Apparently, this can actually assist the LLM:

https://silly.business/blog/we-should-revisit-literate-progr...

as discussed here previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47300747

Admittedly part of that is caused by the change in tax laws making it untenable for publishers to maintain a backlist.

I couldn't find an OCR system which was:

- free/affordable

- able to cope with arbitrary check sizes/hand-written checks and my occasional need to arrange multiple invoices in a stack with the check rotate 90 degrees so that all the numbers are visible

- which would capture the data from a scan in such a way that it could be easily used to rename the file

If you know of a system which is flexible enough to do this which is essentially free, let me know.

I once participated in a project where we worked up a database-driven typesetting system for a company whose annual publication had a staff of a dozen (3 managers (one of whom mostly did ad sales), 3 full-time compositors, 6 part-time) and when we put in the system they quit paying their expensive annual license for maintenance on the proprietary composition system, and fired two managers and 1 compositor and half the part-timers.

The staff was commensurately larger when they switched to the first electronic composition system they were using from the typesetter and paste-up they initially used.

The thing is, the failure rate was quite high --- often only 15 (sometimes fewer) lines were returned, and after a while, Microsoft imposed a limit on uploading more files, even though I was deleting the conversations immediately and quitting CoPilot and re-starting (long sessions seemed to have a progressively worse failure rate).

Since then, access to CoPilot has been removed and we're waiting on a test program to finish. Kind of curious how many tokens this was using up (and if there's a model which could be run locally which would work well and quickly enough).

https://github.com/Jack000/PartKAM

That said, after a while, one can be surprisingly fast when picking --- on one occasion I walked up to a bin full of non-descript cardboard boxes, grabbed one, spun it in my hands for the six-sided box check and scanned it to verify it was the correct pick, and then was asked to explain how I had gotten that right by a trainer w/ a bunch of trainees--- it seemed like almost five minutes of explanation of minor differences in cardboard texture, box shape, construction and so forth to explain how it was that at first glance, that was the only correct choice.

I've always wondered if LLMs would arrive at a similar conclusion with on-going training as they are used.

I think that rather underestimates what people can and have done (cue John Henry story).

I worked in an Amazon warehouse for two different stints:

https://www.reddit.com/r/EDC/comments/dmnuts/53mamazon_fulfi...

and it was rather like a gym membership which I couldn't skip out on (glances at exercise equipment cluttering living space) and during which I could ponder life choices and consequences while wishing there was a soundtrack/music.

That said, this sort of thing, LLMs/AIs and data centers, and so forth feel like a perfect storm leading up to singularity (as envisioned by some optimistic science fiction authors) or something far worse, cue Marshall Brain's novella "Manna":

https://karmak.org/archive/2003/12/manna/manna1.htm

One of the most effective menu implementations ever for me was Altsys Virtuoso on NeXTstep's right-click (to pop-up the main menu at the mouse cursor), drag-down to Modify, then drag right to "Punch" or "Union" (whichever was the top command) --- it was a command I did a lot and it was almost gestural, kind of lke a well-done pie menu.

FWIW, the current Windows Start menu at lower-left, while not drawn to the corner now allows one to click the corner to open it, lower-right is "Show Desktop" and upper right closes the current maximized window --- only upper left is at the mercy of whatever app is currently running.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/344729.Designing_Visual_...

and the high water mark of my graphical UI experience was when I used an NCR-3125 running Go Corp.'s PenPoint as a portable/note-taking/sketching device and a NeXT Cube w/ a Wacom ArtZ as my desktop.

https://milos.fyi/blog/fitts-law-why-the-menu-bar-is-at-the-...

A few years later, when PDFs were more prevalent, I found out in an interview that the .pdf which I had sent in had been converted to plain text and then uploaded into a database of résumés and that it was essentially illegible due to issues with the encodings of the old-style figures, small caps, and ligatures which I had used.

Perhaps it would be helpful to ensure that the PDF is tagged so as to ensure that any automated processing results in a useful extraction of text?

One thing which I started with my own children which seemed promising was to read biographies of notable individuals in chronological order as bedtime reading --- since it was a difficult list to compile, I started on a smaller subset of U.S. Presidents which worked well (though I was surprised that there was no child-friendly biography for a couple of them in the local library system necessitating ordering) --- I also tried to read a more formal, adult-oriented biography in advance to anticipate questions. Unfortunately, my wife's schedule changed when we got to Truman and the effort was abandoned due to a changing evening schedule. Note that this was in addition to having read all the C.S. Lewis Narnia books, _The Hobbit_ and _The Lord of the Rings_, Susan Cooper's _The Dark is Rising_ pentalogy and many, many other more traditional book choices.

The big thing in child-rearing is to offer the child chances and experiences and age-appropriate choices --- the line in _The Simpsons_ where Homer tells Bart that it's okay that he failed at learning while wrongly phrased does have a kernel of truth in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47300747

c.f.,

http://literateprogramming.com/

Last month I bought a flet.dev subscription (and tokens 3 times over --- the recent update seems to be far more efficient in terms of what one gets for a given token spend?) and have been using it to try to make some small apps for CNC work and I am currently dismantling one based on converting the generated .md documentation and re-writing it with the source code inserted at appropriate places and with added commentary and documentation and links --- I'm confident that when I'm done I'll have a tool which I understand and which if need be, could be re-created w/o AI help, or ported to some different UI toolkit/build system.

Jerry Pournelle often mentioned having an application which would teach reading --- apparently it is now out of print?

https://www.readingtlc.com/

Have you looked at intermediary things such as the "Living Books"?

https://wanderfulstorybooks.com/