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Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

I love that there are people who will go into this much detail on stuff. It's really cool that they do. But the whole thing is that if you follow some sequence of steps, powder will clean as well as or better than pods for a third the cost. All right, this isn't a significant portion of my expenses so I'll pay the 3x cost since my dishes come out clean anyway.

I wish the description of the video was like an abstract.

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> But the whole thing is that if you follow some sequence of steps, powder will clean as well as or better than pods for a third the cost.

YMMV. Based on the earlier videos, I did switch back to powder, and I did follow the steps of putting some powder in the main compartment for the pre-wash. And i did try several powders.

Yet, none of the powders were anywhere near as good as the tablet we use.

It also doesn't contain any nasty chemicals, unlike several of the powders[1].

So we went back to our tablets. It might cost slightly more, but hardly a significant expense by any stretch.

Now, there might be some powders that work better which aren't available here in Norway. But I gotta work with what I got.

[1]: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/siste-nytt/test-av-oppvaskmidd...

He demonstrates this in the video as well. Powder/tablet from the same company performed differently, the powder seems to be deliberately underpowered.

Powders should perform better for the reasons explained - that was the reason he prefers powder, not the cost. The problem is that the powder in the pods is better than the loose powder.

The solution might be to put powder in the pre-wash tray and a pod in the dispenser. Or you could cut the pods and split the powder between the prewash and the dispenser.

Dunno what you have available, but since watching his video on powders I've always just broken off part of the powder pods we use.

We have the Finish tabs with the red ball in the middle (that's what our Costco carries, so that's what we use). I just break off on one side of the red ball and then crumble that up for the pre-wash. It usually breaks off super easily into three parts: The remaining tab with the red ball attached and two smaller pieces. If you rub the smaller pieces against each other, they break up super easily into powdered form. No cutting required.

> It also doesn't contain any nasty chemicals, unlike several of the powders

At least in the US my experience has been the reverse of that. Several of the companies seem to have used the pods as an excuse to increase the number of chemicals that require chemical burn labels on the packaging and switch "Best By" dates to very literal "Use By" dates. With those pods, there's a thin water-soluble plastic that is also prone to melting at the posted expiration dates as all that is between you and second or third degree chemical burns.

No thanks. I worked food service in High School and had more than enough Chemistry classes in college to have too much healthy respect for chemical burn notices to trust any of the pods at this point. (Especially as someone who lives alone and will almost never use an entire package of pods before "Use By" dates.)

I haven't tried powders, but I did go back to liquid detergents even though there's only about one option left on store shelves where I shop which have now devoted so much space to the wasteful plastic tubs of the pods.

I've been trying paper for about 2 years now and its been great. Works about the same, feels the same, no pods. Its quite a nice experience.

My kids would routinely put in too much powder, which would gunk up the dispensing mechanism, requiring my time and effort to clean it out and fix it. Eventually the dispenser broke entirely and had to be replaced. We since switched to pods and haven't had any problems with the dispenser. The pods are worth every extra cent.

My issue is the pods fail to dissolve ~5% of the time and leave a gunk that clogs the dispenser which again requires time and effort to clean. I'm convinced by the video to try powder again but I've had the filming issue with almost every powder I've tried. So, we'll see what happens...

I'm convinced pods broke my dishwasher. I switched to powder years ago and haven't had a problem since.

I have a pet theory this is due to a wet pod tray: the pod's film partially melts and sticks to the tray before it's released. I made a habit of wiping the tray dry with a piece of paper before loading the pod and this stopped happening to me.

How do you wash the piece of paper?

My process is to use cheap Walmart powder for prewash and Kirkland pods in the dispenser. Avoids any over filling issues.

I used to just use the Kirkland pods and they worked fine too. The reason I started using powder in prewash is to get any loose fat dissolved so that it doesn’t clog over a period of time, not sure if that’s a valid concern. And yes, I do run hot water before starting the dishwasher.

I just want a dishwasher and washing machine that I can load with gallons of soap once a month or whatever, and let it do the detail work for me.

I know they exist in the commercial realm, but I'm not 100% certain the wife is ready for a Hobart machine in the kitchen ...

Miele has home dishwashers that do this now. But like all things consumer, it's a proprietary system that's designed to keep you locked into a subscription relationship with the company.

True for their dishwashers. But to their credit, Miele's washing machines actually come with two additional cassettes that you can fill with your (liquid) detergent of choice. You don't have to use Miele's proprietary ones.

I have one of these. The detergent gizmo is a hard plastic shell with an interesting shape, powdered detergent inside, and a plastic film cover that looks like it’s heat-sealed on. It contains no electronics whatsoever. You can refill it, and the only limitation is that it’s kind of awkward to open, fill, and re-seal. The easiest way IMO is to cut a large flap in the hard plastic on the sides, then tape it down after refilling. It works fine.

Also, the Miele powdered detergent, in my personal opinion, sucks. And it leaves some residue behind. Yuck.

PowerDisk? As long as you load salt and rinse aid, it works like a charm. As you said, if you want to save a bit of money, you can 3D print a replacement. But they last long enough that I don’t mind the cost.

What do salt and rinse aid have to do with it? Those have been things you load into a reservoir when prompted for years. And for those of us who live in HN’s homeland where the water is very soft, you may get better results by not loading rinse aid (there’s some moderately compelling evidence that rinse aid is rather toxic to digestive tracts, and it doesn’t even have much rinsing benefit if you’re rinsing with soft-enough and low-enough-TDS water), and the salt is also unnecessary with soft water. You do need to poke at the dishwasher settings to make it happy without rinse aid and salt, but this is well documented in the manual.

> What do salt and rinse aid have to do with it?

If you should be using them and aren’t, the detergent in the disks doesn’t work. With them (I live with hard water, though a home filter takes a lot of it out) the disks work quite well in my experience.

Recently bought a washing machine.

I looked at Miele, saw the requirement for using their refill containers (TwinDos†). Noticed an option for using not theirs as a fallback but it all seemed a bit convoluted.

Then I took a look at some high-ish end LG and they had sort of the same principle (EZDispense††), except the dispenser sits like a usual tray that you fill in with regular off-the-shelf liquid stuff, and then you're good for a while. The whole wifi/app stuff is entirely optional, the machine is fully functional through the panel without the app. So I got that one, very happy so far.

† https://www.mieleusa.com/c/laundry-tech-washing-machines-aut...

†† https://www.lg.com/in/magazine/easing-laundry-with-ezdispens...

My Samsung bespoke combo washer dryer has that feature. It uses less detergent than we are used to so my wife uses pods, but I think this is better un general since the clothes come out clean even if they don’t smell like detergent. So not only do I not need to load detergent, I don’t need to transfer to the dryer. Still have to load sanitizer in unfortunately.

I heard the dryer in those is slow and breakable. Does it take forever to dry stuff?

In the few months I’ve had the Samsung All-in-One my experience has been at least a 50% increase in time spent drying compared to an LG stack I had previously. Also, when complete, if you do get to it within 5 to 10 minutes of finishing, it feels damp, but that clears on its own after 15 to 30 minutes or so if it sitting in the dryer with the door automatically opened.

Very pleased with the experience personally. I am very happy to trade not having to transfer the laundry in the middle with it simply being done when I get back to it a few hours later. YMMV.

Does the Samsung use the same drying method as the LG did?

Older dryers (that needed a vent) were inefficient, but faster at drying. They constantly pumped damp, heated air out of the vent.

Modern condensing dryers keep the heat in the system for a more energy efficient drying cycle but the condensing process is slower.

Samsung has both heat pump (the one talked about above) and vented (similar to normal dryers) versions. LG doesn’t have a vented version yet. Condensers are slower than heat pumps, if you don’t have a vent and/or a 240V outlet, heat pump is the way to go. I personally chose a vented one because it was replacing existing machines. In NYC, heat pumps are more popular since a lot of apartments don’t come with vents or 240V (and definitely in the UK where they put the washer/dryer in the kitchen, you also see these all over Japan, all heat pump versions).

Mine is vented, not heat pump, so the drying time doesn’t change from other vented solutions.

I had that on a GE Profile from I think 1999 if I remember right. It was pretty nice. I think it's still a feature on some of them.

That dishwasher was great and lasted over 20 years. The previous owners had definitely abused it and never cleaned it. I repaired it and had about the best dishwasher for a few more years. Eventually the main logic board went out (can't blame it too much, had electrical issues that killed a few things) and a replacement board was going to cost a few hundred dollars in parts even from questionable third party sellers. Seemed to be a good bit to sink on what was a highly abused >20 year old washing machine at the time.

as someone who's gone down the rabbit hole of dishwasher home repair, I've created more problems than I've solved. I agree that maintenance is important, but when you get into replacing the seals and gaskets that can result in water flooding into your kitchen, i decided recently to draw a line. I'm now the proud owner of some fancy leak detection / moisture detection IOS products as a result. (and yes I'm aware there are better, low tech solutions like the "frog" on the market, but I chose to torture myself instead)

Put a drop of food colour on a paper towel. Let dry. Then leave that where drips might happen. The colour will run. I leave it for a few days after every plumbing repair.

Funny, I use toilet paper and check if it gets wrinkled, but I like your method better.

Yeesh I'm starting to sound like a Bosch shill but they've had leak detection in all but their bottom rung dishwashers for a few generations. The current ones will actively pump the water out when a leak is detected.

https://www.mieleusa.com/c/powerdisk-automatic-dishwasher-de...

miele dishwashers as mentioned below.

LG washing machines. And I think Miele washing machines as well

I've used a washing machine like this. For the feature to be useful, it has to be correctly implemented. Unfortunately, all r&d budget apparently, goes into developing vendor's mobile application and wifi connectivity, not on basic mechanics inside.

which is still weird, because those apps are always terrible and the connection always insecure

Apps are not for you, but for advertisers. UX is a secondary concern, generating additional revenue stream is the goal.

I was almost tempted into buying an all-in-one unit that washes and dries. Only a few brands are releasing these heat-pump based models currently and it doesn't seem quite ready for mainstream release. But the LG model I found did have the ability to preload it with detergent and run up to 60 cycles before filling again. I almost bought it just for that feature. But went with the older more reliable model instead. Maybe in 10 years after this washing machine dies the feature will be more prevalent and reliable.

https://www.lg.com/us/washcombo-all-in-one

I think long term, having two "all-in-one" combo washer and driers would make way more sense than separate washing and drying units. But the price for functionality just isn't there yet.

Both the LG and GE heat pump all-in-one units come with auto detergent dispensers. For the life of me I can't imagine wanting one more thing to break, especially on an LG product as LG is notoriously poor with parts availability.

I am already putting items into the dishwasher, so the marginal effort for me to add the dishwasher tab is very low.

That’s how my Miele washing machine works and I love it.

You put two large detergent containers in (one for whites and one for colours) and then forget about them. The machine reminds you when you’re running low and allows you to reorder more thru the app.

I have no idea if it’s cheaper or not, but anecdotally they feel like they last a long time. Ultimately, I don’t care, because of the convenience and the fact I know the machine is working out the correct dose per wash (the machine has a touchscreen interface that allows you to state what’s in the wash: T-shirts, denim, towels, etc. the level of soiling, etc. Then it works out the temperature, duration, drying time, and correct detergent type and dosage)

Samsung has some that do this, but their appliances have some other big downsides

Is it not possible to teach your children to put the proper amount of detergent?

He says that having the ability to tailor the amount of powder for the size of the load is one of the selling points of powder. But I'm guessing most people would much rather waste the few cents of savings in exchange for not needing to think about their dishes even that tiny bit extra.

Or just, you know, wait till the machine is filled before running it. If that takes too long you can just run a soaking cycle midway through.

Get 2 steps of the dishwasher shelves, then when it's done swap them, and you never have to put the dishes away

Do you actually do this? I’ve thought about this but don’t have the space for it.

amount of water used in washing cycle is +/- same, not dependent on size of load. reducing amount of powder will create weaker concentration and reduce cleaning capabilities of machine/detergent.

in reality, reducing amount of powder won't change much most of the time, because majority of cleaning happens due to physical action of (hot) water. there were multiple times when I was forgetting to put detergent and dishes went out clean. it mostly makes difference for some very dry/backed on stuff.

Yep.

I (as is common for many middle-class South Africans) have a domestic worker who cleans the house, and in general you just have to accept that domestic workers will tend to use quite a bit more cleaning products than is necessary. At least with tablets, they will always use a set amount.

It's not their money that they're needlessly wasting and the thing not being clean is a more immediately noticeable problem with their work than you finding you're spending a lot more than usual on cleaning products.

It also wouldn't work to try give them a budget on cleaning products as then you're encouraging them to skimp on using enough so they get more money in their pocket.

Although our domestic worker is a lovely person who I help out as much as I can, at the end of the day she has limited skills and education, so can't demand very much of a salary, hence why she and many others in her position is a domestic worker.

When you're the one who does all the cleaning yourself and pay for the products you use, you'll try find the amount to use that definitely gets the job done, but isn't needlessly wasteful.

I also like the convenience of the tablets, you don't have to think about the amount or possibly making a mess or pouring too much powder in, etc.

Interesting enough, where I live we also can have domestic workers without being filthy rich. But we've seen the exactly opposite problem: people trust a single product for everything and will use the least amount of it because "it's good enough". The current person working at our place uses dish detergent to clean the entire house unless we tell her everyday to not do it. The previous one used bleach, and ruined most of our bath and hand towels.

There's more to the video than just that. For example: you should run your hot water tap before turning on your dishwasher, and you should experiment with the dishwasher settings, because they can make a big difference.

Running the hot water tap beforehand assumes that the dishwasher is hooked up to the hot water in the first place, which isn’t common everywhere.

Where I live this feature is called hot fill, I believe, and a lot of dishwashers don’t even support it. For those that do support its still generally not recommended to use it since the dishwasher now can’t do any rinsing with cold water, which is not only wasteful but I’ve heard the hot water can damage the water softener in your dishwasher.

But if you do hook it up to hot water (which is a lot more common in the US, I think) this makes a lot of sense.

And lo, there is verily even more information presented in the video than this thread has yet revealed. For what Alec says in the video is that this purge-the-cold-water advice is specific to North America, and he even explains the reasons why!

Haha I have to admit I didn’t watch the whole video.

In which case my comment still stands for those who also haven’t watched the whole video, which is probably a fair amount of people

He does mention it has to do with voltage and heating systems. I think it's something he covered on his kettle vid.

He mentioned that it's not due to voltage but rather low current circuits. A 15 amp circuit translates to around 1,800 watts in the US and if you derate it to 80% of that like the NEC requires a continuous load you'd have around 1,440 watts available.

His argument is that appliance manufacturers are trying to simplify their lineup by making models that would work in homes without a dedicated circuit (15 or 20 amp). Although I can't think of a better argument that still doesn't quite sound right to me. The NEC has required dedicated circuits for dishwashers for quite a while now and IIRC that requirement has been for a 20 amp circuit for a few decades. Even though you typically only see 15 amp receptacles, kitchens have required 20 amp circuits for somewhere north of forty years.

I think a lot of his video is simply based on testing with crappy Whirlpool and AEG dishwashers. There's a reason why Bosch (and these days LG) dishwashers are pretty much universally recommended.

It's the same issue, if you have a higher voltage then you can get more power without increasing current.

For example in Australia a standard house circuit is 10 Amps, but because it's at 240V we can get 2400 Watts (realistically more like 2300) out of a _standard_ wall outlet that is in every room of your house.

It's not the same issue. The vast majority of kitchens in the US have 20 amp circuits (so 2,400 watts peak, 1,920 watts continuous) exclusively. It's a bog standard receptacle (NEMA 5-20R instead of 5-15R) that's backwards compatible with 15 amp plugs. In fact these days most 5-15R receptacles have identical guts to their 20 amp counterparts save for the additional provision for a horizontal blade.

The electrical code (NEC) has started moving towards requiring 20 amp circuits in other rooms and more 20 amp circuits in kitchens.

But they're staying shy of the amp limit on purpose. So designing for 20 amps would be somewhat of a boost but not enough. While doubling voltage would actually fix the problem.

You're going to stay below the circuit breaker rating no matter the voltage. Nobody's going to put a 2,400 watt heater in a dishwasher designed to be used on a circuit that tops out at 2,400 watts because:

a.) I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that most countries will place limits similar to the NEC's 80% rule.

b.) There are other high current draw devices in a dishwasher that will have to run concurrently like the water pumps.

Same with things like electric kettles. You're not going to find 1,800 watt kettles in the US even though they're designed for circuits rated at that. A quick peek at the kettles available in Australia show that most top out at 2,200 watts for the same reasons.

In the context of a dishwasher 240V would only get you more powerful heaters than you could run in the US if the circuits were rated at more than 10 amps. Voltage isn't the issue.

You know what, I didn't read the middle comment in this thread closely enough before my first reply. You're right that an Australian circuit doesn't help much, and the voltage on such a circuit is useless.

A UK circuit on the other hand would fix everything. It has the same number of amps (or maybe more), but double the voltage.

The problem isn't purely amps or volts, but in general home circuits tend to have a similar number of amps, and higher power usually goes hand in hand with higher voltage. That's the sense in which voltage fixes the problem. A US appliance staying well within amp limits has a lot less power than a UK appliance staying well within amp limits.

Meanwhile, here in Germany, we have 230V, but every standard wall outlet is rated for 16A continuous load over 1 hour so you can get 3.6 kW on each circuit.

Your standard home has a supply of 3 phase power @ 35A (southern Germany) or 63A (northern and western Germany), I think only the former GDR is at standard 3x25A, because like in many former Communist countries they had to save on expensive copper and aluminium, and since a lot of the GDR was heated by steam-based central district heating systems, you didn't need that much power anyway.

Lot's old homes and flats here limited to 5A or 3A 220v. If you don't use electric heating your power demands go down substantially, though 3A is a bit small these days.

   the hot water can damage the water softener in your dishwasher

Most dishwashers in the US don't come with water softeners. AFAIK European made American market Bosch 500/700 series ones do, but the American made ones do not. Both would be designed for connection to a hot water supply.

As heated air drying (in the US) has fallen out of favor, hot rinse water will help things dry faster. To that end my Bosch dishwasher has an option to increase the temperature of the rinse water.

I think one of his earlier videos suggested doing what I have always done. Load the dishwasher then do the hand washing. This ensures you have hot water ready to go since you’ve already been actively using it. When hand washing is done, run the dishwasher.

The whole point of getting a dishwasher is to not think about any of this though, for me.

That probably just means you’re using your machine badly.

There's no user error, just bad design.

This is an aphorism, not a truth. But it’s true that dish washing machines are often badly designed, especially when there are multiple opaque options that can be turned on and off. Consider the example presented in this very video, where the “Eco” cycle uses more water and more energy than the normal cycle and where the “High Temp” option adds more wash cycles as well as heating the water for longer. No amount of design can save the user from misunderstanding what these options do. The only way for the user to use the machine correctly is, at a minimum, to read and learn from the service guide (or other documentation) which gives explicit details about what each wash cycle is supposed to do. If you watch the supplementary video you’ll find that even that was incomplete and had errors; full understanding required hacking the dishwasher to reveal which parts of the machine were active (inlet, heater, pump, etc) and for how long.

Therefore I stand by my assertion that if you refuse to learn the details of what your dishwasher actually does then you will probably be using it badly.

I don't understand, though. You make the point that the user needs to read about the machine, but the very fact that the user needs to read about the machine points to bad design. A well-designed machine wouldn't have called a mode that user more energy and more water "eco".

I didn’t say that the machine was well designed. I said exactly the opposite! The very fact that it is not well designed means that you cannot rely on your intuition when operating the machine. If you do not have some idea of how the machine operates then you will operate it badly. In the specific case the video examines, operating it badly means blindly operating it in the default mode when a different mode demonstrably works better.

Oh, then we agree, we need to make up for bad design with lots of work (in learning how the machine works).

Right, and bad design is all around us every day. Learning about how your equipment works is a good idea!

I agree, but telling an overworked parent because their dishes are dirty because they didn't take the time to deeply understand the mechanism of their appliance doesn't tend to go down well.

If a machine doesn’t function correctly or well, then fixing it requires blaming some part of the system that can change for the better. The dishwasher cannot change; it’s just a machine. It could be replaced, but that might be expensive. Much cheaper for the operator to change what buttons they press on the dishwasher instead.

If that requires reading a manual, or carefully timing the actual length of each wash cycle, or making a recording of each of those wash cycles so that you can work out how long they fill for and how many pre-washes and rinses that they each do then so be it.

That's rather odd? The whole point of a dishwasher, I assume, is to save a lot of time and water, and then to get clean dishes. There's nothing unusual at all about spending a bit of time to learn how to use a tool to save time later, like learning an IDE or what have you. Of course, if you're already getting clean dishes then I suppose no further tool learning is needed for you.

My brother the dishwasher could use up 10x more water and 99% of people would still use it. Nobody buys a dishwasher to save water. That you position it like that gives me little confidence in the rest of the analysis.

For long videos, I have a script that fetches the transcript using yt-dlp and pipes it to an LLM for keypoints. If the content sounds interesting, I watch it; if not, I save 45 minutes.

I did something similar a while back, but I treat it as "text thumbnails" and kind of replace YT frontpage with this. I don't use it all the time, but sometimes the clickbait is too much.

Also I should add Gemini (the app) is able to access YT transcripts most of the time, so sometimes I'd just paste the link and ask for a tldr. One of the few reasons to go for Gemini app, not google ai studio.

That said, Technology Connections is worth watching just because videos are very pleasant, it's probably my favorite YT subscription right now.

I did something similar but as a Chrome extension using Gemini 2.5 Flash (or Flash Lite) for summarizing.

On the page it shows an extra TLDR button near the like button.

You can change the prompt to modify how the summary looks and has an optional mode with links to specific timestamps.

Mind sharing the script? It's becoming a big problem to me: people send me links to "must watch videos" but neither the title nor description nor subchapter titles tell me what it actually is about.

In this particular case, it's spending 40 minutes of my life on something that could be explained in 4 sentences.

The more common solution I've seen is asking the person sending the link for clarification.

"It won't be the same if I just tell you, you have to watch it" - my mom on the video of some fake MD selling his miraculous variant of vitamin C that cures everything from cancer to dementia.

See, that's pretty clear indication you can ignore it isn't it?

While attempting to write my own script, I found that there are many websites which offer YouTube summaries, which are probably an easier solution. For example (not affiliated) https://www.easemate.ai/video-summary It even allows you to ask questions about the transcript.

I also found a Python library for fetching YouTube video transcripts, but some issue mentioned that they got banned, so out of caution, I implemented my summary script as a JavaScript bookmarklet instead. It will probably break on the next YouTube update, so I am not sure how useful it is. Also, you have to set your own API key (and maybe URL). I used Groq (not to be confused with Grok), because it is free and very fast.

    javascript:(function(){
    var GROQ_API_KEY = "YOUR_API_KEY_HERE";

    var btn = [...document.querySelectorAll('button')].find(b => b.textContent.trim() === 'Show transcript');
    btn.click();

    function checkTranscriptAvailable(){
        var transcript = document.querySelector('[target-id="engagement-panel-searchable-transcript"]').innerText;
        console.log("transcript:", transcript.slice(0, 50));
        var length = transcript.replace(/\s/g, '').length;
        if (length > 100){
            fetch("https://api.groq.com/openai/v1/chat/completions", {
              method: "POST",
              headers: {
                "Authorization": "Bearer " + GROQ_API_KEY,
                "Content-Type": "application/json"
              },
              body: JSON.stringify({
                "model": "openai/gpt-oss-120b",
                "messages": [
                  {
                    "role": "user",
                    "content": [
                      {
                        "type": "text",
                        "text": "Briefly summarize this transcript:\n\n" + transcript,
                      },
                    ]
                  }
                ]
              })
            })
                .then(res => res.json())
                .then(data => alert(data.choices[0].message.content))
                .catch(err => alert(err));
        }else{
            setTimeout(checkTranscriptAvailable, 1000);
        }
    };

    checkTranscriptAvailable();

    })();

I can always rely on technology connections videos to be interesting to me, so no need to do any of that.

YouTube included a summary:

"This video explores dishwasher detergent, focusing on a new powder formulation. The creator details the science behind effective dishwashing, including pre-wash cycles and water temperature. Independent testing results comparing the new powder to leading pods are revealed."

yeah but it doesn't tell you the point.

i don't have 40 minutes to watch a long-form video essay about detergent.

give me the gist, which based on context is that powder works better and is cheaper

This whole thread is kind of infuriating.

The gist you took away is not quite right because of course you didn’t watch it.

Why does everything have to be summarized? If you want to see the content watch the content. Technology Connections videos are interesting, entertaining (to nerds at least) and a lot of effort goes into them.

Watch them at 1.5 speed if you’d like.

Or don’t watch them at all.

But the “give me a transcript because I want to watch but don’t want to watch” thing is so annoying.

YouTube also provides a transcript on the desktop version of the site, by the way. So this entire thread is pointless.

Wanting a summary that includes the results of the research of the 45 minute video doesn't seem pointless...

Well Citizen Kane is 119 minutes long should I summarize it for you?

He dies and then Rosebud.

If I wanted a summary of Citizen Kane, I would expect it to include the ending, yes.

The value in the content is experiencing it.

The moment some long form content comes out we are all TikTok kids who want a five second summary.

Never mind the fact that YouTube provides a compete transcription that you can copy/paste and dump into an LLM, making this entire thread, as I mentioned before, pointless.

The people asking for a summary are lazy people who want to be spoon fed trivia dopamine hits.

To some audiences, sure. Obviously the other guy gets value out of the content of the content, not just 'experiencing it'

That's EXACTLY what he's doing, right? Get the transcript, pipe to an LLM, determine if it's worth his time. You're on HN, we like to use scripts to automate those sorts of things.

Nobody is demanding a summary from the OP. The AUDIENCE MEMBER went out of his way to determine if the content is worth his time. Its no different than checking reviews before you watch a movie

Tangent but it is funny to me that we focus on tiktok but the news is as bad or worse in terms of super fast tidbits interspersed with ads, tragedy, and local weather

Sometimes people just want to learn a thing.

That is okay.

Better than okay, learning is a good thing. And it's extremely impossible to watch every quality video.

woah there, didn't watch it yet, how about a spoiler warning?

Are you really infuriated by a complete stranger writing a script you don't like and then mentioning it in a message thread? Just curious.

I’m not literally infuriated I’m Internet forum infuriated.

ah but you forget this is from the no-effort november collection.

I want my whole life to be optimized, so that I can consume far more but get nothing out of any of my consumption. Anything that requires art, ingenuity, and human effort can be compressed to a simple bullet point summary.

I don't care that Technology Connections is the perfect blend of campy midwestern technical pedantry, substantive detail, great editing, understated humor. It must undergo machine digestion, its humanity stripped, before being fed to me as a flat slurry. This way, I can optimize my consumption of slurry without ever encountering any of that pesky 'human spirit.'

Because that is optimal.

I hope you had fun making one of the most-straw strawmen I've seen all year.

I did. But also, it's instructive. This mindset is everywhere.

People don't have infinite time. A mindset of never appreciating works on their artistic merits is terrible. But a mindset of appreciating with some works, while for other ones you just want the info please, is a perfectly reasonable way to operate.

Someone that just wants to wash dishes better shouldn't be forced to watch a 40 minute video to learn how. It doesn't mean they want slurry.

Or to put it another way: Imagine you had to watch a video essay to check the weather forecast. It would suck, even if they're good essays. Even moreso if you already have other essays you want to watch.

sweet jesus share that script.

there are a lot of YT vids that can be summed up essentially in 2 sentences and I don't need to see 4 ads first.

YT's actual AI summary is useless, arguably net negative

If you want to build a quick one, it's yt-dlp to download the video, whisper to transcribe the audio, and Claude code have it summarize the transcript.

I'm not at my computer RN but I'll share it later.

Kagi has this as a website https://kagi.com/summarizer and as a browser extension. Really handy for deciding if a long video is worth watching.

This is the script that uses yt-dlp to print the English transcript. I pipe it to Simon Willison's `llm` tool.

https://gist.github.com/abdusco/118a6a3ab41a0a1d2a5f8813f789...

https://github.com/simonw/llm

    > youtube_transcript.py 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAX2_mPr9W8' | llm 'give me keypoints, ignore promotions'
    Certainly! Here are the key points from the detailed discussion about dishwasher detergents, washing cycles, and hot water use:
    
    1. **Dishwasher Detergent Basics:**
       - Most dishwashers have a detergent dispenser designed to release detergent in two doses: a smaller pre-wash dose and a larger main wash dose.
       - The pre-wash helps remove easily dissolvable food residues before the main wash.
       - Oils and fats do not dissolve well in plain water; putting some detergent in the pre-wash water helps emulsify and remove these soils early.
    
    2. **Why Use Loose Powder Detergents:**
       - Loose powders allow flexible dosing: users can adjust detergent amounts based on load dirtiness.
       - Pre-dosed pods force a single, fixed dose which can be excessive or insufficient depending on the wash.
       - The dispenser’s design supports splitting detergent dosing; powders are better aligned with this system than pods.
    
       ... you get the point

It's interesting - YouTube does show AI summaries now - here's the one for this video:

This video explores dishwasher detergent, focusing on a new powder formulation. The creator details the science behind effective dishwashing, including pre-wash cycles and water temperature. Independent testing results comparing the new powder to leading pods are revealed.

I've noticed that they all seem to not give away too much so you still have to watch the video to get the conclusion. It makes sense why they do this for creators, but I do agree it would be awesome to just read the conclusion on many of these.

Videos are for fun. Nobody needs to know the conclusion in isolation. If you wanted a stream of boring facts, there could be a service for that, which nobody would use.

> I've noticed that they all seem to not give away too much so you still have to watch the video to get the conclusion. It makes sense why they do this for creators

Oh summer child, they do that because they'd serve less ads.

clickbait gotta bait

While I’m sure dismissing the video is easy for someone with a dishwasher that already works fine with pods, having worked through all four(?) of those dishwasher videos, I have finally made an enzymatic powder work after months of effort when pods did not help.

Heavy Duty + Hot Wash doesn’t usually work. Doesn’t finish washing.

Heavy Duty + Sani Rinse doesn’t usually work. Weird residue issues for entire top rack.

Heavy Duty + Hot + Sani doesn’t work. Both of the above issues at once!

But, as it turns out —

Normal + Hot + Sani does work, perfectly, repeatedly.

The takeaway from the latest video for me is that the options aren’t Boolean on/off flags for different cycle-specific parameters, the cheap U.S. rental dishwasher comprehensively alters the entire program based on which total set of options are selected in non-intuitive ways.

So I have to use Normal not Heavy, Hot Wash and Sani-Rinse, or my wash cycle doesn’t wash properly. Which is absurd and obnoxious, but TIL, and suddenly I’ve had two consecutive loads of dishes come out clean for the first time in a year of trying.

No, the pods didn’t work either, as it turns out my dishwasher doesn’t reach the “enzymatic cleaning” temperatures off my rental’s barely-120F water using Hot Wash alone. No, the filter isn’t dirty. Yes, it drains fine. Yes, I’ve run cleaning cycles with several cleaning powders. Yes, run the tap to hot. Etc etc.

TLDR for the entire video: If your dishwasher isn’t cleaning fully, even if you use maximum powder or pods or cleaning it, make sure you’ve tried counterintuitive combinations with Light/Normal instead of Heavy, or Sani Rinse to improve the wash cycle, etc. Ruling out unlikely combos because they seem illogical may prevent you from finding a working set. (And if you’re using a powder formulated by anyone who sells colorful dishwasher pods, it’s probably designed to be less effective than the powder in their pods.)

I much prefer the powders. They clean as well as the pods. You actually are supposed to do these steps with the pods too like running the sink to hot. If you don’t, at least with my washer, you are left with undissolved pod carcass somewhere in the wash.

The worst thing by far about the pods though is the smell. I don’t know why anyone would want to eat off a fragranced dish but that is the vast majority of the market I guess.

In terms of powder I use seventh generation fragrance free and I have no issues with it.

> All right, this isn't a significant portion of my expenses so I'll pay the 3x cost since my dishes come out clean anyway.

It's good to know there's another HN poster out there like me who doesn't mind using Electron.

Oh I love Electron. The day of the Linux desktop arrived and no one noticed because there's no difference in platform anymore! All apps are available everywhere and the functionality is equivalent. This is so much of a difference from my childhood. This is definitely an example of increased computing power enabling new use cases (full cross-platform support) at lower cost.

I find that the pods are less effective, even without following those steps. (Disclaimer: I use gel)

>I wish the description of the video was like an abstract.

Business opportunity something something AI

YouTube are already doing it! :(

Not very well, it's always too vague. Good opportunity to compete with a browser extension or service!

google'd [ai summary youtube transcript] and there's already at least 10

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