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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25736 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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Does it have to be a coding problem? I understand that there are time and financial constraints that prevent you from trying a lot of what is being requested, but I also understand @iprayiam3's criticism that it looks like you're cherry picking for something you thing the LLM can do. The problem is that for most people who aren't computer programmers they aren't going to be able to think of anything other than a piece of software that they wish existed but doesn't and ask you to write it from scratch, which is going to be cost prohibitive beyond the kind of textbook examples that were constructed for teaching purposes and don't address problems anyone is actually trying to solve. This seems like it should be marketing 101, but if you're trying to convince people that your product is worthwhile—and that's your stated goal—you have to show them that it will actually help them do something they want to do. If you tell me it can write code to fetch data from a REST API using asynchronous requests then I'll smile and nod but that's complete gibberish to me, and I won't know whether I should be impressed by it or not, or how that's supposed to improve my life.

A coding problem? Not strictly, no. I focused on coding because my collaborator SF (who is doing most of the work) is a programmer.

As you can see from discussion with Phailyoor and faul_sname, I'm open to other well-defined tasks.

So instead, I propose that we re-run the test I gave you last summer, because that is something I actually would use it for, and it obviously isn't too complicated.

I started as soon as I read this. I'm running it on 5.2 Thinking and another instance using Agent mode (the model has access to a computer of its own with a browser). It's taking a while, so I'll ping you when I'm done. I tried to be faithful to your original framing, so I didn't mention that o3 tried and failed at the task, or your critiques shared later.

If this doesn't work, then sure, I can ask SF to consider using his Claude setup to try. Shouldn't be too onerous.

Another idea i had on similar lines would be for me to arbitrarily select a parcel of land in Westmoreland County, PA (selected because all of the recorded documents are available for free online) and see if it could download every deed in the chain of title going back 100 years. This particular task isn't hard to do but would be a proof of concept that it could possibly do more sophisticated work. I recognize that there are a number of scenarios that could arise that would completely flummox the LLM here. Given that, as a proof of concept I could run a few parcels in advance and preselect an easy one as proof of concept, though since LLM boosters like to brag about how powerful their models are I'm inclined to arbitrarily pick one without looking first and see how it does, especially since it cuts way down on the work I would need to do to verify the answer.

I have no idea, in advance, if this will work. I doubt SF does either. But it's also something we can try.

Photoshop/GIMP tool

I share your concerns with the issues arising from Photoshop being closed-source. But I'll share it too, assuming SF hasn't seen this yet. It sounds like something worth trying from my perspective, but I will stress that I am not a professional programmer so I'll be deferring to his judgment.

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