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TL;DW: Too Long; Didn't Watch Distill YouTube Videos to the Relevant Information

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Re: TL;DW: Too Long; Didn't Watch Distill YouTube Videos to the Relevant Information

#181

Post by mazambazz »

DennisP wrote: post #151
righthand wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chatting with AI bots. I agree that this mentality of works being “too long so don’t ingest it”, is not a healthy way to go about life and thinking in general.

It's not that, it's "too long with low information density so ingest it more efficiently." That way we can spend our time on things that are more productive or enjoyable.

Videos are typically already summarized substitutes for complex topics--topics for which you might need to read text or literature to get the full context of. Now we want to min-max and summarize the video themselves. Then what? If that video summary is too long, we throw it into another LLM to summarize the summary of the summary? To what extent does this end?

There's more to learning than just information density. There's visuals, presentations, explanations. And if you want more proof, then a video played a 2x speed is twice the information density, yet we all know that many videos would be extremely hard to retain anything from at that speed.

Re: TL;DW: Too Long; Didn't Watch Distill YouTube Videos to the Relevant Information

#182

Post by jamesy0ung »

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote: post #147
stong1 wrote: post #128

Hi HN! I'm the author of this service. Thank you for your support. There may have been some temporary downtime due to residential proxy running out of bandwidth. I have purchased additional bandwidth. (I run this service for free.) There also may be some errors with particular videos because they are not accessible in certain regions. For now all requests to YouTube originate from United States, but open to change in…

> open-source > OPENAI_API_KEY Choose one.

If you don't like it, just edit the open-source code to point to a locally hosted open-source llm.

Re: TL;DW: Too Long; Didn't Watch Distill YouTube Videos to the Relevant Information

#183

Post by satvikpendem »

meroes wrote: post #143
_Algernon_ wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you need 4 extensions (counting ublock as well) to make a site useable, maybe it is time to reconsider what site you spend your time on?

Ya we are sick and addicted. Not only do I need the above 4, I need a separate browser because YouTube breaks with Firefox, private tabs to not taint my preferences when I watch one-ofs, and other addons such as a channel and video blocker.

Interesting, I'm using Firefox, what breaks with YouTube for you? I also like PocketTube for subscription management as I find that much better than trying to trawl through the mountains of BS on the homepage.

Re: TL;DW: Too Long; Didn't Watch Distill YouTube Videos to the Relevant Information

#184

Post by satvikpendem »

arccy wrote: post #164
satvikpendem wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher speeds than 2x. I usually watch at 3x and sometimes more (sometimes with captions turned on). Keyboard shortcuts as well, as others have mentioned.

the built in one has keyboard shortcuts too:

There are more advanced keyboard shortcuts than just that when using an extension like YouTube Enhancer which includes the aforementioned higher speeds.

Re: TL;DW: Too Long; Didn't Watch Distill YouTube Videos to the Relevant Information

#185

Post by noname120 »

stong1 wrote: post #128

Hi HN! I'm the author of this service. Thank you for your support. There may have been some temporary downtime due to residential proxy running out of bandwidth. I have purchased additional bandwidth. (I run this service for free.) There also may be some errors with particular videos because they are not accessible in certain regions. For now all requests to YouTube originate from United States, but open to change in…

Out of curiosity which residential proxy service do you use?

Re: TL;DW: Too Long; Didn't Watch Distill YouTube Videos to the Relevant Information

#186

Post by NewUser76312 »

stong1 wrote: post #174
NewUser76312 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey this is really cool, I literally had the same idea about a month ago but ultimately decided to not pursue it. Glad someone else did. A few quick Qs - 1) Do you use the available auto-generated transcripts from youtube? Or do you do any audio parsing? I know transcripts aren't always available. 2) Do you have any plans to monetize in some way, do you think it would be possible? It's definitely a neat product but a…

1.) We do no TTS of our own. We either use the original transcripts uploaded manually by the YouTuber or we use the auto-generated ones supplied by Google. 2.) No, I plan to keep it free as the operational costs are relatively minimal.

Thanks for your response. Yeah that's nice and simple. I wonder how much you'll burn keeping it up for free, are we talking like on the order of $20/mo? If you use models like 4o-mini it might even be less, that thing is insanely cheap and not terrible. Cheers

Re: TL;DW: Too Long; Didn't Watch Distill YouTube Videos to the Relevant Information

#187

Post by [deleted] »

henry2023 wrote: post #24

What if we summarize all the information in the world into a few hundred volumes of human knowledge, then summarize those into a 10,000 pages book, then that into a 10 long form essays, then those into a 100,000 chars blog post, then that into a pamphlet and finally we summarize one more time into a single tweet.

[deleted]

Re: TL;DW: Too Long; Didn't Watch Distill YouTube Videos to the Relevant Information

#188

Post by dinkumthinkum »

kragen wrote: post #19

What I'd really like is a service that edits down YouTube videos by removing all the stock footage and talking head crap, then speeding up the audio to fit over the remaining novel information—whether that's new battlefield footage, electron micrographs, demonstrations of machining techniques, or just elephant toothpaste. The talking head filler seems like it would be easy to recognize, but stock footage recognition…

If that's what you want then why would you want a service like this? Surely there would be a non-video news sources of electron micrographs or elephant toothpaste for which there would probably be hundreds or thousands of LLM TL;DR things.

Re: TL;DW: Too Long; Didn't Watch Distill YouTube Videos to the Relevant Information

#189

Post by dinkumthinkum »

soraminazuki wrote: post #38
satvikpendem wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use SponsorBlock (be sure to enable all categories of blocking such as filler content, not just sponsors), DeArrow (de-clickbaits thumbnails and titles) and a video speed changer extension to enable much of your stated functionality, though of course not all. I've saved likely years of watching due to this combination.

How did your viewing experience change after using DeArrow? I'm curious because DeArrow has a great reputation, yet my gut feeling tells me that I should avoid watching clickbait videos altogether.

If you avoid watching clickbait thumbnailed videos then you will miss out on a lot of good content. Perhaps you are fine with this but if the implication is that a clickbait thumbnail implies the video is not good, this is an indicator that, at this point has almost no correlation with the video quality. This is because content creators, pretty much have to use clickbait thumbnails to get views or traction, largely because of the way YouTube's "algorithm" works.

Re: TL;DW: Too Long; Didn't Watch Distill YouTube Videos to the Relevant Information

#190

Post by dinkumthinkum »

jasode wrote: post #82
_Algernon_ wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Instead what should they do? Read a book, touch grass, etc. >They clearly enjoy watching and digesting information from YouTube- the biggest platform for this. I'd probably enjoy heroin but I still choose not do take it because I know it's not good for me. What's your point?

>Read a book, touch grass, etc. There's a ton of useful information that's only available in Youtube videos and not books such as DIY tutorials, repairs, etc. Unfortunately, many helpful videos also include useless fluff. E.g. a "good" 10 minute video on how to disassemble a Samsung dryer to replace the heating element also has 2 extra minutes of "click my link to Nord VPN" and "please smash that Like button and subs…

I agree with you about there not being anything wrong with watching YT videos (no virtue signaling about "grass" here) but at the same time, couldn't you just watch the video on 1.5x - 2x? You can easily skip the VPN ad reads, I don't know, how valuable is your time, really, at the level of minutes? I know that there will be people on here that have autistic levels of min-max optimization of their entire lives like some kind of techno-vampires or something but if you're watching a couple dozen videos, plus or minus, a day is this really enough time to be worth a bunch of micro-optimization?
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