[highwaylights]

I think it’s a case of this not fitting your use case.

It wouldn’t replace reading the front page for me but I could really see it replacing a podcast on my morning walk. Especially given the absence of news spin or adverts. I’ll definitely be giving it a try tomorrow.

[afavour]

I don’t want to overindex this point because at the end of the day this is just a fun hack project… but I do think it’s worth considering the behaviors our work encourages.

Much like I think the 24 hour news cycle is detrimental to just about everything, an hourly HN summary strikes me as excessive. No one needs that much HN in their lives. But as you say, a daily summary you listen to the place of a podcast? That feels like the right fit.

[bloomingkales]

Depends. There’s no such thing as too much news during ww2 or Industrial Revolution.

This is news about how news as we know it is going away, and there’s more news on that coming 24/7. And that’s just the news on the news.

Idea for OP:

If you treat an HN post and it’s comments as a hivemind, you could do something like ‘Interview with the Hivemind: (insert post topic)”, have the AI ask interview questions where the hivemind can respond from the entire thread. This is to get any post into some kind of known podcast format.

If you intersperse talk about Big Foot throughout that interview for no good reason, you could become the #1 podcast in the world.

[wholinator2]

What do you mean there's no such thing as too much news about war or capitalism (my interpretation of ww2 and industrial revolution)? I can't imagine your saying that interspersing your entire life with hourly updates on the deaths of millions of people is a... good? healthy? survivable thing? What about every 15 minutes? What about every second of every day? "No such thing" is certainly a strong phrase.

I can certainly say that consumption of news above around 1-2 hours a day in myself and everyone I've had the pleasure to discuss this with is an increasingly bad thing. Especially war! If you spend all of your time just consuming news about things when do you have time to do things like live a fulfilling life or enjoy peaceful human existence. Continuous news is the opposite of peace.

Maybe you're saying in general rather than in one person's life but i'd counter that a mass amount of news in general _is directly_ a mass amount of news in a mass amount of people's lives. Why would there be tons and tons of news unless people were actively consuming more and more of it?

How many hours a day do you spend reading current events and news? Why don't you spend more? Your answer to that question is my rebuttal

[bloomingkales]

I say it because at any point either of those two things could have shown up at your front door (as it was happening).

In this case, yeah, CNN may give you AI synthetic news sooner rather than later to preempt the inevitable.

I’m not really commenting on whether it’s good or bad really. This may be the last hours of how we’ve all been getting news. Worth watching I think.

[paledot]

You realize that the Industrial Revolution was almost 100 years long, right?

[Guest9081239812]

I think you're right here. I'm forgetting about "entertainment".

This will never replace my visits to HN because it's not efficient. Unless it uses neurolink to beam the information into my mind, that's always going to be the case. It fails in that way.

However, let's consider a podcast. You get 5 people that are entertaining, knowledgeable about technology, well spoken, and have differing opinions, and get them to spend 30 minutes talking about the top HN posts. It's slow, they would most likely not even discuss my favourite posts, but yet, I would consider listening. Is it possible to replicate that with AI? Could AI digest the content and all of the comments, and turn it into an entertaining and educational discussion and debate between a few different AI voices?

I think it's possible, and it changes the idea from being an inefficient method of summarizing content, to a form of entertainment. That could be the right direction to go with this kind of project. However, even if AI perfectly replicates a great podcast, how would I feel listening to it? I think this question applies to most AI content. How important is the human process in the content we consume? Do people only care about the end result, or do they want read a book written by a person, view photos taken by a person, listen to songs performed by a person, and listen to a podcast by real people?

[highwaylights]

This isn't what I had in mind, but now that you've suggested it I would absolutely listen to this. In fact, I'm convinced having read it that this is where we're going good or bad (I can see a lot of YouTube gurus suggesting this as the new get-rich-quick scheme for "creators"). A high quality version of this would absolutely work though if that can be achieved.

I was thinking more in terms of the way you can get morning news briefs on a nest hub. The AI summarising the top posts on HN would have value to me as something to listen to in the morning not because I expect a really interesting debate, but mostly just to get a quick update on what the buzz is on HN on a given day so I can decide if I want to pick up the thread from any of those topics when my day starts at the desk.

[hunter2_]

> the new get-rich-quick scheme for "creators"

I wonder if the person executing the scheme would still be referred to as a "creator" in this case: they're creating a creator, and it's not so useful to have the same label for multiple layers (factory factories all the way down?). I could see possibly "engineer" (taken from "prompt engineer") or other technical terms being used instead of art terms.

[highwaylights]

Senior Bullshit Engineer