6 ms·

I think and hope that you're wrong. There's always been cheese, and there's a lot of it now. But there is still a market for top-notch insight. For example, Pe

• lynx23 2y ago
  Seriously, hardcore history? I dont even remember where I heard from him, but I think it was a Lex podcast. So I checked out hardcore history and was mightily disappointed. To my ears, he is rambling 3 hours about a topic, more or less unstructured and very long-winded, so that I basically remember nothing after having finished the podcast. I tried several times again, because I wanted it to be good. But no, not the format for me, and not a presentation I can actually absorb.
  • emsixteen 2y ago
    Don't worry, you're not alone. I can't remember what I didn't like about it, but I really wasn't a fan. Thankfully there's plenty out there I am a fan of!
  • phreeza 2y ago
    Yea there are much better examples of quality history podcasts, that are non-rambling. E.g. Mike Duncan podcasts (Revolutions, History of Rome), or the Age of Napoleon podcast. But even those are really just very good digestions of various source materials, which seems like something where LLMs will eventually reach quite a good level.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • OutOfHere 2y ago
      For such historical topics, my LLM-based software podgenai does a pretty good job imho. It is easier for it since it's all internal knowledge that it already knows about.
    • triceratops 2y ago
      It's interesting I have the exact opposite opinion. I'm sure Mike Duncan works very hard, and does a ton of research, and his skill is beyond anything I can do. But his podcasts ultimately sound like a list of bullet points being read off a Google Doc. There's no color, personality, or feeling. I might as well have a screen reader narrate a Wikipedia article to me. I can barely remember anything I heard by him. Carlin on the other hand, despite the digressions and rambling, manages to keep you engaged and really feel the events.
  • Hammershaft 2y ago
    Hardcore History can certainly be off kilter, and the first eppy of any series tends to be a slog as he finds his groove. That said, Wrath of the Khans, Fall of the Republic, and the WW1 series do blossom into being incredible gripping series.
  • dr_dshiv 2y ago
    Try “fall of civilizations.” Best pod I know. Maybe Shwep.net
    • krzyk 2y ago
      Interesting stuff, but the music and the well, falls are quite depressing.
  • refurb 2y ago
    Yes! I’m a huge history buff (read hundreds of books) and was so excited when someone told me about Hardcore History. I tried a few episodes. I really tried. I couldn’t do it. It reminded me of my uncle would tell a 5 min story in half an hour. The dramatic filler, breathless story telling was too much for me. If anything it would put me to sleep. I’ve found a few history podcasts that I think go into a lot more depth and I learn a lot more from.
  • speckx 2y ago
    I, too, found hardcore history a bit unstructured. If you like history, take a look at https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/ https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/.
• sqeaky 2y ago
  I know I'm not the first to say this, but I think what's going on is that these AI things can produce results that are very mid. A sort of extra medium. Experts beat modern LLMs but modern llms are better than a gap. If you just need voice discussing some topic because that has utility and you can't afford a pair of podcasters (damn, check your couch cushions) then having a mid podcast is better than having no podcast. But if you need expert Insight because expert Insight is your product and you happen to deliver it through a podcast then you need an expert. If I were a small software shop and I wanted something like a weekly update describing this week's updates for my customers and I have a dozen developers and none of us are particularly vocally charismatic putting a weekly update generated from commits, completed tickets, and developer notes might be useful. The audience would be very targeted and the podcast wouldn't be my main product, but there's no way I'd be able to afford expert level podcasters for such a position. I would argue Perun is a world class defense Logistics expert or at least expert enough, passionate enough, and charismatic enough to present as such. Just like the guys who do Knowledge Fight, are world class experts on debunking Alex Jones, and Jack Rhysider is an expert and Fanboy of computer security so Darknet Diaries excels, and so on... These aren't for making products, they can't compete with the experts in the attention economy. But they can fill gaps and if you need audio delivery of something about your product this might be really good. Edit - but as you said the robots will catch up, I just don't know if they'll catch up with this batch of algorithms or if it'll be the next round.
  • FranzFerdiNaN 2y ago
    > I know I'm not the first to say this, but I think what's going on is that these AI things can produce results that are very mid. A sort of extra medium. Experts beat modern LLMs but modern llms are better than a gap. I've seen people manage to wrangle tools like Midjourney to get results that surpass extra medium. And most human artists barely manage to reach medium quality too. The real danger of AI is that, as a society, we need a lot of people who will never be anything but mediocre still going for it, so we can end up with a few who do manage to reach excellence. If AI causes people to just give up even trying and just hit generate on a podcast or image generator, than that is going to be a big problem in the long run. Or not, and we just end up being stuck in world that is even more mediocre than it is now.
• theptip 2y ago
  This is true but the quality frontier is not a single bar. For mainstream content the bar is high. For super-niche content, I wouldn’t be surprised if NotebookLM already competes with the existing pods. This will be the dynamic of generated art as it improves; the ease of use will benefit creators at the fringe. I bet we see a successful Harry Potter fanfic fully generated before we see a AAA Avengers movie or similar. (Also, extrapolating, RIP copyright.)
  • llm_trw 2y ago
    On the contrary, the mainstream eats any slop you put infront of it as long as it follows the correct form - one needs only look at cable news - the super niche content is that which requires deep thinking and novel insights. Or to put another way, I've heard much better ideas on a podcast made by undergrad CS students than on Lex Fridman.
    • jimbokun 2y ago
      Cable news viewership has been rapidly dwindling.
      • athrun 2y ago
        Has it really though? https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/cable-news/?tabItem=34586070-62b9-4c4f-b51d-d2192c3f9095 https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/cable-news...
        • jimbokun 2y ago
          According to that article, for everyone except Fox. And even they are way down relative to 2020. (I suppose you could also quibble with "rapidly".)
  • oxym0ron 2y ago
    I would say the opposite is true - mainstream cares much less about the quality content but more about catchy headline.
• authorfly 2y ago
  Different strokes for different folks... We all seek different kinds of quality; I don't find Peruns videos to have any quality except volume. He reads bullet points he has prepared, and makes predictable dad jokes in monotone, re-uses and reruns the same points, icons, slides, etc. Just personally, I find it really samey and some of the reporting has been delayed so much it's entirely detached from the ground by the time he releases. It's a format that allows converting dense information and theory to hour long videos, without examples or intrigue. Personally, I prefer watching analysis/sitrep updates with the geolocations/clips from the front/strategic analysis which uses more of a presentation (e.g. using icons well and sparingly). Going through several clips from the front and reasoning about offensives, reasons, and locations is seems equally difficult to replicate as Peruns videos, which rely on information density. I do however love Hardcore history - he adds emotion and intrigue! I agree with your overall hope for quality and different approaches still remaining stand out from AI generated alternatives.
  • richardw 2y ago
    I like a range of the Ukraine coverage. From stuff that comes in fast to the weekly roundup-with-analysis. E.g. Suchomimus has his own humour and angle on things, but if you don’t have a unique sense of humour or delivery then it’s easier for an AI to replace you. Give it a year or three, up to the minute AI generated sitrep pulling in related media clips and adding commentary…not that hard to imagine.
    • grugagag 2y ago
      > Give it a year or three, up to the minute AI generated sitrep pulling in related media clips and adding commentary…not that hard to imagine. But why? Isn’t there enough content generated by humans? As a tool of research AI is great in helping people do whatever they do but having that automated away generating content by itself is next to trash in my book, pure waste. Just like unsolicited pamphlets thrown at your door you pick up in the morning to throw in the bin. Pure waste.
  • caulk 2y ago
    Drifting off topic, but do you have any examples of those analysis/sitrep content creators you prefer?
• littlestymaar 2y ago
  Pleased to see Perun being mentioned on HN.
  • throwuxiytayq 2y ago
    It's always funny when I find out that various people I respect follow Perun uploads closely.
• OJFord 2y ago
  I would like them to be right, for that to mean that the 'real' content gets fewer (fewer bother) but better (or at least higher SNR among what there is). And then faster/easier/cheaper access to the LM 'uninspired but possibly useful' content, whatever that might look like.
• fny 2y ago
  Try Lawfare as a better LLM hurdle. The depth and expertise and at times physical experience required for their discussions seems far out of reach. I suspect LLMs are not sophisticated enough as a paradigm to get there.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
  • inquirerGeneral 2y ago
    [dead]
• DanHulton 2y ago
  I keep seeing this asertion: "the robots will get there" (or its ilk), and it's starting to feel really weird to me. It's an article of faith -- we don't KNOW that they're going to get there. They're going to get better, almost certainly, but how much? How much gas is left in the tank for this technique? Honestly, I think the fact that every new "groundbreaking" news release about LLMs has come alongside a swath of discussion about how it doesn't actually live up to the hype, that it achieves a solid "mid" and stops there, I think this means it's more likely that the robots AREN'T going to get there some day. (Well, not unless there's another breakthrough AI technique.) Either way, I still think it's interesting that there's this article of faith a lot of us have "we're not there now, but we'll get there soon" that we don't really address, and it really colors the discussion a certain way.
  • atrus 2y ago
    AI has been so conflated with LLMs as of late that I'm not surprised that it feels like we won't get there. But think of it this way, with all of the resources pouring into AI right now (the bulk going towards LLMs though), the people doing non-LLM research, while still getting scraps, have a lot more scraps to work with! Even better, they can probably work in peace, since LLMs are the ones under the spotlight right now haha
  • llamaLord 2y ago
    IMO it seems almost epistemologically impossible that LLM's following anything even resembling the current techniques will ever be able to comfortably out-perform humans at genuinely creative endeavours because they, almost by definition, cannot be "exceptional". If you think about how an LLM works, it's effectively going "given a certain input, what is the statistically average output that I should provide, given my training corpus". The thing is, humans are remarkably shit at understanding just how exception someone needs to be to be genuinely creative in a way that most humans would consider "artistic"... You're talking 1/1000 people AT best. This creates a kind of devils bargain for LLMs where you have to start trading training set size for training set quality, because there's a remarkably small amount of genuinely GREAT quality content to feed this things. I DO believe that the current field of LLM/LXM's will get much better at a lot of stuff, and my god anyone below the top 10-15% of their particular field is going to be in a LOT of trouble, but unless you can train models SOLELY on the input of exceptionally high performing people (which I fundamentally believe there is simply not enough content in existence to do), the models almost by definition will not be able to outperform those high performing people. Will they be able to do the intellectual work of the average person? Yeah absolutely. Will they be able to do it probably 100/1000x faster than any human (no matter how exceptional)?... Yeah probably... But I don't believe they'll be able to do it better than the truly exceptional people.
• ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  I stumbled on a parody of Dan Carlin recently. I don't know the original content enough to know if it's accurate or even funny as a satire of him specifically, but I enjoyed the surreal aspect. I'm guessing some AI was involved in making it: An American Quakening https://youtu.be/wGpdxsgreOE?si=r7ef1vBOjIvqD_PQ https://youtu.be/wGpdxsgreOE?si=r7ef1vBOjIvqD_PQ
• tinyhouse 2y ago
  How many people can generate top notch content? Not many.