Ok, thanks for the viewpoint, that makes sense. I use AI summaries every day and find it very valuable. But I also see the trend e.g. on Reddit, that people are very dismissive of ai content.
Both Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text now have local models that are good enough to get the job done. Kokoro for TTS, Parakeet for STT and Fluid-1 for text formatting (I use it with FluidVoice). I hope this is a trend that continues for other applications.
After seeing this for the first time, I've build PdfToMp3 to listen to these papers. It has now evolved into ListenDock. Fun fact: PdfToMp3 existed before NotebookLM and I already had "overviews", but I called them teacher explanations.
Here is an example of a "Teacher Explanation" of the paper "Quantifying the Rise and Fall of Complexity in Closed Systems: The Coffee Automaton"
This is the key, if they are very similar but used by different consumers the chance that they will diverge in the future is very high. And once they do they will break the abstraction.
And to test the hypothesis if the motivation actually works with "fast flashing images" I built this experiment: https://fitfatflix.fit/
When openClaw came out I build a game like map around it to orchestrate tasks: https://memefields.com/
And not published, I build a little recommender app of activities I can do only today or only this time of the year where I currently am, so I don't miss good things.
I was concerned about big players offering the same functionality when building listendock.com, but maybe there is a place for specialized apps like that.
Lately I've been trying to learn about topics more intentionally instead of following what the YouTube feed recommends, for example evolutionary algorithms. For that I built the topics feature in my app, so I get a number of papers and articles suggested and then over the next weeks I can listen to them.
I got almost the same reply, including the "push it" nonsense:
> Walk! It would be a bit counterproductive to drive a dirty car 50 meters just to get it washed — and the walk will take you less than a minute. You can simply pull the car out and push or walk it over, or drive it the short distance once you're ready to wash it. Either way, no need to "drive" in any meaningful sense for just 50 meters.
I was also looking for IT-related podcasts and had the same impression. What seems to work is when people write interesting books and then go on shows to promote their books by talking about the content.