Gentle, a Personal History | Hacker News Reader

Gentle, a Personal History

rmozone.com

67 pointsstrob14 comments

I had been wondering why/how so many startups had suddenly "figured out" the transcript-first editing interface, and it seems that Gentle was the answer.

Such a transformational piece of invention that has enabled a whole wave of powerful and valuable products (e.g., descript.com for video/audio editing, buildbetter.app and grain.co for custdev/PM interviews, callin.com for podcasts, etc.).

Amazing and impactful work here, and it's striking how non-commercially the creator approached it all. Thanks for sharing.

For the curious - Assembly.ai (https://www.assemblyai.com) is an incredible API for getting really low-cost, high quality and fast audio/video transcription on a word-by-word basis.

Congrats to author for gentle,

Some of Author’s other pages are quite interesting , if not unusual...

Why are these public tho, these look like a personal diary for author itself.

[0](https://rmozone.com/snapshots/2017/10/rmo-at-google/)

[1](https://rmozone.com/snapshots/2016/03/multi-email-website-ar...)

You seem to be unfamiliar with the idea of a *personal web site*.

Hosted on one's own domain, hosting whatever content one chooses to throw up on a server, intended primarily for oneself and one's acquaintances, these things are as old as the web and among its most fascinating treasures.

Notice how all the videos are also self-hosted.

on describing the name, gentle,

> based on a misunderstanding from a chat with steve, i circumvented both issues in gentle by redefining the problem away from force and towards an imperfect resilience, thinking about alignment as normal speech recognition with a "nudge" towards the provided transcript:

this is such a testament to the ability to dream arbitrary worlds or systems into being when we author compute.

What is it about all-lowercase typing that bothers me?

I have heard it said that when something is bothers you about another, it is time to look inwards, because almost always it points to a personal quality you judge yourself for, either because you don't like it in yourself, or because you don't give yourself the freedom to have it.

No, they have a point. It makes for a more difficult overall reading experience. Just because you put up with it doesn't mean everyone else has something wrong with them.

On the other hand, sometimes it really is the other person making things unnecessarily difficult for their own convenience/status/bloody mindedness/ignorance/lack of consideration. Empathy goes both ways.

the lack of majuscules fuzzes the text recognition algorithms baked into your brain by decades of optimization, thus requiring somewhat more than ordinary cognitive effort to parse. also it's kinda "texty" and some people think it's pretentious i guess lol

Since anyone who graduated 2nd grade must purposefully go out of their way to type in all lowercase, I always associate it with people who want to portray the sense that what they're telling you is really important, but they're so used to knowing and telling people really important stuff, they don't really care, and it's like nothing to them.

If you look like you care, that's not really cool of course. Passion is bad. If you look like you really don't care, that pretty much makes you extremely cool.

yeah i smoke cigarettes during recess and am speaking in a monotonous tone, so what

I think it's that it's deliberately harder to read, as if the author is disrespecting their readers. It's hard to tell where sentences start and end, so your inner voice has trouble with the shapes of phrases. Every paragraph looks like it starts in the middle of a sentence, making you constantly think something is broken. When I'm reading something and notice mistakes or unconventional features, I have to slow down and spend more time looking out for obstacles so they don't trip me up.

Back on topic, gentle looks pretty neat, and may be what I need for a project. I just need an efficient way to make transcripts.

It is specific to this page, and I suspect it is intended for stylistic effect, since he is discussing speech-recognition software.

BTW, scroll left on the header graphic!

I like the line

> i was low on narrative and cash.

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