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Comments (41)

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  fishtoaster
  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 video2. 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!
• bobajeff
  I like the concept and these explainers. It sounds like this is using a HTML based format to be similar to like a Flash / Shockwave animation to keep data size down.I wonder what the challenge would be of making these videos more interactive would be? Also I do wonder if there is any research happening in making AI explainers more trustable.
• adrianwaj
  Great. Wordpress plugin would work. Get publishers to embed these videos at the top of their own articles. Allow them to tweak/fix/fine-tune them. Accept micropayments and on-demand generation. Readers can pay for better videos or "deep-dives."This will work for young readers too, illiterates and foreigners. All three!!
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  nonethewiser
  You guys are going to hate this but next up: Each thread in a 10 second explainer and it just autoplays
• vbernat
  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.The article: https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2026-spanning-tree-videoThe tool built by Claude to make the video: https://github.com/vincentbernat/vincent.bernat.ch/tree/2808...
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  harvey9
  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
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  scosman
  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.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)
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  dverlaeckt80
  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.
• anon
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• kristopolous
  you know what might be interesting? The "HN 10 minute" -- 20 seconds per front page hn story as a podcast, daily.
• mlaretallack
  Did not think I would like that, but really good, simple and easy summary.
• alentodorov
  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
  I'm an instructional designer, and I think this is awesome!I'm going to be looking to reproduce this.
• mgxplyr
  It's actually very good...
• daok
  I like it! I bookmarked it. But I wouldn't pay for it.
• russellbeattie
  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.
• eleventen
  Now I want to watch the comments as a video too.
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  russellbeattie
  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
• customguy
  > And finally, a real pixel-based video of the tool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6rbHmBxSEs"a compressor uses three main organs" @ 2:97I 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
  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!
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  1970-01-01
  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.
• j45
  This is pretty cool, I'd want to see the visualizations a little different but that's a personal preference.
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  DANmode
  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.
• ProofHouse
  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.
• babu_mick
  yo this is wild
• ls-a
  [dead]
• goshx
  This is awesome!
• anon
  undefined