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Comment by rfarley04 | Hacker News Reader

I definitely thought you meant that you asked it to write 5 bullet points that covered/summarized 14,501 books haha. Would love to see the output from that prompt.

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Me too! I was really looking forward to seeing a summary of so many books. Was expecting to see something like: * life is hard * people can be evil * war is inevitable * everyone is afraid of dying * humans persevere even in the face of insurmountable odds

There's a quote from Naval Ravikant that I really like (but now can't find), "All self-help books essentially boil down to 'prioritize long-term payoffs over short-term ones'". Haven't seen a single instance of that being incorrect.

Yeah, but this pairs well with that joke about being lost in a hot air balloon. The one about the answer being detailed, technically correct, and utterly useless.

I mean, if homo sapiens could reliably prioritize long-term payoffs over short-term ones, the world would look very different.

It would be hilarious if one of the bullets were “42”.

Maybe that book was left out?

I did ask it to summarize all of war and peace in a single sentence, then a single word. I forget the sentence, but for the word, it chose Humanity.

Same here! Love the idea behind this, but of course the big question is was one able to legally provide the content of 14,501 books to ChatGPT? Or there some database that has the content of all such books, and one can license there use?

That is actually possible. You could summarize each book first and then group them and summarize the groups etc. Divide and conquer approach.

This could be easily implemented with langchain for example.

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