discussionSubmitted The familiar loneliness of the Kinetoscope as a story · 17 points
HN discussionSubmitted Onfim's World: Child artists in history as a story · 13 points
HN discussion
