Posted by karpathy 3 hours ago
Definitely something worth exploring.
One of the positive effects of the recent AI wave is that it shows more folks are warming up to the idea of paying a subscription for tech. Perhaps, the next generation will grow up with tech that doesn't rely on addiction to earn ads money. The downside is that the gap between "folks who can afford tech" and "folks who cannot" might grow even more.
I would also be more impressed with it if they created their own video processing and serving stack.
Compare it to the widespread refusal to pay for Youtube Premium even as ads get worse there.
I made myself a thing that tries to answer the title + thumbnail from the transcript, and shows me the answer if there is a good one. Never launched it, but it's at youtldr.com if you want to try.
The main issue with Youtube are the ad rolls. The video content itself can be great. But I wouldn't wish those ads on my worst enemy. It's mind poison. Straight poison into your consciousness. AI generated ads for every conceivable image and status vulnerability. And they now do this weird thing where the ad is delivered as a pop song. Like a Taylor Swift engineered pop song for a Korean face mask. The song is 10 mins long about how this woman was happily married then divorced then saw her husband with a woman half his age and how that made her feel and how her self worth was tied to her marriage and her looks but also she's not just that but also somehow the solution is a Korean face mask. It was really traumatizing for me. You can see how much it infected my mind. It's poison.
I realised after a while that one of the main reasons I go online is to expand my horizons. I'm actively looking for something new or interesting or surprising that I might not have encountered or thought about before. I am also looking for perspective - give me a broad picture of how the world is so I can calibrate and introspect where my own perspective differs and could be updated. I want to see the things that don't fully align with my ideas.
So it turns out personalised feeds are actively curating against what I'm looking for. I'm curious if others are like me or is this just something weird about me. I think it is very much why I like Hacker News format. It's in the broad areas of my interests but it is anything but curated just for me.
It does need a new-to-old sort though, which is easy to add in.
If you watched all of these videos, you would be the smartest, most annoying person ever. Lol
well some might use it to listen to Rick Astley's Music
Seriously, thank you for prompting this into existence!
If you swipe away when it shows it's about an IoT doorbell you watched half, and if you swipe away after seeing the button makes it meow you watched the whole thing. In either case the algorithm thinks you liked it more than average.
In long-form videos this doesn't really work but you can use vague titles to achieve higher click rates. Taken from my actual homepage: "DON'T GIVE ME HOPE, DON'T LET ME HOPE THIS MUCH" "Did you know about these...?" "Calcium Carbide Trick" "The WORST skill to train on OSRS" "They Were Busy With Their Big Plans" "If you were trying to destroy the economy..." "What happens when we don't need each other any more?"
You know which one I'm not going to click on? "FRACTRAN: 14 fractions that produce infinite primes". That's because I already know FRACTRAN is an esoteric programming language written in fractions.
Do a good job training it and this isn't much of an issue, but give it an inch...
To me the most valuable part of this is the curation pipeline. I'd love to have access to those recommendations without needing to adopt an entirely separate viewing experience.
In my opinion this is the part that's holding back _a lot_ more people from publishing. It's a barrier that's surely about to fall. Still interested what steps you took (and manually, or Claude did it all?)
I've always been put off by the continuing financial obligations personally. Like I'll invest a considerable amount for one time things easily, but year after year with constantly increasing costs? No fuckin way.
people like us don't have that much time...