Hacker News Reader

Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

I've been complaining on hn for some time now that my only real test of an LLM is that it can help my poor wife with her research, she spends all day every day in small town archives pouring over 18th century American historical documents. I thought maybe that day had come, I showed her the article and she said "good for him I'm still not transcribing important historical documents with a chat bot and nor should he" - ha. If you wanna play around with some difficult stuff here are some images from her work I've posted before: https://s.h4x.club/bLuNed45

View on HN

While it's of course a good thing to be critical the author did provide some more context on the why and how of doing it with LLM's on the hard fork podcast today [0]: mostly as a way to see how these models _can_ help them with these tasks.

I would recommend listening to their explanation, maybe it'll give more insight.

Disclosure: After listening the podcast and looking up and reading the article I emailed @dang to suggest it goes into the HN second chance pool. I'm glad more people enjoyed it.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/podcasts/hardfork-data-ce...

People have had spotty access to this model for brief periods (gemini 3 pro) for a few weeks now, but its strongly expected to be released next week, and definitely by year end.

Oh I didn't realize this wasn't 2.5 pro (I skimmed, sorry) - i also haven't had time to run some of her docs on 5.1 yet, I should.

> ...of an LLM is that it can help my poor wife with her research, she spends all day every day in small town archives pouring over 18th century American historical documents.

> I'm still not transcribing important historical documents with a chat bot and nor should he

Doesn't sound like she's interested in technology, or wants help.

It doesnt have to be perfect to be useful. If it does a decent job then your wife reviews and edits, that will be much faster than doing the whole thing by hand. The only question is if she can stay committed to perfection. I dont see the downside of trying it unless she's worried about getting lazy.

I raised this point with her, she said there are times it would be ambiguous for both her and the model, and she thinks it would be dangerous for her to be influenced by it. I'm not a professional historical researcher so I'm not sure if her concern is valid or not.

I think there's a lot of meta thought that deserves to be done about where these new tools fit. It is easy to off handedly reject change, especially as a subject matter expert who can feel they worked so hard to do this and now theyre being replaced so the work was for nothing. I really dont want to say your wife is wrong, she almost assuredly is not. But it is important to have a curious mindset when confronted with ideas you may be biased against. Then she can rest easy knowing she is doing her best to perfect her craft, right? Otherwise she might wake up one day feeling like symbolic NLP researchers trying LLMs for the first time. Certainly a lot to consider.

I really appreciate your thoughtful reply. I try my best to be encouraging and educating without being preachy or condescending with my wife on this subject. I read hn, I see the posts of folks in, frankly what reads like anguish, about having a tool replace their expertise. I feel really, sad? about it. It's interesting to be confronted with it here (a place I love!) and at home (a place I love!) in quite different context. I've also never been particularly good at becoming good at something, I can't do very much, and genai is really exciting for me, I'm both drawn to and have love for experts so... This whole thing generally has been keeping me up at night a bit, because I feel anguish for the anguish.

As a scientist, I don't think this is valid or useful. It's very much a first year PhD line of thought that academia stamps out of you.

This is the 'RE' in research, you specifically want to know and understand what others think of something by reading others' papers. The scientific training slowly, laboriously prepares you to reason about something without being too influenced by it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com