6 ms·

I wish there was a TL;DW bot to summarize a videos like this. I’m curious but not in a place i could easily watch a video.

drekipus 2y ago
Watch later
TowerTall 2y ago
Someone posted this link on HN a short while ago https://www.tldw.pro/ https://www.tldw.pro/
cglong 2y ago
You can ask Gemini to summarize a YouTube video for you! Also if you have YouTube Premium on Android, you can ask questions about the current video. Here's Gemini's summary of GP's video: https://g.co/gemini/share/8c0417024a3f https://g.co/gemini/share/8c0417024a3f
- hedora 2y ago
  Alibaba just released 100 large models. One takes a 20 second video and summarizes it. Now I wonder if it supports audio. If so, I want the relevant browser plugin so I can read YouTube on my machine!
chmod775 2y ago
Asianometry's videos are good precisely because of the detail and background he goes into. If you summarize them you take that away and pretty much just end up with what has already been said here.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  It's a 20 minute long video, the information density can almost certainly be denser.
  - chmod775 2y ago
    > It's a 20 minute long video You mean 20 minutes short. There's enough in there to blow it up into a 45 minute documentary at least. You already spent more than 20 minutes commenting under this story. > The information density can almost certainly be denser. And what would be the point of that? There's a limited amount of information one can retain in a short span of time, and it's not like he repeats himself or has a verbose style. I already go back and rewatch his videos later, taking new pieces of information from them. Again, if you want the tldw, it's already in the comments here. If you want the details, go watch the video. The video is being linked because the video itself is good. Wanting a summary that retains the same qualities is like wanting to have your cake and eat it too.
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      I generally read faster than some narrator slowly babbling on over a meandering script, so that is 20 minutes long. If the video is 20 minutes long, I wager I can read an equivalent article in less than 5 minutes and come out enlightened all the same. Videos are great for getting the eyes of the general man who doesn't have a preconceived interest in a subject, you're trying to bait clicks and videos are great for that. For people already interested in the subject though? Videos are almost always a literal waste of time compared to a well written article. And if you wanna say I have a short attention span: Sue me. I'm a 35 year old millenial, we're infamous for having short attention spans.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - SllX 2y ago
        You my friend may benefit from developing the arts of the 2x speed, the skipping, the scrubbing and the stopping. Not every video is worth watching to completion (some are, you get a feel for it), there may be background details you want to skip or scrub through eyeballing the thumbnails depending on familiarity with the subject matter and sometimes everything you want to know is right at the end of the video in a neat little summary. The comments can even give you some insight into where the video is going and whether you want to continue if you read through some of the top ones during playback. I’m not much younger than you, but watching and re-pacing YouTube for educational/information videos is a skill that can be refined and the visual imagery can provide details that again, depending on what it is, might be missed in a written summary. And hey, if none of this is for you, maybe this comment helps someone else out.
- immibis 2y ago
  I tend to bookmark Asianometry videos to watch later because they seem very informative but I'm rarely in the mood to actually listen to the very dry documentary style. They don't make good background noise for instance - I need to focus to accept the new information. At the same time they don't naturally attract my focus.
ranger_danger 2y ago
there are many such sites if you just google for them
makeitdouble 2y ago
You do you, but I'd chime in on why it's not recommended: any simple answer to that question will just be "there's a long history and international context that led to a complex situation". That's the perfect TL;DW but I don't think it helps you much. 20 min is short for such a vague question, and you can watch at 2+x the speed if info density is so paramount. To note it still glosses over an incredible amount of critical things, it's just not a topic that can be shortened that much for anyone actually caring about understanding it.
- nottorp 2y ago
  > 20 min is short for such a vague question, and you can watch at 2+x the speed if info density is so paramount. Interesting how a lot of defenders just assume delivering the same info in writing is not feasible. Has the skill to read/write become a competitive advantage again, like in the medieval ages when 0.1% of the population knew how to do it?
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    To me it comes down to how the creator decided to publish their piece. If there is no specific accessibility need, getting it in the original format on the chose platform would be my primary choice. In particular it's not a time sensitive subject and watch it later sounds easy enough. You seem to put reading/writing on a pedestal, but as you point out we're not in the medieval ages anymore, nobody should feel superior because they read it instead of watching it.
    - nottorp 2y ago
      > You seem to put reading/writing on a pedestal No, I put my personal time on a pedestal. Videos are slow, and I'd rather spend my life in other ways.
    - Xelbair 2y ago
      No, i just value my time and ability to search information. plus i'm unable to consume media in the 'background'.
skissane 2y ago
I didn't watch the video but I skim read the YouTube transcript. The video doesn't propose any single explanation, just a series of events all of which arguably set back Japan's indigenous software industry. A few of the incidents it mentions include (my summary below is more based on my own knowledge of the topic, than what the video specifically mentions): Fujitsu and Hitachi cloned IBM mainframes. So did lots of other companies. At the time they started doing it, IBM was (intentionally) releasing their software into the public domain. However, in 1969, IBM announced they'd start copyrighting their software. Initially they still released the core OS (primarily MVS) into the public domain, and only copyrighted add-ons. However, as the 1970s progressed, more and more new functionality went into the copyrighted add-ons, while the public domain core received only limited enhancements. Finally, in the early 1980s, they put the whole OS under copyright. This left Fujitsu and Hitachi in a difficult position. They were used to getting their mainframe OS from IBM for free, and suddenly they couldn't legally do that any more. Legal choices for them would have included: (1) fork IBM's operating system and create new enhancements themselves (either clone IBM's copyrighted enhancements by clean-room engineering, or design their own incompatible enhancements), (2) negotiate with IBM for a license (unclear if IBM would agree, and may have cost $$$), (3) license an alternative operating system (e.g. UNIX), (4) build their own OS from scratch. But none of those options appealed to them (or maybe they tried some and it wasn't working out), so they decide to go with option (5): illegally copy IBM's copyrighted mainframe operating systems. They used the fact that IBM still shipped the source code for much of its copyrighted software to customers, and somehow got customers to (illegally) hand that source code over. They made rather trivial changes to the source code to try to hide the copying–for example, Fujitsu renamed a lot of IBM routines whose name started with the letter I, to start with the letter J instead. They searched and replaced IBM copyright notices with their own. They even bribed IBM employees to give them IBM confidential material (the IBM employees accepted the bribes as part of an FBI sting operation). And IBM found out, and sued both Fujitsu and Hitachi, and the settlement of the suit required Fujitsu and Hitachi to pay IBM hundreds of millions of dollars, and also banned Fujitsu and Hitachi from continuing to sell the software outside Japan (IBM agreed to let them continue selling it in Japan, in exchange for them paying licensing fees.) Other stuff I know about this topic (not in the video): In the 1980s and early 1990s, Fujitsu mainframes were quite popular in Australia, but due to this settlement, by the end of the 1990s, basically all of Fujitsu's Australian mainframe customers had either migrated to IBM mainframes, or else to non-mainframe platforms. There are still Fujitsu and Hitachi mainframes running in Japan today, but they are deeply legacy, basically stuck in the 1990s – they didn't follow IBM's transition to 64-bit in 2001. Fujitsu and Hitachi weren't the only mainframe vendors faced with this problem, but other vendors sought to solve it within the confines of the law. In the US, Amdahl had the same issue, but it decided to focus on their Unix variant UTS instead of MVS. (Amdahl did have an internal project to build a clone of IBM's MVS, apparently based on legal clean-room reverse engineering, called Aspen, but it got caught in development hell, and Amdahl cancelled it before they ever officially shipped it, although possibly a few customers got beta test versions.) Germany's Nixdorf had a fork of IBM's DOS/VS operating system (for low-end mainframes), which they got by acquiring the American company TCSC; they ported the Unix clone Coherent to run on top of it, before killing it off in the late 1980s when Nixdorf decided to give up on mainframes and focus purely on Unix instead. Other mainframe vendors didn't have this problem because their operating systems were not based on IBM's – for example, the other Japanese mainframe vendor, NEC, their mainframes run a fork of GE/Honeywell/Bull's GCOS operating system (ACOS), which NEC legally licensed. Another incident the video discusses is the TRON project, which was a Japanese indigenous standard for operating system APIs, endorsed by the Japanese government, conceptually similar to POSIX. It included both variants aimed at general purpose computing (BTRON) and embedded systems (ITRON). However, this frightened the US software industry, which convinced the US government to declare TRON a "trade barrier". And that mostly killed TRON as an operating system. TRON didn't die completely, it still sees some use in embedded systems even today (the video mentions the Nintendo Switch Joy-Con controllers run it), but it never achieved the original vision of becoming Japan's standard operating system. Instead, Microsoft Windows did. And then there were also macroeconomic issues (Japan's real estate crisis in the 1990s), and cultural issues – it mentions how the Japanese government encouraged Japanese industry to focus on copying successful Western technologies, even improving them incrementally in the process, as opposed to coming up with fundamentally novel technologies of their own. That approach served Japan very well for industries such as cars, but doesn't work so well for the software industry.
Findecanor 2y ago
I tend to just listen to Asianometry as a podcast while resting or doing menial tasks at home.
littlecranky67 2y ago
There is kagi (paid search engine) summarizer for youtube videos: https://kagi.com/summarizer https://kagi.com/summarizer As for the above link, it gives: "Japan has a large trade deficit in software, importing far more software and services than it exports. Despite having iconic hardware companies, Japan lacks major software giants like Microsoft or Oracle. This is due to a history of government policies that favored hardware over software development, as well as a shortage of skilled software engineers and a lack of software startups in Japan. While Japan has made efforts to develop domestic software platforms, they have largely failed to gain traction. The video suggests there are no easy solutions to Japan's software industry challenges."

drekipus 2y ago

Watch later

TowerTall 2y ago

Someone posted this link on HN a short while ago https://www.tldw.pro/ https://www.tldw.pro/

cglong 2y ago

You can ask Gemini to summarize a YouTube video for you! Also if you have YouTube Premium on Android, you can ask questions about the current video. Here's Gemini's summary of GP's video: https://g.co/gemini/share/8c0417024a3f https://g.co/gemini/share/8c0417024a3f

hedora 2y ago
Alibaba just released 100 large models. One takes a 20 second video and summarizes it. Now I wonder if it supports audio. If so, I want the relevant browser plugin so I can read YouTube on my machine!

chmod775 2y ago

Asianometry's videos are good precisely because of the detail and background he goes into. If you summarize them you take that away and pretty much just end up with what has already been said here.

Dalewyn 2y ago
It's a 20 minute long video, the information density can almost certainly be denser.
- chmod775 2y ago
  > It's a 20 minute long video You mean 20 minutes short. There's enough in there to blow it up into a 45 minute documentary at least. You already spent more than 20 minutes commenting under this story. > The information density can almost certainly be denser. And what would be the point of that? There's a limited amount of information one can retain in a short span of time, and it's not like he repeats himself or has a verbose style. I already go back and rewatch his videos later, taking new pieces of information from them. Again, if you want the tldw, it's already in the comments here. If you want the details, go watch the video. The video is being linked because the video itself is good. Wanting a summary that retains the same qualities is like wanting to have your cake and eat it too.
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    I generally read faster than some narrator slowly babbling on over a meandering script, so that is 20 minutes long. If the video is 20 minutes long, I wager I can read an equivalent article in less than 5 minutes and come out enlightened all the same. Videos are great for getting the eyes of the general man who doesn't have a preconceived interest in a subject, you're trying to bait clicks and videos are great for that. For people already interested in the subject though? Videos are almost always a literal waste of time compared to a well written article. And if you wanna say I have a short attention span: Sue me. I'm a 35 year old millenial, we're infamous for having short attention spans.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - SllX 2y ago
      You my friend may benefit from developing the arts of the 2x speed, the skipping, the scrubbing and the stopping. Not every video is worth watching to completion (some are, you get a feel for it), there may be background details you want to skip or scrub through eyeballing the thumbnails depending on familiarity with the subject matter and sometimes everything you want to know is right at the end of the video in a neat little summary. The comments can even give you some insight into where the video is going and whether you want to continue if you read through some of the top ones during playback. I’m not much younger than you, but watching and re-pacing YouTube for educational/information videos is a skill that can be refined and the visual imagery can provide details that again, depending on what it is, might be missed in a written summary. And hey, if none of this is for you, maybe this comment helps someone else out.
immibis 2y ago
I tend to bookmark Asianometry videos to watch later because they seem very informative but I'm rarely in the mood to actually listen to the very dry documentary style. They don't make good background noise for instance - I need to focus to accept the new information. At the same time they don't naturally attract my focus.

ranger_danger 2y ago

there are many such sites if you just google for them

makeitdouble 2y ago

You do you, but I'd chime in on why it's not recommended: any simple answer to that question will just be "there's a long history and international context that led to a complex situation". That's the perfect TL;DW but I don't think it helps you much. 20 min is short for such a vague question, and you can watch at 2+x the speed if info density is so paramount. To note it still glosses over an incredible amount of critical things, it's just not a topic that can be shortened that much for anyone actually caring about understanding it.

nottorp 2y ago
> 20 min is short for such a vague question, and you can watch at 2+x the speed if info density is so paramount. Interesting how a lot of defenders just assume delivering the same info in writing is not feasible. Has the skill to read/write become a competitive advantage again, like in the medieval ages when 0.1% of the population knew how to do it?
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  To me it comes down to how the creator decided to publish their piece. If there is no specific accessibility need, getting it in the original format on the chose platform would be my primary choice. In particular it's not a time sensitive subject and watch it later sounds easy enough. You seem to put reading/writing on a pedestal, but as you point out we're not in the medieval ages anymore, nobody should feel superior because they read it instead of watching it.
  - nottorp 2y ago
    > You seem to put reading/writing on a pedestal No, I put my personal time on a pedestal. Videos are slow, and I'd rather spend my life in other ways.
  - Xelbair 2y ago
    No, i just value my time and ability to search information. plus i'm unable to consume media in the 'background'.

skissane 2y ago

I didn't watch the video but I skim read the YouTube transcript. The video doesn't propose any single explanation, just a series of events all of which arguably set back Japan's indigenous software industry. A few of the incidents it mentions include (my summary below is more based on my own knowledge of the topic, than what the video specifically mentions): Fujitsu and Hitachi cloned IBM mainframes. So did lots of other companies. At the time they started doing it, IBM was (intentionally) releasing their software into the public domain. However, in 1969, IBM announced they'd start copyrighting their software. Initially they still released the core OS (primarily MVS) into the public domain, and only copyrighted add-ons. However, as the 1970s progressed, more and more new functionality went into the copyrighted add-ons, while the public domain core received only limited enhancements. Finally, in the early 1980s, they put the whole OS under copyright. This left Fujitsu and Hitachi in a difficult position. They were used to getting their mainframe OS from IBM for free, and suddenly they couldn't legally do that any more. Legal choices for them would have included: (1) fork IBM's operating system and create new enhancements themselves (either clone IBM's copyrighted enhancements by clean-room engineering, or design their own incompatible enhancements), (2) negotiate with IBM for a license (unclear if IBM would agree, and may have cost $$$), (3) license an alternative operating system (e.g. UNIX), (4) build their own OS from scratch. But none of those options appealed to them (or maybe they tried some and it wasn't working out), so they decide to go with option (5): illegally copy IBM's copyrighted mainframe operating systems. They used the fact that IBM still shipped the source code for much of its copyrighted software to customers, and somehow got customers to (illegally) hand that source code over. They made rather trivial changes to the source code to try to hide the copying–for example, Fujitsu renamed a lot of IBM routines whose name started with the letter I, to start with the letter J instead. They searched and replaced IBM copyright notices with their own. They even bribed IBM employees to give them IBM confidential material (the IBM employees accepted the bribes as part of an FBI sting operation). And IBM found out, and sued both Fujitsu and Hitachi, and the settlement of the suit required Fujitsu and Hitachi to pay IBM hundreds of millions of dollars, and also banned Fujitsu and Hitachi from continuing to sell the software outside Japan (IBM agreed to let them continue selling it in Japan, in exchange for them paying licensing fees.) Other stuff I know about this topic (not in the video): In the 1980s and early 1990s, Fujitsu mainframes were quite popular in Australia, but due to this settlement, by the end of the 1990s, basically all of Fujitsu's Australian mainframe customers had either migrated to IBM mainframes, or else to non-mainframe platforms. There are still Fujitsu and Hitachi mainframes running in Japan today, but they are deeply legacy, basically stuck in the 1990s – they didn't follow IBM's transition to 64-bit in 2001. Fujitsu and Hitachi weren't the only mainframe vendors faced with this problem, but other vendors sought to solve it within the confines of the law. In the US, Amdahl had the same issue, but it decided to focus on their Unix variant UTS instead of MVS. (Amdahl did have an internal project to build a clone of IBM's MVS, apparently based on legal clean-room reverse engineering, called Aspen, but it got caught in development hell, and Amdahl cancelled it before they ever officially shipped it, although possibly a few customers got beta test versions.) Germany's Nixdorf had a fork of IBM's DOS/VS operating system (for low-end mainframes), which they got by acquiring the American company TCSC; they ported the Unix clone Coherent to run on top of it, before killing it off in the late 1980s when Nixdorf decided to give up on mainframes and focus purely on Unix instead. Other mainframe vendors didn't have this problem because their operating systems were not based on IBM's – for example, the other Japanese mainframe vendor, NEC, their mainframes run a fork of GE/Honeywell/Bull's GCOS operating system (ACOS), which NEC legally licensed. Another incident the video discusses is the TRON project, which was a Japanese indigenous standard for operating system APIs, endorsed by the Japanese government, conceptually similar to POSIX. It included both variants aimed at general purpose computing (BTRON) and embedded systems (ITRON). However, this frightened the US software industry, which convinced the US government to declare TRON a "trade barrier". And that mostly killed TRON as an operating system. TRON didn't die completely, it still sees some use in embedded systems even today (the video mentions the Nintendo Switch Joy-Con controllers run it), but it never achieved the original vision of becoming Japan's standard operating system. Instead, Microsoft Windows did. And then there were also macroeconomic issues (Japan's real estate crisis in the 1990s), and cultural issues – it mentions how the Japanese government encouraged Japanese industry to focus on copying successful Western technologies, even improving them incrementally in the process, as opposed to coming up with fundamentally novel technologies of their own. That approach served Japan very well for industries such as cars, but doesn't work so well for the software industry.

Findecanor 2y ago

I tend to just listen to Asianometry as a podcast while resting or doing menial tasks at home.

littlecranky67 2y ago

There is kagi (paid search engine) summarizer for youtube videos: https://kagi.com/summarizer https://kagi.com/summarizer As for the above link, it gives: "Japan has a large trade deficit in software, importing far more software and services than it exports. Despite having iconic hardware companies, Japan lacks major software giants like Microsoft or Oracle. This is due to a history of government policies that favored hardware over software development, as well as a shortage of skilled software engineers and a lack of software startups in Japan. While Japan has made efforts to develop domestic software platforms, they have largely failed to gain traction. The video suggests there are no easy solutions to Japan's software industry challenges."