Readit Newsljoshua commented on · Posted by u/herbertl
Just a plug for the book this content is derived from, Noam Wasserman's "The Founders Dilemmas." It lays out so many facets of startup decisions that deserve thought from the outset to prevent issues. It also strikes a good balance IMO between being based in statistics and research, and including anecdotes from actual experiences that bring the statistics full circle. I'd highly recommend it.
ljoshua commented on I ditched Spotify and set up my own music stack leshicodes.github.io/blog... · Posted by u/starkparker
I’ve never been on the Spotify train, but with an all-Apple household, including HomePod Minis in multiple rooms, I’ve been stuck in iTunes/Apple Music land. We own our music, which is nice. And I dutifully pay the $24.99 per year for iTunes Match so that I can tell Siri what to play on HomePods, but I will be 0% surprised when they deprecate that service.
Anyone have a good non-Apple way of getting Siri to play songs from a personal music collection on HomePods? My kids use it most.
ljoshua commented on The last 11M iTunes users, and why they stick around washingtonpost.com/entert... · Posted by u/reaperducer
Just yesterday I paid my annual $24.99 iTunes Match subscription to keep my music library synced between my laptops, phones, and HomePods. It’s a beautiful thing, but it feels tenuous every time that renewal goes in. Will it be my last? I hope not!
There is just something about actually owning the music that appeals to me and my wife (and yes, we’re children of the original iTunes era, when you could load up your playlist and then click the cool nuclear-looking button in iTunes to burn it to a CD). It won’t last forever, but I’ll keep with it till it dies because it works.
ljoshua commented on How large are large language models? gist.github.com/rain-1/cf... · Posted by u/rain1
Less a technical comment and more just a mind-blown comment, but I still can’t get over just how much data is compressed into and available in these downloadable models. Yesterday I was on a plane with no WiFi, but had gemma3:12b downloaded through Ollama. Was playing around with it and showing my kids, and we fired history questions at it, questions about recent video games, and some animal fact questions. It wasn’t perfect, but holy cow the breadth of information that is embedded in an 8.1 GB file is incredible! Lossy, sure, but a pretty amazing way of compressing all of human knowledge into something incredibly contained.
ljoshua commented on NotebookLM Audio Overviews are now available in over 50 languages blog.google/technology/go... · Posted by u/saikatsg
Why not simply upload the pdf version of the scanned book or document? Extracting the text out of a scanned document via GCP Document AI API sounds like unnecessary use of resources
I was running into context window issues doing this. I could have gone in and split up the scanned book into chapters or something to get around this, and did that for a couple of subjects. But it wasn't too much work (and literally cost me pennies, like six of them) to get the pure text extract, and it's pretty easy to work with now. (Besides, which random dev doesn't love a little side challenge to explore new APIs at home every now and then? ;) )
ljoshua commented on NotebookLM Audio Overviews are now available in over 50 languages blog.google/technology/go... · Posted by u/saikatsg
> for my homeschooled kids
Learning requires making mistakes. Kids need to learn social skills in low-stakes environments. School is the best environment for this. When a person misses this part of their childhood education, they may struggle to learn these skills later in life.
It sounds like you may be speaking from experience, and if so, I respect that.
My kids have done both public schooling and now homeschooling. For a variety of personal reasons, public schooling was not going to be an option for a couple of them, so we're trying this out now and it has been successful. We are tightly integrated into a very active church group, and they have lots of social interactions on a regular basis there, as well as opportunities with other homeschooled kids around town.
It's definitely a balance, and there's no one silver bullet on either side of the fence, but the best any of us can do is actively strive for giving each child the best and most appropriate experiences for them.
ljoshua commented on NotebookLM Audio Overviews are now available in over 50 languages blog.google/technology/go... · Posted by u/saikatsg
I hope you encourage your kids to actually read as well.
Oh don’t worry, they make excellent use of their library cards. :)
ljoshua commented on NotebookLM Audio Overviews are now available in over 50 languages blog.google/technology/go... · Posted by u/saikatsg
NotebookLM audio overviews/podcasts have been an absolute boon for my homeschooled kids. They devour audiobooks and podcasts, and they love learning by listening to these first. Then when we come together for class, we discuss what was covered, and can spend time diving into specifics or doing activities based on the content. It’s super nice to have another option for a learning medium here.
To generate them, we’ve scanned the physical book pages, and then with a simple Python script fed the images into GCP’s Document AI to extract the text en-masse, and concatenated the results together into a text-only version of the chapter. Give that text to NotebookLM and run with it.