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Comment by anonymous908213 | Hacker News Reader

Addendum: After further consideration, I would like to offer two specific suggestions regarding the first point.

Low effort, minimal change suggestion: a link or table of contents header at the top of each month's page to jump to the diary entries.

Higher effort, bigger change suggestion: I think it would make for a significantly better reading experience if all of the diary pages and their transcriptions for a month were listed sequentially, such that you could seamlessly read them without clicking previous/next page.

I think it's a bit of a waste to have put so much effort into preserving this, but the actual ability to read it is de-prioritised relative to the ability to read an LLM summary.

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You're right, and it's a good idea. The summary started out small, as a header to the actual daily pages, but then I realized I could have AI do a lot more work here, including silly things like collect weather references and assemble them together. My prompt kept getting bigger to find trends in the data. But, it takes away from the view-ability of the site, which is not good.

LLM's ability to take 7400+ handwritten entries and try to make a narrative out them is amazing. With all of the AI experiments on HN lately, we're figuring out the power of LLMs, but it most cases, it still needs a human refining touch, and we need to remember that. Or else it just looks like AI slop.

I certainly don't think it's a bad thing to try to refine the information into a more digestible form. I think, for example, the dedicated "People", "Places", "Events", and "Map" sections are well-organized and interesting[1]. I would simply prefer if the presentation of this information did not detract from the ability to read the diary itself, as it does on the month pages. I am rather fond of reading historical diaries as part of a general curiosity about the past, and reading the experiences as they were written is as interesting to me if not more so than the aggregate information, personally.

[1] Although, of course, there is the question of reliability. For example, the "Boy Scouts" page says Boy Scouts have 2 mentions, but has references to 3 diary entries! Also, on further examination, Sep 1931 has broken dates (meaning my previous theory about it breaking only after Jul 1941 was wrong), and some pages appear to be out of order.

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