Notes on the history of technology, medicine, science, art, drugs, and empire. Also: AI in research and teaching.
| Platform |  | Pricing | Only free issues | Publishes | Weekly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Issues | 60 | Founded | 3 years ago | Last Issue | 11 days ago |
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Using Opus 5.5 to discover a new eyewitness record of the dodo
Another day, another historical cipher broken by a frontier model. Yesterday, the security researcher Carter Church announced that he had used GPT-6 Astra (working on the problem for six hours) to break a Napoleonic-era cipher that had prev...
AI labs need to start funding historical research
I’ve written previously about the pitfalls and use cases for AI in augmenting historical research, but things have changed significantly since 2024-25. Occasioned by the dueling releases of GPT-6 Sol and Opus 5.5 this week, I thought I’d sh...
The "mechanical miracle" that ruined Mark Twain's life
“All the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle.”
Such was Mark Twain’s verdict on the Paige Compositor, a typesetting device which was among the mos...
Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
My first year of college, I had a work-study job which ended up being one of the most sneakily important intellectual experiences of my life. I was a lowly library shelver, assigned to the shelves labelled A through F section in the Library...
What is happening to publishing?
The big news in the world of writing today is the controversy over the award of a Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize to a story called “The Serpent in the Grove.” The piece was almost certainly co-authored by AI.
As of this morning...
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Authors
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Historian of science, medicine, technology, drugs, and culture at UCSC.
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