This is so neat! I really think AI turbocharges this kind of personal project way more than it speeds up programming for work:
> I was curious about the possibility of doing this myself, and I asked ChatGPT. Not surprisingly, it knew a lot of the various tapes, file formats, sizes, processing, storage, and after it asked some clarifying questions, it was quite optimistic about me being able to do this myself
Between this, it seems like it helped with so many different parts of the process:
1. Asking for how to do technical things, like transfer video from these old VHS to a newer computer.
2. Writing code for the web portal to host the videos.
3. Writing VLC plugins to help with data entry.
4. Transcribe audio into text.
Similarly, a coworker recently made a website that imitates what Alpha School does to incentivize his own kids to finish their homework all in the span of a weekend, and it's cool to think of the kinds of projects that less or minimally technical people can do with the help of ChatGPT to guide them.
Of course, the debugging techniques and the debugging and problem-solving techniques that you get from being a professional programmer helps a lot with taking what LLMs give you with a grain of salt, and knowing what they're good at and what they're not. But it is a superpower for sure.
> Of course, the debugging techniques and the debugging and problem-solving techniques that you get from being a professional programmer helps a lot with taking what LLMs give you with a grain of salt, and knowing what they're good at and what they're not. But it is a superpower for sure.
I'm really coming around to the idea for the lucky of us (and I'm assuming a lot about the average HN poster) AI really is a force-multiplying tool
I'd love to see the imitation of alphaschool . I would work on my own , and i'd love the inspiration . Any chance you can share ?
completely agree on the personal project angle. for family media specifically, the barrier was never really technical, it was the combination of effort + organization + knowing what to do with the output.
i've been digitizing old family photos recently and the part that surprised me most was how much context you lose if you don't capture it alongside the media. a photo of someone at a table means nothing in 30 years unless you know who, where, when. my parents can still tell those stories but that window is closing.
the AI angle is interesting here because transcription and basic organization are exactly the kind of tedious-but-important tasks that nobody does unless the friction is near zero. if you had to manually label 500 photos you'd never do it. if an AI can get you 80% of the way there, suddenly the project becomes feasible.