[wruza]

Are you sure it’s a life changing productivity booster? Sometimes I look at my projects and wonder how would I explain it to an LLM what this code should have done if it didn’t exist yet. Must be a shitton of boilerplate programming for copilot to be a life-changing experience.

[AYBABTME]

You haven't used them enough. Everytime an LLM reduces my search from 1min to 5s, the LLM pays.

Just summary features: save me 20min of reading a transcript, turn it into 20s. That's a huge enabler.

[wruza]

Overviews aren’t code though. In code, for me, they don’t pass 80/20 tests well enough, sometimes even on simple cases. (You get 50-80% of an existing function/block with some important context prepended and a comment, let it write the rest and check if it succeeds). It doesn’t mean that LLMs are useless. Or that I am antillamist or a denier - I’m actually an enthusiast. But this specific claim I hear often and don’t find true. Maybe true for repetitive code in boring environments where typing and remembering formats/params over and over is the main issue. Not in actual code.

If I paste the actual non-trivial code, it starts deviating fast. And it isn’t too complex, it’s just less like “parallel sort two arrays” and more like “wait for an image on a screenshot by execing scrot (with no sound) repeatedly and passing the result to this detect-cv2.py script and use all matching options described in this ts type, get stdout json as in this ts type, and if there’s a match, wait for the specified anim timeout and test again to get the settled match coords after an animation finishes; throw after a total timeout”. Not a rocket science, pretty dumb shit, but right there they fall flat and start imagining things, heavily.

I guess it shines if you ask it to make an html form, but I couldn’t call that life-changing unless I had to make these damn forms all day.

[mecsred]

If 20 mins of informations can legitimately be condensed into 20 seconds, it sounds like the original wasn't worth reading in the first place. Could have skipped the llm entirely.

[bostik]

I upvoted you, because I think you have a valid point. The tone is unnecessarily aggressive though.

Effective and information-dense communication is really hard. That doesn't mean we should just accept the useless fluff surrounding the actual information and/or analysis. People could learn a lot from the Ignoble Prize ceremony's 24/7 presentation model.

Sadly, it seems we are heading towards a future where you may need an LLM to distill the relevant information out of a sea of noise.

[mecsred]

Didn't intend for it to be aggressive, just concise. Spare me from the llm please :)

[crazygringo]

> it sounds like the original wasn't worth reading in the first place

But if that's the only place that contained the information you needed, then you have no choice.

There's a lot of material out there that is badly written, badly organized, badly presented. LLM's can be a godsend for extracting the information you actually need without wasting 20 minutes wading through the muck.

[mecsred]

Yeah I can see that use case, I just wouldn't trust an LLM to decide "is this worth reading". May as well flip a coin.

[AYBABTME]

Think of the summary of a zoom call. Or of a chapter that you're not sure if you care to read or not.

Not all content is worth consuming, and not all content is dense.

[postalrat]

If I had a recording of the zoom call I could generate a summary on demand with better tools than were available at the time the zoom call was made.

[andrei_says_]

My experience with overviews is that they are often subtly or not so subtly inaccurate. LLMs not understanding meaning or intent carries risk of misrepresentation.