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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

What LLM can I get and feed hundreds of hours of video into that will give me the position of a specific vehicle alongside when that happened?

An LLM isn’t going to help you here, but basic Computer Vision and a SQL database has been a solution _if you have the cameras_. I wrote a license plate reader as a university project using OpenCV almost 20 years ago.

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If you were able to write one 20 years ago, I dare say an LLM could whip one up super-fast. Or just search the internet and tell you where to find one.

One of the risks of LLMs is that a lot of tasks go from "an expert could do this easily given a few weeks" to "anyone who thinks to ask an LLM can do this easily and get results the same day"

> One of the risks of LLMs is that a lot of tasks go from "an expert could do this easily given a few weeks" to "anyone who thinks to ask an LLM can do this easily and get results the same day"

By that logic, all problems are solved with LLMs, though.

Honestly, there's plenty of experts worried about exactly that. But if you'd prefer, feel free to mentally scope my claim to the domain of "things we already know LLMS can do, like copying previously solved software problems"

The claim was "a lot of tasks", which is certainly true.

It wasn't "all tasks".

This point is moot, though. The claim either implicitly includes the task under discussion or it's a non sequitur.

An LLM could certainly write you an OpenCV program to do this task. I’ve used them for exactly that kind of work. The moot non sequitur is yours.

I dare say it might require a little more knowledge than _anyone_ would possess.

Any competent llm would write a script using opencv to extract the license plates.

I did this with Gemini 3, mostly for fun and to test it's capabilities. Teslausb records all dash cam videos and auto syncs it to my nas when in wifi range. Yolo and opencv extracts and does ocr on any defected license plate, and puts it all on a map, along with trip information. Not particularly useful or interesting, and not something I would have done pre-llms, but the difficulty was basically writing a one paragraph prompt and using some free tokens

By that logic, all problems are solved by LLMs. If that was true, then there's no reason for any products to exist for anything anymore.

I think the key word is on "any one". Personally, I know how do to the work, I just didn't want to because it provided minimum value to me. But I didn't actually need to know how to do it, because the llm produced perfect results for me without needing to prompt it with any specifics

But what you have is a license plate reader. They've existed and are a solved(mostly) problem since the 80s. Flock isn't an ANPR, it's a network of cameras that has that as a feature.

An LLM isn't replacing an interconnected camera network, it's replacing a script that can be replicated from a 6 year old blog post!

You made this same incorrect claim in another comment. You’re generalizing beyond what others are claiming, without any basis. (This is the logical fallacy known as hasty generalization.)

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