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Six months ago there seemed to be a flood of people who wanted to normalize Dyslexia and were pitching startups that the 75% of people who can read just didn't need because... they can read.

Haven't seen so many pitches for summarizers lately.



there was software called Copernic Summarizer ~25 years ago that was so useful for taking huge articles and condensing them into a paragraph. I have no idea how it worked. At some point i lost access to several pieces of software i bought in that era, also including ambrosia software's catalog which i had purchased. I think i lost my gte email address or something, can hardly remember.

I haven't used chatgpt (or whatever) for summaries in a couple of years, so i have no idea what SOTA is; although "chat with a document" seems like it'd be more useful in general than a summary for the way i eschew long-form articles.


> I have no idea how it worked.

I traced down this through an academic article which favourably compared it to other summarising solutions back in 2006. It might help answer the question: https://web.archive.org/web/20070209101837/http://www.copern...


For me chat with a paragraph in a language I sorta know (Japanese) or wish I knew (Chinese) is really useful. I ask for a translation and see discordances with what I can read and ask about them and get good answers. I also can lean on translations from my text and insist that certain words get used, etc.


They also had Copernic desktop search which was really good until they enshittified it slowly.


thankfully "everything.exe" is everything i need. not affiliated, it's just really nice on windows. On linux, mlocate and the like are fine, although i find myself doing a `find / -name foo` most often. I don't use Mac, but i have an understanding that spotlight/sherlock or whatever isn't as good as it was in the past.

Someday i'll actually put all my documents into a document database so i can search stuff inside the documents. Did Copernic desktop search do that? Windows ~98 could; it was real slow back then. I have so many "documents" that even if windows still allows searching within files (it probably does) i reckon it'd kill my hard drives eventually.


Yes. Copernic desktop search indexed document content. And it was quick. It's pretty hard to understand that MS still can't do useful search




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