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A Controversial Rare-Book Dealer Tries to Rewrite His Own Ending

(www.newyorker.com)
81 points acabal | 5 comments | 22 Oct 24 03:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.852s | source
1. fergie ◴[22 Oct 24 13:56 UTC] No.41914316[source]▶
A well written article, but it could probably have been like 10% of the length.
replies(2): >>41915543 #>>41915945 #
2. williamdclt ◴[22 Oct 24 15:51 UTC] No.41915543[source]▶
I wonder how much shorter Crime and Punishment could have been made!
3. CamperBob2 ◴[22 Oct 24 16:26 UTC] No.41915945[source]▶
You can always run it through an LLM to create a summary of any desired length. Never know what you'll be missing, though. You might actually enjoy the experience of reading the original article yourself. Try it, see how it goes?
replies(1): >>41918387 #
4. gwern ◴[22 Oct 24 20:29 UTC] No.41918387[source]▶
Assuming the summary is accurate. Which I'm not sure is the case - as it happens, yesterday an actual LLM summary of OP struck me as missing important parts: https://www.reddit.com/r/Longreads/comments/1g8so93/a_contro...
replies(1): >>41918549 #
5. CamperBob2 ◴[22 Oct 24 20:48 UTC] No.41918549{3}[source]▶
It's accurate but not deep enough. It's pretty important to specify the summary length you're after, in my experience, rather than just leaving it up to the model.

I asked GPT4o explicitly for an 800-word summary just now, roughly one page of single-spaced text, and I really don't see how it could have done much better: https://chatgpt.com/share/671810c7-477c-800b-a752-376ce6074a...