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gumboshoesyesterday at 3:41 PM4 repliesview on HN

I have permanent prompts in Gemini settings to tell it to never include videos in its answers. Never ever for any reason. Yet of course it always does. Even if I trusted any of the video authors or material - and I don't know them so how can I trust them? - I still don't watch a video that could be text I could read in one-tenth of the time. Text is superior to video 99% of the time in my experience.


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al_borlandyesterday at 8:55 PM

> I still don't watch a video that could be text I could read in one-tenth of the time.

I know someone like this. Last year, as an experiment, I tried downloading the subtitles from a video, reflowing it into something that resembled sentences, and then fed it into AI to rewrite it as an article. It worked decently well.

When macOS 26 came out I was going to see if I could make an Apple Shortcut to do this (since I just used Apple’s AI to do the rewrite), but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

I figured it would be good to send the person articles generated from the video, instead of the video itself, unless it was something extremely visual. It might also be nice to summarize a long podcast. How many 3 hour podcasts can a person listen to in a week?

sidewndr46yesterday at 4:26 PM

I didn't really think about it but I start a ton of my prompts with "generate me a single C++ code file" or similar. There's always 2-3 paragraphs of prose in there. Why is it consuming output tokens on generating prose? I just wanted the code.

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fwipyesterday at 6:17 PM

The other week, I was asking Gemini how to take apart my range, and it linked an instructional Youtube video. I clicked on it, only to be instantly rickrolled.

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jeffbeeyesterday at 3:47 PM

That's interesting ... why would you want to wall off and ignore what is undoubtedly one of the largest repositories of knowledge (and trivia and ignorance, but also knowledge) ever assembled? The idea that a person can read and understand an article faster than they can watch a video with the same level of comprehension does not, to me, seem obviously true. If it were true there would be no role for things like university lecturers. Everyone would just read the text.

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