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Comment by Daniel_Van_Zant | Hacker News Reader

I fight to record any presentations I do as often as possible. When I am asked for the slides I send the full recording instead as the way to manage this exact issue.

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Few things are as frustrating as finding slides from what seems to be an insightful talk strongly pertaining to what you are working on, but no recording of that talk to watch.

I applaud the effort to record such talks, especially in the current age where you know few people will actually watch it and appreciate your effort (but some big LLM provider will certainly lift it as part of a mass scrape and charge a few bucks for access to your findings without crediting you).

What do you expect people to do with that? Spend another hour rewatching the thing? Push it into some AI summary tool?

If information is important enough to bother someone asking for a copy of it, but not important enough to spend an hour ingesting, I'm not sure what to tell you.

Wait. I'm unclear what your point is.

Is it that asking for a copy is an unreasonable burden that should require a significant time investment from me?

I've sent many copies of many things I made in my live. It's not so bad. And it's easily shared with many people at once.

Or is it that people can't ingest any meaningful information in less than an hour?

That's clearly not true either. A five minute article can contain extremely valuable insights. A 30 second conversation even more so.

My company records all presentations: it’s like sharing the slides, but better, since we just have the entire presentation again.

Always recording is a good practice I think. It's so cheap with video conferencing that you might as well. Even if nobody uses it later, it didn't cost much. And if you get that one presentation that provides stellar value it's a gift that keeps on giving.

I don't really agree that a recording is always better than the slides. Slides are a text medium, and as such can be searched. You can also go through them much, much faster than through a recording (even if you can listen at 2x). If you're just looking for something specific, slides can be much better.

And sometimes you need to get the whole experience. And then the recording is much better.

The slices of a good presentation are worthless without the presentation itself. If the deck is valuable in and of itself, it could have just been an email or word doc in the first place.

Well, it's not the reality of most slides I've seen. Most of them seem to be a pretty good summary of the talk. Weirdly, some of them contain more information than the talk.

I do believe most presentations I've seen could've been an email or an article. So I guess I agree with you?

> I do believe most presentations I've seen could've been an email or an article. So I guess I agree with you?

Yeah, I really should have said that in my original post. Most presentations could have been a one pager, and any presentation worth sitting through the slides aren't worth having.

Lots of things fall into this category. Speech is very low information density per time.

Thankfully speech recognition and AI summary is a thing now.

This type of phrasing is strange to me. I guess it depends on what you consider to be, and not to be, “information”.

Reading a bullet point summary of Moby Dick certainly would compress the time required to understand the plot.

Isn’t the prose or phrasing part of the transmission?

For most talks, I would say no. If I were going to a lecture by Pynchon (ha!) I would want to listen at 1x. For 99% of talks at conferences which are mostly just a way of communicating technical data, a text transcription that is then reduced in word count by 50% is probably only a very small loss (if that), and a 90%+ time savings.

This gives me an idea for a website. All of the talks of a conference, audio transcribed and LLM summarized into 3-minute reads.

It might be worth doing the whole INFOCON archive…

Information should be indexed https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/

The thing is: When working with the material afterwards the important part are the small details. The talk/recording are good for the high level overview and following along on the big picture, but for details it is annoying as one has to jump around for specific words and phrases. Something written or an image/diagram is a lot better to study in depth.

And there lies the trouble with slides: During a talk they should support what is being said, but they are often abused as also being the handout for afterwards.

It sounds like you want detailed documentation. That’s fine, but that’s not what a talk is. A good talk isn’t a reference. And good documentation isn’t an engaging talk.

If people want that, produce two artifacts. Don’t try shoehorn a talk into being documentation. That’s just a recipe for bad work.

It depends on what the talk is about. Of course Steve Jobs' of cited iPhone introduction didn't have any details for in depth research later on, but was a high level product introduction.

A technical talk however explains a concept, a tool or something and thus contains technical information to follow up with, but for that I need the words, the phrases stated so I even know what to look for in the manual. And probably I want to follow it in the order they presented it (I hope they thought about the order they presented it in!) however the manual is ordered more in a reference order.

So yeah, if you do a high level marketing talk it doesn't matter, but then I also won't spend the time on watching a second time. If it has technical depth, then being able to follow the depth is good.

I have dealt with this issue as well before. If folks need something more in depth I will use a LLM + some massaging of my own to create a supporting document. Here is an example of a very disorganized conversation and the supporting document I made with it: https://www.danielvanzant.com/p/what-does-the-structure-of-l... It has clear definitions of the key terms. Timestamps for the important moments, and links to external resources to learn more about any of the topics.

Slides should just have relative links to supporting content online that is accessible on same website/domain and can be downloaded as a single zip.

It is not that complicated really, no need to reinvent the wheel.

I've been in this situation. I'll spend the hour watching the info, but I'll dislike the inefficiency. I consider it impolite.

Not a complete mitigation, but VLC et al plays back at 1.5X+. Highly recommended.

> Spend another hour rewatching the thing?

Yes?

There exists a slider at the bottom of most videos you can click and drag to your prefered location /s

A video of the presentation is pretty much always better than just the slides. Even if you got the slides you'd have to click through them to find the one you were looking for. Your argument could just as easily be phrased:

"What do you expect people to do with that? Click through and read every slide?"

And it would make about as much sense as the original argument (none).

> Your argument could just as easily be phrased: "What do you expect people to do with that? Click through and read every slide?"

I've had considerable practice at reading. Learned it at a young age, and I got to be pretty good at it over the years. I can get through a slide deck much faster reading it than watching a presentation.

Thank you for pointing out that watching the presentation and clicking through the slides takes you just as long. I assumed most people were at my level of reading speed. It must've been hard coming forward like that. I'm sorry I made you go through that. In the future I will check my privilege.

Yes, why not? Those who missed the real thing can watch it sped up and skip parts, saving time.

Yeah, recordings are fine for those who missed it. And with video conferencing recording is so easy that you might as well do it, living the motto "better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it".

But when someone specifically asks for slides, it just feels like a dick move to say "you don't want the slides, rewatch the whole presentation instead".

Sometimes you're just looking for the link on slide 45, the pithy problem description on slide 5, or, y'know, you just want to quickly go through the main points again.

Why would I want to listen or watch a presentation (even sped up), when I can read a transcript many times faster, can scan through for the bits that are most relevant, and can quickly jump back to review something if I want to?

It's only when you read the transcript of pretty much any presentation or podcast that you realise how superficial most are and how low the information density actually is.

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