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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Tell Claude or whatever to read https://tinylittleoffice.com/llms.txt and it will then be able to generate URLs that render documents.

Here's a deck I had it generate about how the URL format works: https://bit.ly/4yRBc1v

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thank you, this explains much better, so it's kinda like https://bento.page/

As seen on HN about three months ago, with +1000pts and +230cmnts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49008211

Why not just get your agent to write LaTeX? Use the beamer template and get a much more professional, customisable, git-commitable and transferable presentation.

You inspired me to knock together a LaTeX version of the same pattern - lets you drop LaTeX in the URL so you can link to the rendered version.

https://tools.simonwillison.net/latex

There is an issue with clipping off the context menu:

https://postimg.cc/0r4jrF59

Looks cool. I can see this being useful for sharing a single, tiny url rather than a full bulky pdf.

Personally I like to keep my LaTeX tooling local so it can integrate with everything I already use, and I own simple plaintext files.

Or typst, did that with my CV.

Then why not typst? Much faster to render and far more ergonomic/human-understandable when you eventually have to touch something inside.

typst is VC-funded, and its longevity is in doubt.

I prefer to get bleeding edge LLMs to use old, time-hardened technologies. They are more stable, I trust they're not going to change out from under me, and it is more transferable. The ergonomics of the actual markup don't matter to me, since I'm not writing it, so I'd rather the more powerful, more training data option.

Just one example: Every university and academic publication in the world give LaTeX formatting templates, examples courses etc.

Ergonomics matter even for LLMs. Also, compile speed, quality of error messages, how easy it is to get something right (especially that LLMs are "blind" unless you want to burn a lots of tokens, so they sort of just reason without the visual output) absolutely matter and can turn a one-shot LLM prompt into a multi-turn agent churning wasting tokens for no good reason.

I'm not saying that it's necessarily the case here, but typst is past the very early phase and LLMs are decent at generating it. Also, many formatting templates have been converted to typst as well.

This was super useful. Thanks.

That last slide with a QR code that purports to embed the entire document/deck is intriguing.

I presume there are practical limits to the file size here?

And images inside slides must be impossible to fit it right away?

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