kolchinski

I read Guns, Germs and Steel recently and loved it. After finishing it, I was wondering how well the theses had held up in the time since it was published and did some research, and seems like most (though not all) of the major points have held up pretty well or even been strengthened by recent evidence. However, the book seems to have attracted a surprising amount of hate, which this reminds me of! It feels to me like an instinctive hateful backlash to a remarkable achievement, like "crabs in a bucket syndrome" or the Einstein quote -

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.”

It's very possible to get campsites but you do need to pounce right when they open up, especially in busier times of year - https://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/camping.htm

I and many of my friends regularly wake up to do the 7am clickthrough on recreation.gov and often (though not always) are successful for the dates we're trying to get.

Hah hopefully not, if this takes off we'll be filtering for illegal/immoral use! Outbound AI calling is actually illegal although widely done :(

Excited to be able to use this, the demo was really impressive!

Oh yeah agreed that the change in prices doesn't prove it's a scam, my thought was more along the lines of - when crypto insiders who have been talking up crypto as valuable/important because it's independent of the government quickly change their tune and cheer on government intervention when it goes into their pockets, it makes it pretty clear what the dynamic actually is.

Thanks yep got it working, really great stuff!!

Hey Ben, this looks great, but I'm getting a "Rate Limit Exceeded" error, anything to be done about that?

Definitely, but none of my obvious suspects from my immediate network are looking/a good fit. A post like this is both to find people I don't know who might be a good fit as well as to surface this to people I do know but that I might not have otherwise thought to reach out to.

I'd love to chat as well if you've still got bandwidth — I'm at alex@kolch.in

Thanks, appreciate it!

Also Azure actually! Yeah for a sentence or two the onboard OCR usually gets it right, but if you’re listening to a few pages at a time there are almost always a bunch of errors and it gets pretty exasperating to listen to.

Check out Speechify and NaturalReader, IIRC they’re two of the most popular apps for that use case and I remember their voices were pretty solid.

Just took a look, their lower-quality model is almost exactly the same price as Azure TTS, and the quality is similar. Thanks for the pointer.

Makes sense, one other interesting use case would be looping in translation into the middle of the pipeline so that you could scan a book in a language you don't speak and have it read to you in a language you do speak.

Yes this is a very valid point, on a technical level it's definitely a 2-step thing. From a product perspective I'm framing it as a "this app reads books out loud to you" but if I start hearing about people using it to grab the text out (which is possible right now) I'll definitely consider paying more attention to that use case.

Yeah I (and my fiancée) are also Audible users — this app is mostly for cases where an audiobook or even e-book don't exist, like for older books you might get from a used bookstore or library. I'd prefer to set the price point lower, but if a user uses their 250-scan quota (which can be up to 500 pages, since you can scan 2 at a time) fully, I'll actually be losing about $10 on them that month, so I'm hoping not everyone uses their full quota!

That said, I'm expecting OCR, LLM, and TTS API prices to continue coming down, at which point I'll be able to drop the price and raise the quota. Honestly I suspect iOS itself should be able to handle this use case well sooner or later, but until then, there's this app :).

iOS has pretty decent built-in OCR and TTS but give it a try on a book page if you're curious — unfortunately the OCR makes a lot of mistakes (as well as including footnotes etc.) and the TTS is still pretty robotic. I do hope and expect they'll improve soon, though, at which point the only advantage of this app will be that it can scan multiple pages at a time — probably not enough of an advantage to justify its existence at that point although I'll see what users say. For now, as far as I've seen it's the highest-quality option for this (granted, very niche) paper-to-audio use case.

All languages will be tough but adding common ones that are already supported by off-the-shelf OCR, TTS, and LLMs is definitely doable; do you have any that you're most keen on?

Yes, their quality is great but the cost is astronomical — I pay about $8 in Azure TTS bills alone for TTS-ing a 500-page book (what you can scan per month with a $10 subscription), whereas Eleven Labs would be about $100 for the same length. I found Azure to be the best bang-for-the-buck, although I'm on the lookout for more affordable high-quality TTS, which would also let me drop the price point of the app.

It's Azure's TTS API — I'm using four of their voices.

Good idea thanks, let me figure out how to do that.

Yes, true (for now) — which language(s) are you looking for?

The APIs I'm using are mostly multilingual so it'd be doable to extend to other languages.

I’ve had the same experience and agreed for the current state of the tech, I actually expect the industry to grow IF the AI tech doesn’t advance much further for a few years. But I think we’re only one to several leaps of capability away from the scales tipping towards fewer and fewer specialists being needed to translate human needs into instructions for computers.

Looks like they should be available on other devices too – I just got it to work on my Apple Watch without changing anything.

https://support.apple.com/guide/shortcuts-mac/run-shortcuts-...

Yep, just click on the three dots over the blue rounded rectangle that says "GPT Mode" and it'll show you!

Author here, thanks – great point. Mind leaving it as a comment on the essay itself as well for posterity? Or I'm happy to add a footnote/comment quoting you.

Mezli (YC W21) – we build robot restaurants | Full-stack Software Engineer | San Mateo, CA (Bay Area) | ONSITE | Full-time

We're hiring a full-stack SWE to take charge of the user-facing software for our robot restaurant (ordering, pickup, etc.) This is the last role we're planning to hire for before our next fundraising round; it'll come with substantial equity.

Core stack: React, NodeJS, GraphQL, AWS. You'll have significant input into which technologies we use.

For more, check out https://www.mezli.com/careers (this is the first job there.) To inquire or apply, email me (Alex) at ak@mezli.com.

Right now we're running the restaurant with human cooks so staying open on weekends takes overhead – we'll be doing weekends starting with our robot launch next year!

Hey folks, Alex here (the author of the blog post) – happy to answer any questions.

Our Launch HN was previously discussed here – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26468204

Mezli (YC W21) | Full-time ONSITE San Mateo, CA | Mechanical Design Engineer

At Mezli, we’re building autonomous restaurants (“auto-kitchens”) that halve the cost of healthy, convenient meals. As engineers in grad school at Stanford, we (Alex K, Alex G, and Max) got tired of having to either cook or spend $10+ per meal to eat well.

So we teamed up with Eric, a Michelin-star chef, to create Mezli.

Since going full-time in January, we’ve built a working auto-kitchen and launched a ghost kitchen that our customers love (Google Mezli to see the reviews!)

We were in the latest batch of Y Combinator and just finished raising a seed round.

The job: As our mechanical design engineer, you’ll be responsible for designing and building multiple subsystems of our auto-kitchen.

You’ll design and prototype components, send parts out for manufacture, and order parts from suppliers. You’ll also work with the rest of our engineering team to define the architecture of the next version of our auto-kitchen. As one of the first engineers at Mezli, you’ll have the chance to take on leadership roles as our team expands.

https://mezli.breezy.hr/p/ccb889373361-mechanical-design-eng...

100% – making healthy food accessible to everyone is a big part of why we're doing this.