Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

There are certainly times I would love to see a presentation like this reformatted as an article.

I tried pulling out the Youtube transcript, but it was very uncomfortable to read with asides and jokes and "ums" that are all native artifacts of speaking in front of a crowd but that only represent noise in when converted to long written form.



Shouldn't some AI be able to clean that up for you? This seems something LLMs should be well-suited for.

---

FWIW, I'm the speaker and let me be honest with you: I'm super unmotivated to write nowadays.

In the past, my usual MO was writing a bunch of blog posts and submit the ones that resonated to CfPs (e.g. <https://hynek.me/articles/python-subclassing-redux/> → <https://hynek.me/talks/subclassing/>).

However, nowadays thanks to the recent-ish changes in Twitter and Google, my only chance to have my stuff read by a nontrivial amount of people is hitting HN frontage which is a lottery. It's so bad I even got into YouTubing to get a roll at the algorithm wheel.

It takes (me) a lot of work to crystallize and compress my thoughts like this. Giving it as a talk at a big conference, at least opens the door to interesting IRL interactions which are important (to me), because I'm an introvert.

I can't stress enough how we're currently eating the seed corn by killing the public web.


Here's an attempt at cleaning it up with Gemini 2.5 Pro: https://rentry.org/nyznvoy5

I just pasted the YouTube link into AI Studio and gave it this prompt if you want to replicate:

reformat this talk as an article. remove ums/ahs, but do not summarize, the context should be substantively the same. include content from the slides as well if possible.


Pretty good, except it’s not Bismarck but Fontane. ;) Also, I’m comparing myself to CGP Grey, not whatever it’s transcribed. :D


Thanks, saved me so much time




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2027 batch! Applications are open till November 2.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: