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fishtoaster 1 hours ago [-]
Because we all contain multitudes, I can simultaneously accept that:
1. I hate everything about this because I vastly prefer text over video for the same content, especially AI generated video
2. There are a lot of people for whom video is their preferred medium and so this will be valuable to them.
It's a technically cool project and your cost-per-video is impressively low. Best of luck!
jonplackett 31 minutes ago [-]
I concur with only #1.
vbernat 14 minutes ago [-]
This looks a good idea to let people choose their preferred medium. I am not into video either, but I turned one of my latest blog article into a video using Claude, since I thought it would be “easy.” I asked it to build the video by screencasting a browser presenting the interactive diagrams of the article and add some titles. It build some kind of recording app for me. It still took me many hours, but I think I would be faster if I redid it. I would pay to have it done faster, but I want to keep control of the text, not have a summary.
Please, nobody click on the link to this hn item within hn.watch as it would be even more dangerous than typing 'google' into Google
nonethewiser 33 minutes ago [-]
I found that video to be one of the clearest. TBH they are all pretty good.
This is pretty crazy. It's not hard to imagine something like Reddit deploying this as a first party feature.
scosman 2 hours ago [-]
These AI explainers are taking over. I tried getting this working back in May. The models were okay but not quite there and it was a ton of effort. Opus 5.5 seems like the tipping point.
- Voiceovers: aligns animations to the voiceover, can generate voiceover with elevenlabs, or will transcribe and timestamp a real voiceover
- can reorder scenes both in code, and using ffmpeg for audio.
- interactive controls during authoring, can ask for micro edits or re-builds
- MP4 export/encoder
- Generates a video from a prompt (obvs)
dverlaeckt80 2 hours ago [-]
This is actually quite impressive from an engineer viewpoint. I just have the feeling that the videos quickly become very monotonous and rather boring due to the monotonous AI voices. If somehow you could bring dynamic variation in these videos that would be fantastic.
itomato 12 minutes ago [-]
0:04 for the first , 0:02 for the second. I'm personally all done with that.
jonplackett 29 minutes ago [-]
The thing I like about an explainer video is the personality and insight of the person giving it.
Like Marquise Brownlee just has opinions I care about and I watch his videos for this reason.
If a video just explains something I could just read all I’m getting is a layer of obfuscation.
nonethewiser 11 minutes ago [-]
Presumably you also like that they are explaining things right? I mean that seems like the more critical step. Otherwise if it's just Marquise Brownlee, you could just watch Marquise Brownlee say the same sequence of random words for 3 minutes a few times per day.
jonplackett 8 minutes ago [-]
I feel I need to explain beyond just a whine.
I think this is exactly the opposite of what AI should be used for. It is going to make people dumb.
Watching a video instead of engaging your own brain makes you feel like you learned something without actually trying and I would bet it works much less well.
If someone is there adding something beyond what is already there - ie someone like Maruqise. Then it makes sense for them to be there.
If not it is just brain rot.
People already have issues with concentration. Allowing them to further allow that muscle to atrophy will not be good.
xp84 13 minutes ago [-]
All of what you said is great, and I especially detest the proliferation of slop videos on YouTube, where it makes no sense to drown out the ample supply of such personalities and insights with AI voices summarizing wikipedia or Reddit threads over AI imagery slideshows.
But given how good a job this seemed to do at giving me more than just headlines, I'd love to have maybe even just an audio podcast feed of the top 10 stories like this compiled a few times a day. I would listen while I'm doing things when reading isn't practical.
tl;dr agree that we don't need this to replace reading, but I see that it can be a useful tool.
jonplackett 5 minutes ago [-]
Yeah I do see your point. And for some reason making it into audio does seem less offensive to me. Maybe it’s because it at least transforms it into something I can do while doing something else. Whereas a video is basically the same mode of operation: staring at a screen.
I’m still basically against this though. I consider it slop.
kristopolous 10 minutes ago [-]
you know what might be interesting? The "HN 10 minute" -- 20 seconds per front page hn story as a podcast, daily.
eleventen 4 minutes ago [-]
Now I want to watch the comments as a video too.
mlaretallack 1 hours ago [-]
Did not think I would like that, but really good, simple and easy summary.
russellbeattie 21 minutes ago [-]
This is well done! Not just for the video generation - it makes me realize that a short AI generated paragraph summary added to the top of each HN thread could vastly improve the discussions about a lot of topics. The number of people who comment based on the title of a link alone is pretty high, and I'd bet the vast majority of commenters only skim the linked pages anyways. Might as well get everyone on the same page with a quick overview.
alentodorov 2 hours ago [-]
loved scrimba. thanks for building that. was anout to pushback bc of the torrent of show hn sloppy pists but this one is fun.
simbas 2 hours ago [-]
I'm an instructional designer, and I think this is awesome!
I'm going to be looking to reproduce this.
daok 2 hours ago [-]
I like it! I bookmarked it. But I wouldn't pay for it.
mgxplyr 2 hours ago [-]
It's actually very good...
russellbeattie 28 minutes ago [-]
I just tried it out - it's pretty cool. The postscript was actually noted in the generated video about this topic, which I find amusing.
I have to say, if HN were to add an AI generated paragraph summary about each link at the top of each comments page, it would probably go a long way to improving
xp84 8 minutes ago [-]
For most articles these days, we'd have to first have a separate bot get the archive.is link for it!
But I'm skeptical that people would embrace it. It's more about the optics, and it also relates to the old principle of "Read the article -- don't start opining based only on the headline." Many would probably say that you shouldn't offer an opinion if you've only read an AI distillation.
It could be wrong - or more likely, the article acknowledges likely objections and refutes them well, but that part didn't make it into the summary, so everyone starts raising very un-insightful points as though the author was oblivious to them.
I don't dislike that it's video (because I know people who won't read can't be "made to read" by there not being "nice enough explainer videos"), but this is the kind of stuff that bothers me in both video and text, and greatly. I don't want to rant about it here because it's not specific to your product at all, it's not even specific to LLM, the internet and especially youtube is full of stuff that neither speakers/authors nor audience seem to ever parse. And if you're just downstream of big models you probably can't really influence that. But since you are NIH enjoyers, maybe you could train your own at some point? I don't want to consume such videos, but I do want those who do to have nicer ones, because that'd be good for me, too.
Vaslo 2 hours ago [-]
This is great - many of us who are technical but not working in hardcore tech probably scroll by quickly on stuff we have never heard of. Getting a quick synopsis like this may drive more traffic and understanding.
Thanks!
1970-01-01 1 hours ago [-]
This feels like when a decent book is made into a movie, and then the movie does well so someone will take the movie and summarize the plot in a YouTube video. TLDR: this is TLDR for TLDR. Just read more from the source.
redhed 23 minutes ago [-]
Yeah I feel like this would be better as summaries of textbook chapters or information rich sources, a lot of HN posts are already basically text summaries of a complex topic that it doesn't really make sense to further summarize them.
xp84 3 minutes ago [-]
To me, the use case is to go from an often opaque headline ("Using Nix and containerd with Jev on macOS") to a paragraph which hopefully gives some strong hints as to what those things are and why it's interesting, because the articles often are written for an audience already deeply into all the topics. Because often a few of those terms I might have no clue about and thus scroll on by, but with a brief "why you should care" explanation, I might realize it's actually something cool.
j45 1 hours ago [-]
This is pretty cool, I'd want to see the visualizations a little different but that's a personal preference.
DANmode 2 hours ago [-]
Thanks, I hate it.
Kidding, I already sent it to a friend with ADHD who has been struggling to remain anchored to the tech world in any way besides Shorts.
But, culturally, I definitely hate the trend it implies!
Neat. Thank you for sharing.
nxc18 39 minutes ago [-]
Leaning into brainrot is not going to unrot your brain, even - especially - if you have ADHD.
I watched the videos and confirmed they are worse than brainrot.
ProofHouse 58 minutes ago [-]
I would stick with this. There's huge potential here. I'm not going to lie, I did a video of this, and it was pretty slop. Some of it didn't even make sense and was super irrelevant. That being said, refined, there's really actually some major potential with this idea.
1. I hate everything about this because I vastly prefer text over video for the same content, especially AI generated video
2. There are a lot of people for whom video is their preferred medium and so this will be valuable to them.
It's a technically cool project and your cost-per-video is impressively low. Best of luck!
The article: https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2026-spanning-tree-video
The tool built by Claude to make the video: https://github.com/vincentbernat/vincent.bernat.ch/tree/2808...
This is pretty crazy. It's not hard to imagine something like Reddit deploying this as a first party feature.
I made an OSS framework for these for when you want to go beyond one-shoting it: https://github.com/scosman/videowright
- Voiceovers: aligns animations to the voiceover, can generate voiceover with elevenlabs, or will transcribe and timestamp a real voiceover
- can reorder scenes both in code, and using ffmpeg for audio.
- interactive controls during authoring, can ask for micro edits or re-builds
- MP4 export/encoder
- Generates a video from a prompt (obvs)
Like Marquise Brownlee just has opinions I care about and I watch his videos for this reason.
If a video just explains something I could just read all I’m getting is a layer of obfuscation.
I think this is exactly the opposite of what AI should be used for. It is going to make people dumb.
Watching a video instead of engaging your own brain makes you feel like you learned something without actually trying and I would bet it works much less well.
If someone is there adding something beyond what is already there - ie someone like Maruqise. Then it makes sense for them to be there.
If not it is just brain rot.
People already have issues with concentration. Allowing them to further allow that muscle to atrophy will not be good.
But given how good a job this seemed to do at giving me more than just headlines, I'd love to have maybe even just an audio podcast feed of the top 10 stories like this compiled a few times a day. I would listen while I'm doing things when reading isn't practical.
tl;dr agree that we don't need this to replace reading, but I see that it can be a useful tool.
I’m still basically against this though. I consider it slop.
I'm going to be looking to reproduce this.
I have to say, if HN were to add an AI generated paragraph summary about each link at the top of each comments page, it would probably go a long way to improving
But I'm skeptical that people would embrace it. It's more about the optics, and it also relates to the old principle of "Read the article -- don't start opining based only on the headline." Many would probably say that you shouldn't offer an opinion if you've only read an AI distillation.
It could be wrong - or more likely, the article acknowledges likely objections and refutes them well, but that part didn't make it into the summary, so everyone starts raising very un-insightful points as though the author was oblivious to them.
"a compressor uses three main organs" @ 2:97
I don't dislike that it's video (because I know people who won't read can't be "made to read" by there not being "nice enough explainer videos"), but this is the kind of stuff that bothers me in both video and text, and greatly. I don't want to rant about it here because it's not specific to your product at all, it's not even specific to LLM, the internet and especially youtube is full of stuff that neither speakers/authors nor audience seem to ever parse. And if you're just downstream of big models you probably can't really influence that. But since you are NIH enjoyers, maybe you could train your own at some point? I don't want to consume such videos, but I do want those who do to have nicer ones, because that'd be good for me, too.
Thanks!
Kidding, I already sent it to a friend with ADHD who has been struggling to remain anchored to the tech world in any way besides Shorts.
But, culturally, I definitely hate the trend it implies!
Neat. Thank you for sharing.
I watched the videos and confirmed they are worse than brainrot.