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Comment by superchroma | Hacker News Reader

tl;dr, she loses her airpods which are subsequently stolen and doesn't get them back. Lot of writing about a chase that ultimately results in nothing.

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Have you ever read a novel? You'd hate them.

I read novels but don’t like all of them. This one was certainly one of the most boring and that’s not the sentiment I look for in novels. What did you liked in this one ?

A novel about lost headphones would be a surefire hit

Give it to Nolan. He will bring time travel, theory of pseudo-relatively and everything else in it, in the end revealing it was actually all about espionage and those pods contained sensitive information that a clever time travelling agent has hidden on in. Shit, I just gave it away. Spoiler alert!

It certainly could be enjoyable, depending on what happens and how it's told.

"A novel about an old guy fishing would be a surefire hit"

Novels have a plot. You don’t need to be rude.

lol, lets not compare this sort of journalism to a novel now...

lol, lets not compare this sort of personal diary with journalism now… :)

And the story is very well written and fun to read.

I was certain they were going to be in the authors jacket pocket on inside it’s lining or something.

Same. I was somewhat disappointed at the end. But I'll be clutching my AirPods Pro even closer tighter to my chest tonight, as a result.

That’s very subjective.

I thought it was gonna relate Airpods to Christopher McCandless. But that's Into The Wild. So thanks for clearing that up for me. :)

The title relates to Into Thin Air which Jon Krakauer also wrote about the 1996 Everest disaster (of which he was part).

Ahhhhhhhh. That's what my brain was remembering.

Does it otherwise reference that at all? Google Ngrams has the phrase `_VERB_ into thin air` going back to 1599.

Why use few words when you can use a bazillion words.

BTW, the text is too long for GPT4 to summarise, I wonder if that's a tactic sites use against AI tools? :D Just make the text so long and full of purple prose that the AI models choke.

> Why use few words when you can use a bazillion words. BTW, the text is too long for GPT4 to summarise, I wonder if that's a tactic sites use against AI tools? :D Just make the text so long and full of purple prose that the AI models choke.

Regardless of the usefulness of a summary for this article, the obvious solution is to split the text into smaller chunks and generate summaries for each chunk, then combine them into an overall summary.

As an example, ChatGPT was able to summarize 32 out of the 48 paragraphs in this article, which contained about 3,714 tokens and 15,289 characters:

> The author resisted buying AirPods due to fear of losing them, but eventually gave in and bought them. Predictably, they lost them in a ski lodge. They later discovered that they were being pinged by the "Find My" app and were located in a nearby town. Despite warnings against it, the author contemplated taking vigilante action to recover their AirPods but ultimately decided against it.

Then, I requested a summary of the remaining 16 paragraphs, which contained 1,681 tokens and 6,983 characters:

> The author recounts their attempts to track down their stolen AirPods using Apple's Find My app. They follow the location of the thief to a museum and a Wal-Mart, but are unable to identify the culprit or retrieve their AirPods. The app leads them on a wild goose chase through a crowded outlet mall before the AirPods eventually end up in Mexico City. The author reflects on the futility of their efforts and accepts that they will likely never recover their lost property.

The purpose of this story is for the author to recount their experience in an entertaining way that's pleasant to read. Why would you want to use an LLM to summarize it? That'd be like finding an interesting-looking novel to read at the bookstore, then buying the Cliff's Notes instead.

I've thus far kept myself mostly isolated from and ambivalent about the GPT hype, but this comment, even if it's somewhat tongue-in-cheek, really says a lot about where the technology is going to take us as a species. I'm not thrilled about it.

I skipped most of the article because it was boring. I was vindicated by the ending where nothing happens.

The point of reading a story like this is to enjoy the act of reading it, not to claim a reward for reaching the conclusion. It's genuinely saddening how angry people in this thread are getting over the idea of reading for reading's sake.

You must be the type who enjoys reading the short story before each recipe on the internet too and doesn't skip straight to the actual part where they tell you how to cook the dish they've been writing about for 10 chapters already.

I guess the beauty of not finding your lost airpods is lost on me. The shame.

Nothing about the article told me that it was just a short story about trying to find a pair of AirPods.

I expected some technical insights because it was posted to HackerNews, but nope.

I'm glad I'm old enough so I can browse text pretty fast, didn't take me too long to skip to the end.

‘I optimise my life so much that I use an algorithm to summarise articles. In so doing, I am oblivious to the art of content creation for the pleasure of it, as well as its converse, content consumption for the pleasure of it’

"I use an algorithm to decide if an article is just purple prose or does it have an actual message."

I read Brandon Sanderson's books. I don't have any issues with consuming long-form text =)

> That'd be like finding an interesting-looking novel to read at the bookstore, then buying the Cliff's Notes instead.

Wait until you find out how people read "a book a day" or "ten books a week".

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