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.

I gave it a fair shake (10 or so). I'll say this... it does the job of "I can't spend 45 minutes on a journal article that's already over my head, or get through 20 pages of blog slop, so please give me the summary version of this".

The select comment/conversation slide is a nice touch, though it's sure making some choices there.

Main problem seems to be that the sameness of the format (it's clearly following a strict template) and voice do make it feel very repetitive, real fast. I'm not sure how you get consistent results AND solve for that, though.

Thank you!

yo this is wild

It's actually very good...

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.

We have a free MCP so you are free too use our tool if you'd like to use it in your courses as well :)

honestly it's horrible compared to some of the Opus 5.5 ones. But yeah, at the latency/speed you're looking for it's a different ballpark. Let Opus write the style and reference screens/animations, let your small fast model assemble it from parts.

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!

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.

I just had opus make me a tts mobile app that grabs the top 20 HN stories and the top 5 comments for each and read them out to me (using one of the higher quality built in TTS voices on my pixel). The summarization is the worst part of this imo, so pure TTS wins

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.

0:04 for the first , 0:02 for the second. I'm personally all done with that.

Thanks! And I agree. We're getting tons of requests for more nuance in voice selection from our users. You're currently able to say i.e. "Australian English female" in your prompts today, but you should also ideally be able to describe the voice characteristic (i.e. like a funny grandpa, engaged news reporter).

What Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS is doing with generative voice design in this area super interesting.

This is awesome!

I like it! I bookmarked it. But I wouldn't pay for it.

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.

We are not particularly pleased with the state of our visualizations, so I totally agree. If you have any examples of how you'd like to see the visualizations, please share them!

I have ocd so I concur with only #2 for equilibrium.

Thanks! Several people on our team are actually exactly like you: they don't really use videos themselves for learning, but see the utility for others, and enjoy the technical challenges around building a high-performant video format.

Indeed. In much the same vein, I simultaneously accept that:

1. I loathe video with the white-hot glow of a thousand angry suns, and loathe LLM slop-digests of things more still.

2. I spend tremendous amounts of time in situations where I can listen but not read, whether driving or on my bike, and this is a legitimately useful way to catch up on HN in those situations.

Did not think I would like that, but really good, simple and easy summary.

Thanks. Definitely lots of work left to make this feel non-AI-slop.

Think there's a ton of potential here too. So we're staying on course.

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.

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.

Nice! Will check out that repo.

You can use MCP to generate an Explainer video next time if you want. It's currently free, as the tokens for directing and scripting it is offloaded to your agent. And then we cover the TTS for the time being.

just ffmpeg it -vn and post it as an rss xml ... the audio sans video is a fine first step.

Post them to YouTube as shorts and capture view revenue.

We usually include a section about the comments in the end of the video. But perhaps we should add a dedicated "Comments Video" as well.

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.

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, sensory-impaired and foreigners. All four!!

And one has no eyelids. And I must blink. And not topple over. And out.

It doesn't actually capture it as a video, it's just HTML with a voice over essentially.

I hope so! We actually already support vertical videos when generated via the web ui (by clicking the mobile button).

We do cache them like that! As I wrote:

"We create them on-the-fly the first time someone clicks on a link."

Though I realise it could have been said more explicitly. But the second time someone clicks the link we re-use the same explainer.

Glad to hear that. Adding Jev as our "pre-planner" is very high on our todo list. It's the perfect tool for this kind of thing.

We currently spend ~$0.4 on a video (without images) and a have a few seconds of delay before playback. So it's a matter of turning every stone in order to optimize it further. We're going to add Jev asap, as it's an obvious improvement along both axes.

That was one of the challenges when building this. We ended up using Firecrawl. But even so there are a few pages we aren't able to read. In which case we use the Algolia API to get the HN comments and generate the video about the HN reaction on the article instead.

I don't see an RSS feed.

I don't really see why a new programming language is needed to make explainer pages (they are not actually videos).

Seems like over engineering - why not just make JavaScript/HTML?