I'd love to read an article. OpenAI's Whisper seems to solve this problem, and I'm amazed there isn't a youtube-to-text yet.
"Just listen to it in the background" isn't really workable for everybody. I barely listened to my own podcast episode. Text is just better for some people, which happen to be a majority on HN.
It's better for HN too. Note that we can't get any interesting comments until submission plus two hours, since it's two hours long.
I’m concerned you might thought I said everyone should be interested in podcasts, or able to listen to them. (I’m also concerned I misunderstood you!)
Besides that, yes, I love to read articles, too. I do a lot of transcription skimming of episodes where the voices and cadence don’t add much but the information is solid.
YouTube auto-transcripts are usually fairly readable or at least skimmable for the interesting time stamps. There are sites and services (like Readwise) that display them side by side with the video.
I don’t think HN benefits from people quickly skimming article text to add comments, unless they are primary sources themselves and can quickly address a misunderstanding, but that’s another discussion…
Oddly enough, Lex used to have full transcripts of his videos, through his website, but they seem to not be available anymore. I too prefer to read than passively listening. As of now, I just download the episode and listen at small intervals. YT-DLP can download a video/audio and separate it in chapters, that might work for some.
Sorry for misreading you; I appreciate the clarification. You're right of course. Thanks for pointing out the tools like Readwise – I wasn't aware of that, and it's super helpful.
In the spirit of the podcast, I asked GPT-4 for help in writing a reply, and it did a pretty okay job. https://imgur.com/a/MBQoq4A
"Just listen to it in the background" isn't really workable for everybody. I barely listened to my own podcast episode. Text is just better for some people, which happen to be a majority on HN.
It's better for HN too. Note that we can't get any interesting comments until submission plus two hours, since it's two hours long.