Developer rebuilds 1920s Popular Mechanics page-by-page with an agent pipeline, ~30 human decisions
generativist · x · 2026-11-15
Developer generativist restored the January 1920 issue of Popular Mechanics (160 pages) from microfilm scans and published it as Poptimist, with each restored page shown side-by-side against the original scan.
- This is not upscaling or denoising: every page was rebuilt from scratch, then re-rendered as PDF with text overlays, since classic methods fail on 1920s microfilm paper.
- The pipeline is described as "a swamp of agents" writing scripted and generative fixes, aiming to eventually auto-restore entire out-of-copyright libraries.
- The whole run took roughly 30 personal decisions plus 100 human-in-the-loop edit approvals.
- Ink blobs and scan artifacts are removed by comparing renders to originals; some artifacts still have high false positives. The repo will be open-sourced once complete.
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