Top all-time · #13528
Mark Humphries
Personal blog · generativehistory.substack.comaihistorywriting
Mark Humphries writes Generative History, a personal blog at generativehistory.substack.com about ai, history and writing. Since 2025, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 5 times, most often “A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Mark Humphries's Substack posts on testing new AI models on historical work, including an A/B test that he thought showed Gemini 3 output.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Exploring the use of generative AI in historical teaching and research.
Most-linked posts?
- A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-10-17
- /p/gemini-3-solves-handwriting-recognition2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-03-18
What Hacker News says?
I do very different work, or try to - historical HTR is unfortunately so bad even with the top models that the results aren't useful, but I keep trying new models. But there's a historian on substack (Mark Humphries) who's also trying new models, and he also thinks he's gotten Gemini 3 output in A/B tests. He's very impressed with it: https://generativehistory.substack.com/p/has-google-quietly-... I can attest to wh…
Comment linking /p/has-google-quietly-solved-two-of
on “Gemini 3.0 spotted in the wild through A/B testing”Submitted A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition as a story · 553 points
HN discussionReally? This article was gushing about it: https://generativehistory.substack.com/p/gemini-3-solves-han... Which one's the best?
Comment linking /p/gemini-3-solves-handwriting-recognition
on “Mistral AI Releases Forge”Submitted The traditional research paper is dead as a story · 4 points
HN discussionOne thing I think would be very useful here is national archive data: there will be thousands of letters, memos and official documents shared between people alive back then under the care of a museum or government. One of my dreams is to help digitise and make available the thousands of Second World War-era documents in the National Archives at Kew. We’re at the point where a simple phone camera and a robust LLM-pow…
Comment linking /p/gemini-3-solves-handwriting-recognition
on “Mr. Chatterbox is a Victorian-era ethically trained model”