If you don't know what the text says, do you have access to some other form of ground truth? Because otherwise you don't know if they're reading illegible labels correctly!
I can know what the text says cause I have the actual product available :) but you are right if the llm can't read it will fill in the gap with hallucinations probably
They're a better depiction of Vampires than most, with Watts doing everything he could to make them biologically plausible (that can only go so far).
That being said, I found the way they were "shackled" to be ridiculous. If you've got superintelligent and superstrong predatory hominids running around, you have no reason to have them physically free even if you put the medical safeguards in place. Break their spines and sedate them when not in use!
Spoilers:
It seems weird to me that a society with other posthumans and intelligent AGI would be bowled over quite so easily by the vampires, but oh well.
They still killed the book for me. The underlying idea (no spoilers) is absolutely great sci-fi. All this useless blast-from-the-past did was make the story look silly to me. Such a shame. He could have written a great sci-fi book without superstition, alas, he apparently didn't want to be talken serious....
disagree, the vampires are mostly abstracted away with hand wavy "we couldn't possibly understand how they think", interesting concept, the aliens are more interesting though, and echopraxia was a bit of a dud.
It's a reference to the practise of scavenging steel from sources that were produced before nuclear testing began, as any steel produced afterwards is contaminated with nuclear isotopes from the fallout. Mostly ship wrecks, and WW2 means there are plenty of those. The pun in question is that his project tries to source text that hasn't been contaminated with AI generated material.
OAI doesn't show the actual COT, on the grounds that it's potentially unsafe output and also to prevent competitors training on it. You only see a sanitized summary.
Why tough? To me, it seems more prone to issues (hallucinations, prompt injections etc). It is also slower and more expensive at the same time. I also think it is harder to implement properly, and you need to add way more tests in order to be confident it works.
Generally I agree with your point, but there is some value in a parser that doesn’t have to be updated when the underlying HTML changes.
Whether or not this benefit outweighs the significant problems (cost, speed, accuracy and determinism) is up to the use case. For most use cases I can think of, the speed and accuracy of an actual parser would be preferable.
However, in situations where one is parsing highly dynamic HTML (eg if each business type had slightly different output, or you are scraping a site which updates the structure frequently and breaks your hand written parser) then this could be worth the accuracy loss.
You could employ an LLM to give you updated queries when the format changes. This is something where they should shine. And you get something that you can audit and exhaustively test.
