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  • Hacker News
  • Clicked on the demo "What caused the fall of the Roman Empire?" and immediately saw the same inadequacies I've seen in every other system like this: any attempt at visualizing a point ends up being absolute nonsense. Graphics and charts that confuse more than help, or even contradict what is being said.

    It ends up being a hurdle I don't think these services can surpass, given these systems understand nothing, and have no spatial reasoning. Any of these systems that claim to help explain things visually end up being a huge liability for the learner and I would never recommend them to someone.

    by totallygeeky
  • 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-video

    The tool built by Claude to make the video: https://github.com/vincentbernat/vincent.bernat.ch/tree/2808...

    by vbernat
  • > And finally, a real pixel-based video of the tool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6rbHmBxSEs

    "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.

    by customguy
  • 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
    by harvey9
  • 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.
    by dverlaeckt80
  • 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!

    by fishtoaster
  • I really dislike this but have to say it is impressive.

    To test it I tried "Who Killed Paulina Borsook's Career?" The summary is correct I did not hear any errors. https://www.wired.com/story/paulina-borsook-profile/ https://hn.watch/?item=49866903

    It did do what I expected from such a system: - It removed the fun parts of the article and the way it is written. - Stated some interpretations as fact without naming the source Article '"That gunshot prematurely aged my brain,” she said' Summary 'The impact prematurely aged her brain'

    One surprise is did not like: The sharpest concrete thing was a .45 caliber bullet. Feels like some sort of attempt to add original humor and I do not like it.

    This is the worst kind of article for this kind of summary and I feel like it really shows the most and least impressive parts of the system.

    by spoon404
  • 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)

    by scosman

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