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Comment by beepbooptheory | Hacker News Reader

But doesnt something like this interface kind of show the inefficiency of this? Like we can all agree ffmpeg is somewhat esoteric and LLMs are probably really great at it, but at the end of the day if you can get 90% of what you need with just some good porcelain, why waste the energy spinning up the GPU?

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Requiring the installation of a massive kraken like node.js and npm to run a commandline executable hardly screams efficiency...

That's a deficiency with this particular implementation, not an inherent disadvantage to the method

Because FFmpeg is a swiss army knife with a million blades and I don't think any easy interface is really going to do the job well. It's a great LLM use case.

But you only need to find the correct tool once and mark it in some way. Aka write a wrapper script, jot down some notes. You are acting like you’re forced to use the cli each time.

One can do that with LLM as well. Honestly, I almost always just save the command if I think I am going to use it later. Also, I can just look back at the chat history.

I know everybody uses a subscription for these things, but doesn't it at least feel expensive to use an LLM like this? Like turning on the oven to heat up a single slice of pizza.

No, LLMs are extremely useful for dealing with ffmpeg. Also I don't think they're sufficient, they get confused too easily and ffmpeg is extremely confusing.

ChatGPTs free tier is just fine for me.

Nice

Because getting 90% might not be good enough, and the effort you need to expend to reach 97% costs much more than the energy the GPU uses.

Because the porcelain is purpose built for a specific use case. If you need something outside of what its author intended, you'll need to get your hands dirty.

And, realistically, compute and power is cheap for getting help with one-off CLI commands.

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