logoalt Hacker News

zozbot234yesterday at 8:02 PM4 repliesview on HN

I'm not sure if you're familiar with public domain texts from around the 19th or early 20th century, but they were not intended to be skimmed or speed-read the way we'd skim a modern text prior to getting into a more attentive close-reading. Even their short magazine articles were actually the near-equivalent to our scholarly papers, and were often read aloud at length in parlor gatherings. So having a LLM split the text into manageable sections for you and provide a hint of what each lengthy wall-of-text paragraph will be about is actually a huge gain in readability.


Replies

smallerizeyesterday at 8:03 PM

Oh well that was the whole point to me. If I wanted to read something that's not from 1911 I could just do that lol

BigTTYGothGFyesterday at 8:59 PM

The trick is to have a basic level of literacy and then you don't need the machine to chew it up for you like a mother bird.

qmrtoday at 12:41 AM

> So having a LLM split the text into manageable sections for you and provide a hint of what each lengthy wall-of-text paragraph will be about is actually a huge gain in readability.

Perhaps your attention span needs improvement.

keaneyesterday at 8:23 PM

Mostly from a bit further back but you might enjoy https://earlymoderntexts.com/texts