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Comment by sajithdilshan | Hacker News Reader

> It knows less from memory, Multi-turn tool calling is weaker, It’s not the best coding agent

Then what does it good at? Sending faxes?

I don't have the hardware to test this, but being trained to say "I don't know" instead of misleadingly talking confidently about what it does not know is interesting in itself.

Seems like it's good at reading German documents and reasoning over them. Custom German-language tokenizer, and one of the least hallucinating models.

Well that’s a pretty important skill for German users!

Unfortunately yes.

I know this is a long standing joke, but I am 27 now, born and raised in Germany, and genuinely never had the opportunity to use a Fax machine. It honestly kind of bums me out because there is something that seems cool about Fax (being fully aware that it should be fully obsolete by now)

Fax was never cool.

As a kid I interned at a bookstore, and before closing we'd write the book orders on a sheet of paper, slide it into the Fax machine to send to the book wholesale. I think the Fax printed out some kind of response a minute later.

Next day, the books would arrive. This was maybe 1996, but I thought it was pretty cool.

Fax was mind blowingly cool.

Maybe you can relate to seeing webcams or Facetime when it came out or something.

Being able to see a signed document or a picture someone took 5000km away quickly was mind boggling in its age.

You have plenty of opportunities you’ve just not been forced to use them. Look into your contracts right now, I bet rhrrr are opportunities

Fax was always awkward and weird. Resolution sucked and the paper handling was unreliable.

They were never common. They were mostly business tools, and consumers never wanted them. Sometimes you'd be required to send someone a fax, and you'd have to go to an office store. (And pay rather a lot; dollars per page.)

I hope you get to give one a try some day, for kicks, but the thrill will wear off fast.

> They were never common.

Are you sure about that? I remember we had one at home when I grew up, so I assumed they were very common at the time. (And it's not like we had this crazy business driven family use of it.)

About the best data point I can cite is that I never saw one in a TV show.I don't think the Huxtables had a home fax machine. (Though maybe I just watched the wrong programs, and we're talking about a very long time ago so memory could fail.)

Ah I thought it was specifically about germany.

> I never saw one in a TV show

Now that you mention it, I think I only remember one from the simpsons.

But based on [1] my mom really was an outlier for getting a fax machine. Mabye we had enough contact with beurocracy to make it work it. :D Even in 1995 only 1.5 million out of 36 million (4,1%) households had one. (Although I remember it from ~2000, so too bad the data doesn't go there.)

For the US with 14 million out of 98 million households (14%) fax machines were more popular for ordinary households than in germany. (But home-use was never the issue in the fax debate anyway, just fun facts :) )

[1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...

It never occurred to me that anyone would try to take data on that. Way to go, OECD!

I suspect there are a lot of German companies that have thousands of documents that describe their software/product. Adding or changing a feature means you have to ask 20 people whether there might something that can break some edge case behavior for which no (automatic) test exists. In this case, it would be nice to have a virtual employee who knows the content of all documents.

I even experienced the opposite case: Some feature was first rejected since everyone agreed that it would break some behavior. After talking to several people again, I discovered that the use case which required this behavior did not exist anymore and had been officially phased out years before. Maybe, some RAG LLM could have told me, based on company documents, that there is some edge case that can be removed making the way free for the new feature.

GPT was better at chat and rag before coding

I was thinking about the use cases for Germany residents actually, but yes, you're right. A German AI model needs to be able to handle fax machines (there's a bit variety of them) and also needs to handle letters coming home. german image-to-text.

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