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Comment by sixhobbits

7 months ago

Technology spreads slowly. google docs is an instant 50x productivity increase for any legal process and yet a few years ago I saw an advocate's mind blown by a simple demonstration of simultaneous editing from two people in the same affidavit.

For him, the norm is still to redline a document on paper, and have his secretary add those changes to the original digital document and have that sent over to the opposing team for the same treatment.

I don't have strong opinions about LLMs' coding ability (though compared to the other comments so far I am more on the "LLMs are pretty good at creating software from natural language descriptions" side) but even assuming that LLMs can give programmers a 50x productivity increase, I'd assume it would take 10-50 years for industry and processes to evolve to take advantage of that increase.

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sixhobbits

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eesmith  7 months ago

My lawyer says his office runs on Microsoft 365. Is Google Docs really 50x over that? I don't even see how it's 50x over LibreOffice and a shared drive.

  • tocs3  7 months ago

    I think the "50x" is a little bit of a random number.

    If you are already writing good code it might be hard to get any great improvement. If you are a beginner without much training /experience it might not be hard to see orders of magnitude improvement.

    It might take some time though. When I have spoken to non coding people they seem to look at me like I am talking about flying to the moon. If computers are ever considered general tools and the general public every moves more towards more DIY and small business there might be more of an uptake.

  • sixhobbits  7 months ago

    Sure if it's online and multiplayer it's similar. My comment is not google over Microsoft but shared/multiplayer docs for tracking changes and reaching agreements in minutes for something that used to take (and for many still does take) weeks or months of manual reconciliation of printed paper documents