Announcing the LessWrong Curated Podcast

Solenoid_Entity

I'm super excited about this! I find it much lower effort to consume audio content than text, and am a big fan of the SSC podcast. I expect this to significantly increase the number of curated LW posts I read

[-]Ben Pace3y20

Glad to hear!

[-]Jim Fisher2y129

As of 28 July, this podcast has dramatically declined in quality. Instead of human narration, it is now "Narrated for LessWrong by TYPE III AUDIO". It's a text-to-speech model that has far too many problems for this to be listenable. The prior human narration was excellent, e.g. the effort put into describing images.

Please revert this change, or move it to a different podcast!

[-]Raemon2y40

Thanks for the feedback.

I do definitely agree human vs machine should be separate podcasts.

The decision to have the auto-reading is pretty different from the decision to have individual posts get custom human narration (we're a bit more funding crunched now and it was less obviously worth it for every individual curated post. but the automated stuff is cheaper and easier to just do for a large swath of posts). But we'll keep feedback like this in mind when deciding how much to prioritize each of them.

[-]David James2y20

I listened to part of “Processor clock speeds are not how fast AIs think”, but I was disappointed by the lack of a human narrator. I am not interested in machine readings; I would prefer to go read the article.

[-]Liron3y100

Bravo Solenoid Entity, love your work with SSC Podcast and really appreciate that you're taking this on.

[-]Solenoid_Entity3y60

Thanks, glad you're enjoying :)

[-]Matt Putz3y40

Amazing! Thanks so much for making this happen so quickly.

To anyone who's trying to figure out how to get it to work on Google Podcasts, here's what worked for me (searching the name didn't, maybe this will change?):

Go to the Libsyn link. Click the RSS symbol. Copy the link. Go to Google Podcasts. Click the Library tab (bottom right). Go to Subscriptions. Click symbol that looks like adding a link in the upper right. Paste link, confirm.

[-]Kayden3y20

Thanks for the suggestion, works great!

[-]CrimsonChin3y30

Huge fan of solonoid entity and his work on SSC. I think this is a treat choice, I'm very excited.

[-]Solenoid_Entity3y10

Thanks for the endorsement!

[-]Aaron Bergman3y*30

Thank you, Solenoid! The SSC podcast is the only reason I to consume all of posts like Biological Anchors: A Trick That Might Or Might Not Work

[-]Solenoid_Entity3y20

Glad to hear it's useful :)

[-]willbobaggins3y20

Excellent job Solenoid. I love this!

[-]Solenoid_Entity3y10

Thanks :)

[-]Evan R. Murphy3y20

Very excited about this! I listen to LessWrong more often than I read it. But my go-to is a janky solution involving Google Assistant plus another app. And then i still only get a synthesized voice. Look forward to trying out the podcast!

[-]Kayden3y50

Have you looked at the Non-linear library? I find them far better than the otherwise-robotic sounding audio by usual TTS. Plus, it's automated and podcasts are available pretty soon after any post is published. I like it as I like to go on long walks and listen to LW or Alignment forum posts.

Also, there's an audio collection of the top-of-all-time posts from LW, the Alignment forum, and the EA forum.

[-]Evan R. Murphy3y10

I tried Nonlinear Library awhile ago but had trouble finding my groove with it. I recall finding it cumbersome to search for episodes/posts. Is there a good way to do that?

It's good to know the episodes are available soon after a post comes out. That was another doubt I had about Nonlinear, not knowing if the post I wanted would be on there yet. Do you know about how long after a post is published it takes it to appear on Nonlinear?

[-]Kayden3y40

I agree. It's not easy to search for specific episodes on the Nonlinear library. I open it in something like Google podcasts and then search in page for keywords. It is cumbersome as you said. They did mention in their original announcement post that the to-do goals are 1. Creating a compilation of top-of-all-time posts for all 3 forums, 2. Creating forum-specific feed, and 3. Creating tags and a searchable archive.

Since they've done the first two, I hope it's not long before they add the tags functionality.

For Nonlinear, there's a threshold too:

The current upvote thresholds for which articles are converted are:
25 for the EA forum
30 for LessWrong

I think that due to the volume of posts on LW, The curated podcast would have something similar.

[-]Ben Pace3y10

Good to hear. I'll appreciate it if you let me know how it works out for you :)

[-]Bojadła2y10

Are you no longer updating the libsyn version? The most recent episode there is from August 2022 while the other sites have newer episodes.

[-]Solenoid_Entity2y10

Thanks for checking! The Libsyn feed has been redirected, it's now hosted on BuzzSprout. All new episodes should still be going to all the platforms. Are you having trouble with any of the platforms, or just the Libsyn site itself? That one won't work anymore, unfortunately.

[-]Bojadła2y10

My problem is that you link libsyn in the post but it doesn't contain all episodes. I was able to find the other episodes but I would still like for the post to be updated.

[-]Solenoid_Entity2y10

Ahh good point, sorry I didn't notice that. I'll update the post shortly.

[-]Timeroutes2y10

Why are the new episodes narrated by a robot?

[-]Solenoid_Entity2y10

See here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/b9oockXDs2xMdYp66/announcement-ai-narrations-available-for-all-new-lesswrong

Please share your feedback here or in the comments on that post, it's helpful for our decision-making on this :)

[-]Timeroutes2y10

The LessWrong Curated Podcast used to be my regular and only check–in with the LessWrong world because it fit well into my schedule. I skip the episodes that are narrated by a robot because I find the emphasis unnatural, which makes the essays confusing for me. All the episodes of the past months have been narrated by the robot, so I have lost contact. I activated my LessWrong account just to ask what is going on.
I realise probably not everyone is as picky as me and that the podcast is most likely a non–funded project, so I cannot ask for much. And that it is better to have a robot–narrated podcast than no podcast at all. I still appreciate the work that has been put into it. But if the plan is to keep the podcast robot–narrated, I will have to switch to reading the essays.

^{^}

Hat Tip to Tamera Lanham and Mattieu Putz for the suggestion at dinner!

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