Oh you're that Wesley. Big fan of your podcasts!

Ex-historian here, now an engineer. Ben is one of the few historians really thinking in depth about the implications of LLMs for historical research and teaching: both the good (wow, they are really great at transcribing difficult handwritten documents now; you can use Claude Code to vibe code up quick visualizations for your research or teaching that would have taken weeks of work before), and the bad (students submitting AI-generated essays). Highly recommended reading.

It's also nice to see a working historian who posts to HN. (If there are any others, please raise your hand!) Our community is richer for the wide variety of non-engineering professions represented here, from medical doctors to truckers to woodworkers to pilots to farmers. Please keep posting, all of you.

The audio transcript exercise here is particularly interesting from a journalism perspective.

Summarizing a 3.5 hour council meeting is something of a holy grail of AI-assisted reporting. There are a LOT of meetings like that, and newspapers (especially smaller ones) can no longer afford to have a human reporter sit through them all.

I tried this prompt (against audio from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgJ7x7R6gy0):

  Output a Markdown transcript of this meeting. Include speaker
  names and timestamps. Start with an outline of the key
  meeting sections, each with a title and summary and timestamp
  and list of participating names. Note in bold if anyone
  raised their voices, interrupted each other or had
  disagreements. Then follow with the full transcript.

Here's the result: https://gist.github.com/simonw/0b7bc23adb6698f376aebfd700943...

I'm not sure quite how to grade it here, especially since I haven't sat through the whole 3.5 hour meeting video myself.

It appears to have captured the gist of the meeting very well, but the fact that the transcript isn't close to an exact match to what was said - and the timestamps are incorrect - means it's very hard to trust the output. Could it have hallucinated things that didn't happen? Those can at least be spotted by digging into the video (or the YouTube transcript) to check that they occurred... but what about if there was a key point that Gemini 3 omitted entirely?

> I have seen what people are capable of doing when their tools get out of the way, and they are free to just create. This is how world class athletes, musicians, artists, writers, and of course programmers take what is in their mind and translate it into reality.

I think this is a fallacy. If you approach the question of how these people achieve the things they do with a bias towards tooling then you'll come to the conclusion that it plays a big role in their success.

In reality, many of these folks start with a very strong drive to achieve something and then the rest sort of follows. If you want to be a world class musician, start practicing an instrument. Ideally fall in love with music. The rigorous and meticulous practice routine comes later.

In other words: you can have the world's best tooling that gets out of the way, but you're still as unmotivated to do anything as before.

I think it's a cool idea and it sounds like a fun and creative endeavor. I don't want to talk it down. But I also wouldn't want folks to get the, in my opinion, misguided impression that "tooling -> success" is the correct order.

This is a nothing burger blog post that likely made it to the front page because it mentions "LLM" in the title. Worse yet, it's an ad actually.

Of course, your opinion may be subject to selection bias (i.e., you are only judging the art that you became aware was AI generated).

It’s expensive because people are willing to pay a lot for it.

Complaints about child care costs never end in “so I stopped paying them”.

I completely disagree with the premise of the article that draws are most boring and the wider the score difference the more interesting the game is.

Frequently draws are very exciting, they can make compelling viewing. In a game that is completely dominated by one team, there can be very little of interest.

An alternative metric would be the degree of uncertainty/jeopardy in the game. So a game that ends 1-1 has a high degree of jeopardy because at any moment a team can score and take point from the other team.

The Warp terminal[1] is excellent for this type of thing. In agent mode, you just describe what you want to have happen and it generates the proper command(s) (that you can approve before running).

I use it a lot to convert videos and turn a folder of tiff files into pngs at 1/2 size, etc. It's great at generating FFMEG commands and chaining the right tools together.

[1] https://www.warp.dev

I’ve been experimenting with making my last meal of the day as far from my sleep as possible ideally waking up at 5am, drinking water / vitamins, exercising by lifting my dumb bells in my studio apartment, eating a 1k calorie breakfast and 1k calorie lunch and done with eating by ~1-2 so I have 4-6 hours to digest before bed

Best sleep I’ve ever gotten.

You don’t know what you’re missing out on until you’ve experienced not good but GREAT sleep.

if that’s too extreme avoid too much water before bed if you’re getting up to pee you are ruining your sleep