106 lines
No EOL
6.5 KiB
HTML
106 lines
No EOL
6.5 KiB
HTML
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Pablo here</title>
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<meta charset="utf-8">
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<meta viewport="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
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<link rel="stylesheet" href="../styles.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<main>
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<h1>
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Hi, Pablo here
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</h1>
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<p><a href="../index.html">back to home</a></p>
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<hr>
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<section>
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<h2>How I write some articles I have a hard time getting started with</h2>
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<p>
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I have a lot of shower thoughts. Way more than I can handle. Many times I feel like some of them
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would make for a nice piece on my webpage, or I should make a personal note out of. But often times
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they won't catch me in the right place and time to sit down, focus, and type them out. You have to
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figure out the key points, lay out a plan, think about what you want to say and how, type it all
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out, work on the text... It burns some calories. And sometimes it's enough friction to kill the idea
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entirely.
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</p>
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<p>
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Recently I found a set of AI tools that allow me to capture some of these ideas and lower the
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friction to get them on ink. My goal is not to have the AI write things for me, but just to quickly
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drop a pretty decent first draft with very little effort, on the spot. With this, I've happily
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rescued many good ideas from getting by falling through the cracks before I even hit my desk (or
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getting ignored because I don't have the energy to go through it all).
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</p>
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<h3>Step one: recording myself</h3>
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<p>
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I'm self-hosting an open source audio transcription app called
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<a href="https://github.com/rishikanthc/Scriberr" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">scriberr</a>.
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It's just a fancy little webpage where you can drop audio and get a transcript. The neat bit is that
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it also allows you to simply record on the spot. I used to host
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<a href="https://github.com/pluja/whishper" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Whishper</a>,
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but you had to first record then upload a file. I really liked it, but sadly I found that was
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enough friction when rushing on the phone to not use it. I can access scriberr from my laptop, my
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desktop, my phone, from anywhere basically.
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</p>
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<p>
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So anytime I feel like it, I can pull out my phone and start ranting about whatever topic is on my
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mind. The recording gets sent to my server back home, and scriberr transcribes the whole thing into
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text automatically. Transcription itself takes a bit because I'm not using a GPU, but I'm not in a
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rush usually since the important thing is just to get the ideas out of my brain and into text easily.
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</p>
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<p>
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The transcript that comes out is usually quite decent in terms of accuracy. I'd say around 95% of
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what I say gets picked up perfectly. The whisper models also do pretty decent in different
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languages, so I can record in whatever I feel like at each moment.
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</p>
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<p>
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What's not great, in case you've never used transcription tools, is that the output is just a long
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stream of words. The model tries its best at punctuation, but it's rather crappy. And obviously, no
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paragraphs. Plus, with unprepared, spontaneous ranting, structure tends not to be top notch either.
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Definitely not article-grade text out of the box.
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</p>
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<h3>Letting an LLM clean it up</h3>
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<p>
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But hey, those are not issues now that we have LLMs! I have a little script that fetches the
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transcript results from my server to my laptop. Once I have my raw transcript locally, I just pass
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it on to Claude, with a little prompt saying something like: "This is a transcript of me talking
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about this and that. Process it for me, I want the output to be like XYZ."
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</p>
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<p>
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Sometimes I really just ask to have the transcript nicely formatted into paragraphs and proper
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sentences, with the actual sentences being totally respected. Other times I already ask for some
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restructuring of the ideas, so it's not just cleaning up the writing but actually shaping it into
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something that resembles an article. It depends on how clear I was during my rant or what I'm really
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planning to get out of it.
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</p>
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<p>
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After this bit, I'll either abandon the idea altogether because it wasn't as interesting as I felt
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initially, or I'll really work properly in the text when I can and come up with something I'm happy
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with. It will still take some desk time to get to a final result, but then the article is really my
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writing and not a mix of my own slop with a layer of LLM slopification on top of it. I can't help
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but think people who just copy paste LLM output and put their signature under it have little respect
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for themselves and their reputation, and little love for the act of thinking and writing.
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</p>
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<h3>A great starter</h3>
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<p>
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And there you go. In just a few minutes, without having to focus deeply in front of a blank file, I
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end up with a first version of my thoughts that I can already start polishing and thinking from. Not
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all transcripts make it into clean texts in the end, but at least I ensure some of the ones which
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would otherwise get lost do survive. The stuff that comes out of the LLM is not always great, to be
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honest. Sometimes I'll change a lot of things from what I said in the audio. Sometimes I'll end up
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adding a lot of stuff that I wasn't covering in my original rant. But the first draft helps me get
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my thoughts out there and gives me something to begin with.
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</p>
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<p>
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And that's often all I need.
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</p>
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<hr>
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<p><a href="../index.html">back to home</a></p>
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</section>
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</main>
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</body>
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</html> |