Hacker News

Convocation

Hacker News - Mon, 09/09/2024 - 10:36am
Categories: Hacker News

Show HN: I made a simple tool to generate a new task/goal list each Monday

Hacker News - Mon, 09/09/2024 - 10:34am

For a while now I've generated a new markdown file for a weekly goal/task list, figured others might find it useful, so I made this.

Most “productivity tools” contain more than I want, I don't need much, just a file.

I imagine I'm not the only one?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41488925

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Show HN: Automatic chaptering – From raw transcripts to structured documents

Hacker News - Mon, 09/09/2024 - 10:29am

Hey HN,

I have been working in the last weeks on the task of automatically extracting a table of contents from a raw (audio or video) transcript, aka a 'chaptering' task.

That turned out to be more difficult than I inially thought, especially because I needed to keep the timestamp data, and because I had to deal with long transcripts, and LLMs tend to 'forget' part of input data when it is too long.

I was also surprised that I could not find any open-source solution for that, in standard libraries like Langchain or LLamaIndex, despite the wide range of possible use cases (text summarization, referencing, sinformation retrieval in RAGs, ...).

I therefore ended up putting together a workflow that turns out to work pretty well. It relies on LLMs for different language processing subtasks (text formatting, paragraph structuring, chapter segmentation and title generation), and on a TF-IDF statistics to add timestamps back after the paragraph structuring.

I just open-sourced the code and made a summary of the methodology here: https://medium.com/@ya-lb/automate-video-chaptering-with-llm...

If you know any other tool or open-source library that allows similar automatic chaptering of text, please share, I'd be glad to know about them!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41488887

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Grokking Concurrency

Hacker News - Mon, 09/09/2024 - 10:26am
Categories: Hacker News

On Currencies

Hacker News - Mon, 09/09/2024 - 10:26am
Categories: Hacker News

Mitsubishi is an example of anti-consumer, poor design decisions

Hacker News - Mon, 09/09/2024 - 10:25am

Mitsubishi is currently undergoing a class action lawsuit over its 2023/24 Outlander PHEV in colder climates.

Mitsubishi bizarrely deleted the battery heater in their 2023/2024 PHEV Outlander. They also have no 12V traditional lead/acid battery, unlike most hybrids.

As you cannot charge such battery pack in cold temps (around -20C or below), without damaging it permanently, no battery heater means no juice to start the PHEV engine. Mitsubishi's answer to this is "keep it inside in the winter", which oddly presumes one has a heated garage.

This is made even more absurd, as Mitsubishi even advertised that there was still a battery heater, and kept that information on its website for more than a year, even when people complained. Loudly.

There are cases of those who bought said models, parking them outside (as most Canadians do), only to discover they are bricks in the winter for months at a time. It should be noted that ICE cars do not have this problem of course (unless they are broken), and PHEV and pure battery cars solve this issue with a battery heater. Mitsubishi is entirely alone with this model, a problem they created by deleting the battery heater.

Some who happened to have a heated garage, would drive to the grocery store in -30C temps, come out and find their car now dead. The firmware, sensibly, prevented any draw from the battery pack to prevent damage, and with no juice, no anything. And even if you could start the engine, as there is no lead acid battery, there is no temp storage for juice. The car is simply not designed to operate this way.

Mitsubishi has released a firmware update, where they constantly charge/discharge the battery when plugged in. This does not solve the obvious technical problems in any real way. (If it did, every company would be doing this)

All other hybrids and battery only cars on the market deal with this sensibly in some way. All of them. Except Mitsubishi and their absurd deletion of the battery heater. This is a 100%, hands down, Mitsubishi created problem, hence the class action law suit against them.

But let's look at another problem case with Mitsubishi.

I have a friend who is about to go on vacation for 2+ months to the south. This is not a rarity, for example 2 million Canadians, and a load of Americans living in the US North head south for the winter for months at a time.

Thus one thing you do is set your heat to 5C. Maybe 8C.

This keeps plants from dying, keeps water pipes from freezing (people watching over the house may need water for the plants, or to use the bathroom when there). There are a variety of other reasons to keep the house above 0C. And -40C(turning off the heat) is not the same as 5C.

Mitsubishi knows this.

Every furnace known to Canucks goes down to eat least 10C, if not 5C. Every thermostat. My current heat pump has a setting for 10C, which I find "high" but usable, thus validating that 17C is not a purely technical limit, and my friend has a new system.

Let me repeat this. My friend's central air, Zuma system with backup electric heat pump, only goes down to 17C.

This is an economic issue. I save 2000 dollars setting my heat to low temps for 5 months vs 21C. But it's also an environmental issue, because setting your heat to as low as possible makes sense.

Cold temps are not gone in Canada each winter, winters have been milder in some regions. Milder, not -20c is gone. Climate is a yo-yo, and only incompetent companies would make such decades-long design decisions. People buy furnaces for 20+ years use, cars often for a decade of use, and even if sold, will be in play in the used market for years beyond that. The next 5 years could see Jan-March -40C temps where I live, no one knows.

So a warning to people buying Mitsubishi products. Very anti-consumer by selling products into markets they should not be. Very anti-environmental, for the same reasons.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41488858

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

Categories: Hacker News

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