Gregory's ServerGoogle Research published the paper as a two-column PDF with no HTML equivalent, so as an experiment I uploaded that PDF to Google AI Studio and told gemini-1.5-pro-exp-0801 "Convert this document to neatly styled semantic HTML" - it did pretty well! https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2024/Pipe-Syntax-In-SQL.html
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@simon I’ve recently started digging into Elixir and the library used for database abstraction called Ecto has this as a feature. It’s really nice: https://hexdocs.pm/ecto/Ecto.Query.html#module-macro-api @simon interesting! I noticed that (on iOS Safari) I couldn’t use “dark night” plugin to turn it into dark mode. (Thought I could use reader mode to darken it). Any idea if this is something you’ve explicitly blocked via a meta tag? (My main reason for wanting to view the original as html was to aid legibility, particularly by having it in darkmode. My eyes are flaring up with photophobia and it’s literally agonising to read black on white at the moment.) “REFERENCES (A long list of references, which I won't reproduce here to save space.)” I know it’s mean to laugh at the poor AI that is doing the best it can… but there’s always space in html. 🙂 (Thank you for this conversion btw.)  @adriano sure, that’s why I specifically called it out - they’re not wrong about that kind of thing @adriano but if they chose not to consider how much time this would save in terms of doing the work to produce a verified, 100% correct HTML version of that PDF that’s on them at this point @simon Huh, I had wondered about exactly this as a service, but hadn’t made the connection with AI Panning and scanning on mobile is terrible. And I am just a casual scientific paper reader |
... possibly too well, six hours after I published that it was already the third search result on Google for the title of the paper!
Since I hadn't reviewed the conversion for correctness I've now added a meta tag to de-index it from the search engine