4 ms·

> certainly better than the majority of personal finance education that people get exposed to unless they seek it out and read a variety of books and sources.

> certainly better than the majority of personal finance education that people get exposed to unless they seek it out and read a variety of books and sources. Also, models are now good enough that you can give them chapters from "authoritative" books, and they'll integrate that and come up with better answers even if their "vanilla" answers were average. And they'll tailor stuff to your particular situation. It's funny that the "agentic" stuff is only used in coding mostly, while it can and does work in other fields as well. As always, you kinda need to check it (at least spot check) but all in all I'd agree it's better than the average stuff you used to find with a quick google search.

legostormtroopr 5d ago
So if you know a book that has the information you need, you just need to upload it into the model to get the right answer. Isn't that a bit circular - if you already know the authoritative source, why ask a model?
- Calazon 5d ago
  Because it's faster. I've done this on different topics - I know the answer is in a particular eBook/PDF/document, but for whatever reason it's not trivial to look it up. The model can do it a lot more quickly than I can, and then I can still verify the accuracy.
  - ImaCake 5d ago
    Depends on the harness too. The MS copilot 365 chat interface happens to parse PDF and docx files before handing them to the model. Absolutely fantastic if your PDF is 1300 pages of concatenated reports and you want to find a single detail in it that you can't easily ctrl+f for.
- lconnell962 5d ago
  Some of the more widely spread and tolerated LLM outputs seem to be AI slop replacing Journalism/Blog slop. Places where people complained about quality already, but tolerated it if important enough. So to name some of the more common ones Translation, Summarization, and Reiteration of a source material. Humans put spin on things, how much you trust a source might not reflect the source's factual accuracy. It might just mean you liked reading it better from one source than another.
- theshrike79 5d ago
  It's basically a fancy context aware ctrl-f to the book. I use this regularly with RPG manuals. I _know_ the stuff, but don't remember every detail by heart. And just ctrl-f:ing through a Mörk/Pirate Borg -style PDF isn't really productive (they're "artistically" laid out). But I can just ask an AI bot that has the pdf indexed like "how does the medical kit work?" and it'll give me a summary along with the relevant rolls within seconds.
  - LorenPechtel 5d ago
    Is there any local version of an AI that can do this sort of thing?
- tygon 5d ago
  Why use a bulldozer to push down a mound of dirt when you can do the same with a shovel? It is faster, easier, and less prone to giving you back pain. Even assuming you are only reading the section of the book related to your issue, a computer works a fair bit faster.

legostormtroopr 5d ago

So if you know a book that has the information you need, you just need to upload it into the model to get the right answer. Isn't that a bit circular - if you already know the authoritative source, why ask a model?

Calazon 5d ago
Because it's faster. I've done this on different topics - I know the answer is in a particular eBook/PDF/document, but for whatever reason it's not trivial to look it up. The model can do it a lot more quickly than I can, and then I can still verify the accuracy.
- ImaCake 5d ago
  Depends on the harness too. The MS copilot 365 chat interface happens to parse PDF and docx files before handing them to the model. Absolutely fantastic if your PDF is 1300 pages of concatenated reports and you want to find a single detail in it that you can't easily ctrl+f for.
lconnell962 5d ago
Some of the more widely spread and tolerated LLM outputs seem to be AI slop replacing Journalism/Blog slop. Places where people complained about quality already, but tolerated it if important enough. So to name some of the more common ones Translation, Summarization, and Reiteration of a source material. Humans put spin on things, how much you trust a source might not reflect the source's factual accuracy. It might just mean you liked reading it better from one source than another.
theshrike79 5d ago
It's basically a fancy context aware ctrl-f to the book. I use this regularly with RPG manuals. I _know_ the stuff, but don't remember every detail by heart. And just ctrl-f:ing through a Mörk/Pirate Borg -style PDF isn't really productive (they're "artistically" laid out). But I can just ask an AI bot that has the pdf indexed like "how does the medical kit work?" and it'll give me a summary along with the relevant rolls within seconds.
- LorenPechtel 5d ago
  Is there any local version of an AI that can do this sort of thing?
tygon 5d ago
Why use a bulldozer to push down a mound of dirt when you can do the same with a shovel? It is faster, easier, and less prone to giving you back pain. Even assuming you are only reading the section of the book related to your issue, a computer works a fair bit faster.