Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

george.mand.is

191–200 of 234 posts

Re: OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why use diffchecker when there’s a perfectly good LLM you could ask right there? lol

Assuming sarcasm but if not, because deterministic vs. nondeterministic output?

Make it semi deterministic with structured/constrained generation!

Re: OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

#192
post #119
post #13

With transcribing a talk by Andrej, you already picked the most challenging case possible, speed-wise. His natural talking speed is already >=1.5x that of a normal human. One of the people you absolutely have to set your YouTube speed back down to 1x when listening to follow what's going on. In the idea of making more of an OpenAI minute, don't send it any silence. E.g. ffmpeg -i video-audio.m4a \ -af "silenceremove=…

Andrej's talk seemed normal to listen at 2x but I've also listened to everything at 2x for a long time. Unfortunately a byproduct of listening to everything at 2x is I've had a number of folks say they have to watch my videos at 0.75x but even when I play back my own videos it feels painfully slow unless it's 2x. For reference I've always found John Carmack's pacing perfect / natural and watchable at 2x too. A recent…

This btw is also why spreading (speed reading) happens in American competitive debate. This gets ridiculed online but it's exactly why it happens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreading_(debate)

Re: OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

#193

I wonder how much time and battery transcoding/uploading/downloading over coffeeshop wifi would realy save vs just running it locally through optimized Whisper.

I had this same thought and won't pretend my fear was rational, haha.

One thing that I thought was fairly clear in my write-up but feels a little lost in the comments: I didn't just try this with whisper. I tried it with their newer gpt-4o-transcription model, which seems considerably faster. There's no way to run that one locally.

Re: OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

#194

I noticed something similar with images as inputs to Claude, you can scale down the images and still get good outputs. There is an accuracy drop off at a certain point but the token savings are worth doing a little tuning there.

Definitely in the same spirit!

Clearly the next thing we need to test is removing all the vowels from words, or something like that :)

Re: OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

#195
post #11

> Is It Accurate? > I don’t know—I didn’t watch it, lol. That was the whole point. And if that answer makes you uncomfortable, buckle-up for this future we're hurtling toward. Boy, howdy. This is a great bit of work, and the author accurately summarizes my discomfort

A lot of people read newspaper. Newspaper is essentially just an inaccurate summary of what really happened. So I don't find this realization that uncomfortable.

That's why I find the idea of training breaking news on Reddit or Twitter funny, wild exaggerations and targeted spin is the sort of stuff that does best on those sites and generates the most comments, 50% of the output would be lies.

Re: OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

#196
post #13

With transcribing a talk by Andrej, you already picked the most challenging case possible, speed-wise. His natural talking speed is already >=1.5x that of a normal human. One of the people you absolutely have to set your YouTube speed back down to 1x when listening to follow what's going on. In the idea of making more of an OpenAI minute, don't send it any silence. E.g. ffmpeg -i video-audio.m4a \ -af "silenceremove=…

From my own experience with whisper.cpp, normalizing the audio and removing silence not only shortens the process time significantly, but also increases a lot the quality of the transcription, as silence can mean hallucinations. You can do that graphically with Audacity too, if you do not want to deal with the command line. You also do not need any special hardware to run whisper.cpp, with the small model literally a…

Others pointed out the value of silence, but I just wanted to say it saddens me when humanity is misclassified as inefficiency. The other day Sam Altman made a jest about how much energy is wasted by people saying "thanks" to chatgpt. The corollary is how much human energy is wasted on humans saying thanks to each other. When making a judgement about inefficiency one is making a judgement on what is valuable, a very biased judgement that isn't necessarily aligned with what makes us thrive. =) (<-- a wasteful smiley)

Re: OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

#197
post #103
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, how might you improve those docs? They seem fairly reasonable to me

The documentation reads like it was written by a programmer who documented the different parameters to their implementation of a specific algorithm. Now when you as the user come along and want to use silenceremove, you'll have to carefully read through this, and build your own mental model of that algorithm, and then you'll be able to set these parameters accordingly. That takes a lot of time and energy, in this cas…

> "start_mode: Specify mode of detection of silence end at start": start_mode end at start?

In "start_mode", "start" means "initial", and "mode" means "method". But specifically, it's a method of figuring out where the silence ends.

> In the end, naming things is famously one of the two hard problems in computer science

It's also one of the hard problems in English.

Re: OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

#198
post #13

With transcribing a talk by Andrej, you already picked the most challenging case possible, speed-wise. His natural talking speed is already >=1.5x that of a normal human. One of the people you absolutely have to set your YouTube speed back down to 1x when listening to follow what's going on. In the idea of making more of an OpenAI minute, don't send it any silence. E.g. ffmpeg -i video-audio.m4a \ -af "silenceremove=…

I wish there was a 2.25x YouTube option for "normal" humans. I already use every shortcut, and listen at 2x 90% of the time. But Andrej I can't take faster than 1.25x

Meanwhile, I've found that just reading the transcript is often good enough.

Re: OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

#199
post #15
post #8

A point on skimming vs taking the time to read something properly. I read a transcript + summary of that exact talk. I thought it was fine, but uninteresting, I moved on. Later I saw it had been put on youtube and I was on the train, so I watched the whole thing at normal speed. I had a huge number of different ideas, thoughts and decisions, sparked by watching the whole thing. This happens to me in other areas too.…

Seriously this is bonkers to me. I, like many hackers, hated school because they just threw one-size-fits-all knowledge at you and here we are, paying for the privilege to have that in every facet of our lives. Reading is a pleasure. Watching a lecture or a talk and feeling the pieces fall into place is great. Having your brain work out the meaning of things is surely something that defines us as a species. We're wil…

> I, like many hackers, hated school because they just threw one-size-fits-all knowledge at you and here we are, paying for the privilege to have that in every facet of our lives.

But now we get to browse the knowledge rather than having it thrown at us. That's more important than the quality or formatting of the content.

Re: OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

#200
post #15
post #8

A point on skimming vs taking the time to read something properly. I read a transcript + summary of that exact talk. I thought it was fine, but uninteresting, I moved on. Later I saw it had been put on youtube and I was on the train, so I watched the whole thing at normal speed. I had a huge number of different ideas, thoughts and decisions, sparked by watching the whole thing. This happens to me in other areas too.…

Seriously this is bonkers to me. I, like many hackers, hated school because they just threw one-size-fits-all knowledge at you and here we are, paying for the privilege to have that in every facet of our lives. Reading is a pleasure. Watching a lecture or a talk and feeling the pieces fall into place is great. Having your brain work out the meaning of things is surely something that defines us as a species. We're wil…

> I don't get how we can all be so blind at what this is going to create.

There is too much information. people are trying to optimize breadth over depth, but obviously there are costs to this.

Post reply on HN