Comment by hebejebelus
4 days ago
> Simon often finds ideas within walled-garden platforms (e.g., TikTok, Twitter) and simply brings them to the open web
I find this is a surprisingly valuable thing. The AI space is moving fast, and a lot of the interesting, imaginative experimental stuff is happening on Twitter, Reddit, and other platforms I really don't want to engage with - but I do want to keep roughly up-to-speed with what's happening there.
That's something I like about having a quote blog - it's a very quick way to post something interesting, but you still have to be selective about exactly which piece you quote.
For TikTok I usually run them through yt-dlp to extract the audio and then use MacWhisper for an initial transcript which I can then hand-edit to get to the most interesting portion. https://simonwillison.net/tags/tiktok/
This workflow (extracting -> transcribing -> curating) is increasingly vital.
We are seeing a massive amount of domain knowledge being locked inside "un-indexable" video containers or walled gardens like Discord and TikTok. Ten years from now, a search query won't find that brilliant explanation on a niche topic unless someone like you pulled it out and put it on the open web.
It's effectively acting as a bridge between the ephemeral algorithmic feed and the permanent archival web.
Well, it’s very much appreciated. So much of the weird one-off experimentation seems to happen on sites like that, and otherwise I’d have to either lump it or eat the radioactivity. It’s an interesting thing that even though I do plenty of my own weird little experiments and similar tool-building escapades as you, but I rarely post about them on my own blog (https://redfloatplane.lol/blog) (and thus, nowhere). Perhaps it’s that posting them on my blog feels like taking more responsibility than just saying “tried this experiment lol” on twitter.