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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

Help me understand why people are using these.

I presume you want information of some value to you otherwise you wouldn't bother reading an article. Then you feed it to a probabilistic algorithm and so you can not have any idea what the output has to do with the input. Like https://i.imgur.com/n6hFwVv.png you can somewhat decipher what this slop wants to be but what if the summary leaves out or invents or inverts some crucial piece of info?

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"Then you feed it to a probabilistic algorithm and so you can not have any idea what the output has to do with the input"

This is theoretically true, but to me at least, practically irrelevant. In all cases, for most values of the word "all", the summary does tell you what the article contains.

For me at least, the usefulness is not that the summary replaces reading the article. Instead, it's a signal telling me whether I should read it in the first place.

People write too much. Get to the point.

any point? regardless of what's written? does that work for you?

sometimes you don't have time to read an entirety of a large article. You want a quick summary, some people are poor at summarizing things in their head as they go and can get lost in dense text. Extensions like these really help me with headers, structure that I want to follow, quick overview and gives me an idea if I want to deep dive further.

Sometimes it's not even an article, but a video. And sometimes all you care is just a single tiny fact from that video.

Although I don't think this particular summarizer works for videos. And I don't think Ollama API supports audio ingestion for transcription. There are some summarizers that work with YouTube specifically (using automatic subtitles).

Speaking of, I made also a youtube summarizer at https://github.com/tcsenpai/youlama

Why don't you try using these tools yourself so you have an understanding of them? People like to get shit summarized, its really not as deep as you are trying to make it out to be.

Did you read my original point? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41814310 given that, why on earth would I waste my time?

Also note

https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/112006855076082650

> You might be surprised to learn that I actually think LLMs have the potential to be not only fun but genuinely useful. “Show me some bullshit that would be typical in this context” can be a genuinely helpful question to have answered, in code and in natural language — for brainstorming, for seeing common conventions in an unfamiliar context, for having something crappy to react to.

> Alas, that does not remotely resemble how people are pitching this technology.

Even if I want to read the entirety of a piece of long form writing I'll often summarize it (with Kagi key points mode) so that I know what the overall points are and can follow the writing better. Too much long form writing is written like some mystery thriller where the writer has to unpack an entire storyline before they'll state their main thesis, so it helps my reading comprehension to know what the point is going in. The personal interest stories that precede the main content always land better that way.

I think you just insulted every journalist on Earth.

It's really not that deep. There's writing you read for its aesthetic merits and writing you read for its contents. When you want the latter but the piece is written for the former a summary fixes the mismatch.

Nowadays a lot of websites are written in a style that goes on and on and on dancing around a topic, adding historical context all in a terrible writing style only to lengthen the text for SEO. In such cases a summary can be a good thing.

At least for me it’s less about the individual article, in that case I agree with you, but more about the case where you have 25 articles.

Now you can’t possibly get through all of them and have to decide which of those could be worth your time. And in that case, the tradeoff makes sense.

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