> I wonder if this "speed up the audio" trick would save you even more.

At this point you'll need to at least check how much running ffmpeg costs. Probably less than $0.01 per hour of audio (approximate savings) but still.

> I feel he may have seen value in military technology.

LOTR has fairly pronounced anti-industrial themes.

That was in a story about elves and wizards. I doubt in WW2 he thought it terrible that the UK could make Spitfires and break German cryptography.

Bullet points are taboo now.

Is there a benchmark to measure real effective context length?

Sure, gpt-4o has a context window of 128k, but it loses a lot from the beginning/middle.

Here's an older study that includes Claude 3.5: https://www.databricks.com/blog/long-context-rag-capabilitie...?

ruler https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.06654

nolima https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05167

They often publish "needle in a haystack" benchmarks that look very good, but my subjective experience with a large context is always bad. Maybe we need better benchmarks.

> ads (sponsored sections) in nearly every video.

SponsorBlock for YouTube resolves the issue.

Wonder what Ted Kaczynski would make of LLMs.

I want to see people who used LLMs all their conscious life enter the workforce. It's going to be amazing. I mean soon we'll see people who are essentially raised by LLMs.

Agreed, the takeover would be peaceful and even celebrated.

> It took television about 50 years to hit stride and go beyond film, but it got there. Shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, and Mad Men achieved something not replaceable by the movie or the novel.

Can you elaborate on the differences between television and film? Especially considering the examples you cite. I'd agree that live broadcasting is a considerable departure from a film as a medium. Still, the shows you reference are very cinematic - longer, sure, but for me, they are as close to a film experience as possible.

I mean, they also self report here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_articles_w...

I want to see people who used LLMs all their conscious life enter the workforce. It's going to be amazing. I mean soon we'll see people who are essentially raised by LLMs.