Gil, The Shitposter Of Ages

its a .ml user. you can safely ignore. xD

sweet merciful torvalds, that must have sucked. Glad you made it out of that hellhole.

I could either take several tedious hours to write out several thousand regex patterns by hand to automatically recognize differing formats of notation for this thing I’m doing IRL… or I could have an LLM do it in a few seconds, and it’ll get 99.99% of the cases, missing maybe one case every hundred thousand… take your guess as to which option I chose. LLMs are a tool. I use it as such.

If, by bible, you refer to the holy book of the local Building Code; then no, I have not.

well, it works, and i don’t need to touch it. remaking what is already working would cost more time.

it is a truly absurd number, simply due to the inane BS variations on terminology and notation. It might have been more reasonable to train a local LLM on this material and then just query -that-… but hey 30ish seconds of claude’s free tier usage; and i’ve got a script that’s ~99.99% as good as a human in terms of pattern recognition. Pretty neat when you think about it.

Not really. There will only ever be about a hundred people who ever use this tool, and it’s really just a massive timesaver that keeps people from needing to open a smorgasbord of files to get a few tidbits from each file; then collate it into one doc… If I get ~99.99% of all the information, and one hundred people use this, odds are, nobody will ever see the .01% edge case of missed info. and even if it does happen, it’s not like it’s obsfucated information in each file, it’s just a pain to open a hundred files and wait for them all to load at once through the disk-heavy GUI application we have to use. simpler to just read via the regex patterns, and then put it out into the terminal for the info needed.

My skillset is geared towards meatsacks and things that go boom. LLMs have been a massive boon to the 1% of my job that needs a code monkey. As long as people still talk to each other, and things need exploding, I’ll have a job. Heck, if we somehow get to a point where money isnt needed, I’d still do what I do simply 'cuz I like it.

regex is computationally pretty cheap, from what I’ve read; due to something about it being a simple AND gate or something… . IDR, and to be honest it doesn’t really matter in the era of 16-core/32thread 5GHz processors… but when you just want it to work… it does “just work”. /shrug.

if you’ve got the spar time to wait for the open sognups on myanonamouse, they’ve got an extremely extensive collection of rather rare ebooks. if not, annasarchive and the sources on fmhy are very useful.