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60% Fable cost cut by converting code to images and having the model OCR it

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Re: 60% Fable cost cut by converting code to images and having the model OCR it

#41
post #5

Ahhh my eyes the vibe coded readme

It’s so painful to read the LLM-compressed explanations. I can’t exactly identify what it is, but it’s an immediate tell and literally requires twice the effort to comprehend. For example: > Honest caveat, visible in the clip: the pxpipe arm answered the count first and needed one follow-up nudge to also print the ledger balance in the requested one-line format; the plain arm followed the format on the first try. Leg…

[deleted]

Re: 60% Fable cost cut by converting code to images and having the model OCR it

#42
I'm sorry, but this is retarded. It works, and it's clever, but but it's clearly a workaround for a pricing failure. Much like the bounty on poisonous snakes leading to people taking up snake-breeding, this just exploits and promotes waste. I think ultimately blame falls on Anthropic for the poor pricing system the enables such arbitrage. But I'm also disgusted by the inevitable tide of people exploiting this until its fixed, and creating an entirely unnecessary extra tide of digital junk.

Re: 60% Fable cost cut by converting code to images and having the model OCR it

#43
post #3

This seems like a pricing hack that burns resources, that when the loophole gets closed the price of OCR will have to rise?

It’s not a loophole, it just happens that encoding information as optical tokens is much more efficient than text.

> encoding information as optical tokens

Educate me: what is an "optical token" when dealing with LLMs?

Re: 60% Fable cost cut by converting code to images and having the model OCR it

#45
post #5

Ahhh my eyes the vibe coded readme

It’s so painful to read the LLM-compressed explanations. I can’t exactly identify what it is, but it’s an immediate tell and literally requires twice the effort to comprehend. For example: > Honest caveat, visible in the clip: the pxpipe arm answered the count first and needed one follow-up nudge to also print the ledger balance in the requested one-line format; the plain arm followed the format on the first try. Leg…

Here's one rewrite that would have helped:

To be fair, as you can see in the clip, the two models handled the prompt slightly differently. The pxpipe variant gave the right count initially but needed a quick follow-up to output the ledger balance in a single line. The standard model, on the other hand, nailed the formatting on its first try. We've completely solved readability here on Fable; our only real hurdle left is getting the models to follow formatting constraints perfectly on the very first reply.

Of course, this was just rewritten by another LLM.

Re: 60% Fable cost cut by converting code to images and having the model OCR it

#46
post #3

This seems like a pricing hack that burns resources, that when the loophole gets closed the price of OCR will have to rise?

It’s not a loophole, it just happens that encoding information as optical tokens is much more efficient than text.

Anyone else laugh out loud when they read this? Like, okay so NO, that's entirely impossible. What's really going on?

Re: 60% Fable cost cut by converting code to images and having the model OCR it

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s so painful to read the LLM-compressed explanations. I can’t exactly identify what it is, but it’s an immediate tell and literally requires twice the effort to comprehend. For example: > Honest caveat, visible in the clip: the pxpipe arm answered the count first and needed one follow-up nudge to also print the ledger balance in the requested one-line format; the plain arm followed the format on the first try. Leg…

Here's one rewrite that would have helped: To be fair, as you can see in the clip, the two models handled the prompt slightly differently. The pxpipe variant gave the right count initially but needed a quick follow-up to output the ledger balance in a single line. The standard model, on the other hand, nailed the formatting on its first try. We've completely solved readability here on Fable; our only real hurdle left…

Reads a little bit better, but still reads like a writer getting paid by the word, which I guess is fitting.

Re: 60% Fable cost cut by converting code to images and having the model OCR it

#49
post #5

Ahhh my eyes the vibe coded readme

It’s so painful to read the LLM-compressed explanations. I can’t exactly identify what it is, but it’s an immediate tell and literally requires twice the effort to comprehend. For example: > Honest caveat, visible in the clip: the pxpipe arm answered the count first and needed one follow-up nudge to also print the ledger balance in the requested one-line format; the plain arm followed the format on the first try. Leg…

My thought on this is that LLMs probably mimic writing patterns and structures from quality resources. But they don't construct a plausible thought hierarchy like an average human does, so their train of thought turns into a rollercoaster of thought. So the order of information is for humans completely out of order.

My guess is that it's a known problem, which steered the frontier models into bullet point preference.

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