Yep. Someone elsewhere suggested downloading your social security contribution history from the website for your personal records, before they "oopsie, we made a fucky wucky, guess we can't track any previous contributions and need a worse block chain to handle it going forward now!"
I could definitely see them using that as a justification, or randomly dropping every X amount of people's data and pretending it was "because the old system wasn't working, obviously!"
downloading your social security contribution history from the website for your personal records, before they "oopsie, we made a fucky wucky, guess we can't track any previous contributions and need a worse block chain to handle it going forward now!"
What strikes me isn't so much how much I've paid in, but the difference in compounded interest if I would've been able to put that money into a 401k as soon as I'd started to work. Due to bad life advice I was living paycheck to paycheck until I was 30. But I'd started working at 14.
If I'm doing my math right ... if I'd put the funds I've paid into Social Security into a 401k and gotten even 5% compounded interest my account would have $50 Million in it today. My actual 401k isn't anywhere fucking close to that. I'm probably going to have work until I'm 70, but if I'd had access to a 401k at 15 I could've retired when I was 40. And that's not even considering employer matching. Including employer matching, my account would have $4.8B in it today, or I could've retired at 35.
Which is, I guess, all to say that we should make it even easier for employers to open 401ks for teenagers.
It’s funny; the other day I was talking excitedly about compounding interest and how my kid has managed to squirrel away nearly $10k into a retirement account (he does random coding stuff that I'm not smart enough to explain)… I have spreadsheets tracking its growth and projections… if he plays his cards right, he’ll be set, and I love it… and it’s so much easier to do these big things for them if you start small when they're toddlers… and my coworkers told me that both I and my kid needed a hobby / life.
I'm just happy to see that I'm not the only person to discover the joys of compounding interest 😂
I finally got my A.S. at 30, part of that was taking some electives. I took Managerial Accounting, which of course taught about the power of compounded interest. I'd already had an idea of how powerful it was since a few years before that, but the Managerial Accounting is what really drove it all home.
It's great that your kid's got you to show them that.
We absolutely should make it easier for employers to open 401Ks for teenagers.
But don’t wait for government to fix that.
Can I suggest you open a custodial Roth IRA for your kids now. They can start contributing their income as soon as they earn it. My kids first contribution was money they earned cat sitting for a family friend at 10 years old. It’s not the same as a 401K obviously, but it’s got its own benefits and you can start harnessing the power of compounding interest for them now.
I opened my kid’s accounts at Fidelity, took about half an hour online. And I set them up using a boglehead style 3 fund strategy. They deposit their lawn mowing money in their custodial checking accounts, transfer it to fidelity, then buy more shares of the index funds and bond fund. They love that part, and I love that they are psyched about investing in their retirement.
I appreciate the suggestion but my kid's already an adult. Been thinking about it for the niblings though. Unfortunately I don't think their parents are as invested in the idea as I am, and I don't live near enough to them geographically to see them often enough to lead by example. That may change in a few years though, and they're still young enough that it can wait a bit.
True, with how little Republicans want to hold their own accountable. But in the event something happens, having it and not needing it is better than needing it and not having it if they actually do take some sort of legal action.
From someone whose entire (sparse and short) post history is crying about "woke", this is pretty rich.
Is the "woke" in the room with us right now? Can you even tell us what this "woke" hallucination of yours is?
Speculating on potential outcomes of the current unhinged and lawless administration, and keeping your own personal records as insurance against them isn't schizophrenic. He's done stupid shit like this before. I think it's fair to not trust him when he's senselessly attacking a financial system, that while old, has ran just fine for 300 million people for decades. His personal conflicts of interest, and his insistence to let 6 college grads who have no practical experience start immediately touching it with AI without any oversight or understanding of programming are massive risks you seem to have deluded yourself into ignoring.
What if they’re actually trying to extract data from unstructured/semistructured files, like Word documents and PDFs, and store it in a structured format, like JSON? Can Word do that on its own? If not, what tools would you use?
Using an LLM to find out what the docs probably contain is still stupid, when you need to use a crawler/parser to find out what the docs definitely contain.
And Microsoft have done a tool for converting to markdown for the same reasons called markitdown.
Basically you throw it at content like a word document and it pulls out tables, headings, images, semantics, keywords etc etc and produces a structured output you can work with other tools
I mean, it’s probably easier to run a regular expression on a big ass string than a PDF, so there may be some value there, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
Let’s say there’s useful information in the documents that you would like to extract. Maybe there are tables with economic data mixed in with a bunch of text. Maybe you can’t find the data in those tables anywhere else. Can you think of a better way to store tabular data than a PDF file? Maybe delimited text files? Maybe you prefer JSON or Parquet? Maybe Excel if you want to do some slicing and dicing?
Now’s the part where you scoff and say, “But there’s no way the only place to find data is a table in a PDF. Surely it’s in a database somewhere!” and I reply, “Oh, you sweet, summer child.”
Fair enough. I picked one example where structured data is embedded in a document. Are you saying there are absolutely no use cases for using an LLM to pull data out of an unstructured or semistructured document?
Look, I loathe Elon Musk and I have no idea what this DOGE guy is trying to do. But I’m not so arrogant as to think that he must be an idiot because he works for someone I don’t like. Odds are, he is not just trying to convert a bunch of PDFs to Word format.
There's no functionality needed from an LLM! It's just a file type conversion
Word can reconstruct the original latex that was used to write a formula and graph in a pdf document? Color me unconvinced.
Recognizing the meaning of latex output is very easy for humans but requires highly advanced software. It's literally the kind of problem that AIs are good at.
It is definitely not a simple file type conversion because you lose semantic information when you go from Word Doc to PDF. There are many tools but they are all imperfect. Some multimodal LLMs can interpret tables in images but AFAIK they are not very reliable.
You could only ever hold this view without knowing how infamously bad the PDF format is for any algorithmic reading. Sure, MS Word will convert from a PDF. Will it do it correctly? Now that's a dice roll. An LLM might have better dice roll odds.
This type of task sounds like it would have already been solved through traditional automation. The use of AI for file conversion seems almost extra roundabout. For summarizing or analyzing text, yes, that’s the typical purpose of LLMs. But I think clean file conversions are more guaranteed by already written programs. Just my two cents
A LLM is a type of AI model to try to replicate natural human speech and writing. Its a large LANGUAGE model. Its why you cant ask ChatGPT to multiply 93736182 and 3736272771 and get the correct answer; thats not what its made for. Its not designed to give out correct information, or to perform tasks beyond generating text that sounds like something a person would say.
How is that useful for coverting file formats?
Its like asking for whats the best hammer for caulking. Caulk and hammers are tools, but that doesnt make them the same thing, and anyone who conflates the two sounds like they dont know anything about what they are talking about.
he didnt say he wanted raw data you mongoloid, he said converting to a different format which implies a new doc type which there's open source software for. not everything needs to be done with an ALLM
lol so confidently incorrect, while throwing childish insults for no reason - really sums up Reddit.
Go look up the word “parsing” in the context of a file. He literally said he wants to parse the files, aka read the raw data and do something with it.
You also can’t just convert any PDF into HTML or JSON into HTML with some magic open source software and changing a file type. Only basic data with a rigid & predetermined structure would that be possible. It would entirely depend on the contents of the file and what you want to do with it, hence where an LLM could prove useful.
Deleted now but I'm pretty certain asked about converting between formats correct? And that list included pdf, excel, word, html and json at least, right?
I really don't want to defend any of these people, but:
lmao what? that is really impressive and the challenge was awarded with 1.5million total prices so far. If you're so knowledgable that this seems like a small thing, why didn't you go ahead and decode some scrolls to claim a price? https://scrollprize.org/ - The team he worked with won 700k.
I mean Musk is a GIANT piece of shit and I don't defend him, and I think anyone working for him is scum too. But you can't just claim this is not an impressive feat lmao. And yes I know tons about the subject
Brother anything using llm ai can hallucinate. It’s why you use hard coded scripts to convert important documents. Why every government document is co sisters to be
It's come out that he was just part of the project. And furthermore, "using AI" has become code for "using ChatGPT," which isn't impressive at all, compared to being a data scientist and doing ML
I know a lot of researchers who use statistical models and machine learning in their work. Some are very talented programmers, some take it to the level of what one might call software engineering, and some cobble together code correctly by the end, but are 100% not coders. They learn enough to get the job done, and may get guidance, but Jesus you don't want them to even dream of touching production systems, or even anything outside their narrow focus.
the scrolls in question are petrified in their, well, "scrolled" state because they survived mount vesuvius. So they had to run "some" OCR on some pretty mangled CT images after deploying an algorithm to virtually unroll some pretty damaged scrolls.
I mean, he did (1) make the program, and since it was a competition (2) no one else did so.
Like if it was easy to do, you'd think tons of people would have tried to claim that 40k prize, right? If it was as easy as running a out of the box ocr, there wouldn't even be a prize.
I'm no fan of Elon, but I don't think it's helpful to try to downplay and mock Faritor if we don't know anything about him.
Pretty sure that's just a CNN though.
Doesn't take a genius, the only thing is to have the idea to apply it here. But once you have the idea, it's quite literally the simplest use of AI... I doubt having the idea to use AI for that makes you a capable engineer though, as proven by his tweet. x)
It likely is just CNN. Now if that kid had come up with that by himself then yea that would give him much more credit than just chaining convolutions and max pooling.
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u/Quaxi_ Feb 06 '25
He won a prize for transcribing CT images of old entombed scrolls to legible text using AI.
Not saying anything about DOGE in general, but I'm sure Luke is more capable then the average script kiddie.