Show HN: I built time to read all the things I want to

5 pointsposted 2 months ago
by thomoliverz

4 Comments

doomerhunter

2 months ago

I did have a similar need. Built it around discord as a bot that would parse links and the various filetypes associated (github repos, tweets, blog posts, pdfs...) to both archive the content and extract some quality metrics / insights.

I'd say that summarizing only is a bit sad since you go away from the actual substance, but at least it helps targeting what you actually want to spend time digging into. Still a bit worried about where we are going to end up if we only read recaps of recaps of recaps (reminds of me of Fahrenheit 451 when the main character talks of books being abridged, then people reading recaps of these recaps)

thomoliverz

2 months ago

Very interesting -

Do agree totally on recaps of recaps.

Point here is more to dump all the links somewhere and then send you a briefing (with all the full content attached) so that you can actually read them in full when you have time.

You can also get everything in a printable PDF so that you can read it the good old way!

You can test here: https://read-fast.replit.app/

Let me know what you think!

rahmanyoo

2 months ago

This maybe an unpopular stance, when i read to learn something new or a fictional story, i noticed AI summaries misses the nuances of good writing that our brain intuitively picks up.

For some reason (maybe there is a psychological explanation), information retention is better when i read from the source rather than an AI summary.

Reward of learning something new in its original form, vastly outweighs ‘time saved’ by AI summaries.

What works for me, pass 1 is scanning through original text, pass 2 is digging into areas that needs deeper understanding and pass 3 is assessing understanding using AI summaries.

thomoliverz

2 months ago

Completely agree.

Direction of travel for this is less re: summaries and more re: creating time for the user to actually read the content in full.

Made some changes based on your feedback to that effect, this week, too. E.g. now when you receive the briefing you can go through the original content side by side to actually deep read.

You can test here: https://read-fast.replit.app/

Would be grateful for your thoughts!