cccybernetic

An incredibly written film that's infinitely quotable.

"Balls. We want the finest wines available to humanity. We want them here, and we want them now!"

"Here Hare Here"

"I feel like a pig shat in my head."

"I don't advise a haircut, man. All hairdressers are in the employment of the government. Hair are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos and transmit them directly into the brain. This is the reason bald-headed men are uptight."

Most PDF parsers give you coordinate data (bounding boxes) for extracted text. Use these to draw highlights over your PDF viewer - users can then click the highlights to verify if the extraction was correct.

The tricky part is maintaining a mapping between your LLM extractions and these coordinates.

One way to do it would be with two LLM passes:

  1. First pass: Extract all important information from the PDF
  2. Second pass: "Hey LLM, find where each extraction appears in these bounded text chunks"

Not the cheapest approach since you're hitting the API twice, but it's straightforward!

Shameless plug: I'm working on a startup in this space.

But the bounding box problem hits close to home. We've found Unstructured's API gives pretty accurate box coordinates, and with some tweaks you can make them even better. The tricky part is implementing those tweaks without burning a hole in your wallet.

I don't feed documents directly to an LLM. First, extract and process the data in a structured way that maintains the hierarchy and metadata of the content (this is important!). Then convert this into a scheme that you can control — it doesn’t really matter what it is (JSON, XML, markdown). From there, feed this to the LLM in chunks. This will get you most of the way there.

There's different ways to validate, but that's why maintaining hierarchy and metadata is so important. If you track this information properly, you can cross-check responses across different LLMs!

I built a web app that extracts data from documents, like PDFs, Word, etc. I've seen people say "GPT wrapper", but it consistently outperforms similar tools in the space. My main customer is a private equity fund that randomly reached out. I didn't know much at all about fintech, but it works and gets the job done.

I don't have a proper marketing site yet since I've been focused on building the app, but it's coming soon (hopefully...)

I built a drag-and-drop document converter that extracts text into custom columns (for CSV) or keys (for JSON). You can schedule it to run at certain times and update a database as well.

I haven't had issues with hallucinations. If you're interested, my email is in my bio.

I haven't seen it framed this way, but yeah - well put.

Absolutely, email is in my profile. Please reach out.

This is a problem I’m working on.

I’m a software engineer at major US research university developing AI-powered software to improve critical reading and writing skills in higher ed. The idea is to provide immediate, high-quality feedback to students, closing the “latency” of submitting something and waiting to hear back from you professor.

I do genuinely think AI can reshape teaching and learning, but it will be a slow iterative process. We can use it scale what works (personalized learning and tutoring, helping students develop mastery/automaticity on topics, targeting areas where they struggle). It can also automate time-consuming tasks that bog teachers down.

If you're interested in pedagogy, AI, and tech, please reach out.

Awesome, thanks for sharing.

To add to this, John Perry Barlow, one of the Dead's two main lyricists, co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation.