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This is great - I've actually started building something similar myself a few months ago.

Requests:

- Split Spanish between Spain and Latin America

- Add difficulty levels (consider speaking speed and vocabulary used)

- Ability to select which topics I want the videos to be about (e.g. science, celebrity gossip, AI)


+1 to splitting Spanish. Even better is picking a Spanish speaking country and listening to news from that specific country.


Thanks!

> Split Spanish between Spain and Latin America Will do!

> Add difficulty levels (consider speaking speed and vocabulary used)

I'm working on splitting it up in easy/normal videos. That should be do-able to assess.

> Ability to select which topics I want the videos to be about (e.g. science, celebrity gossip, AI)

I'm thinking about creating a browser plugin where you can tick a box to automatically import it into Fluentsubs. Or create an exercise from an existing video. It will take minutes before it is fully transcribed but it can be a nice way to prep your own content without people blaming me that I serve biased content.

I'm not sure though if people are willing to install browser plugins. I'm always a bit weiry with plugins that are invasive on websites like YouTube.


> It's hard to think of a scenario where there's a child technical enough to run Gemma 3 locally but somehow unable to access any other written erotica.

The reason you're struggling to understand is that you're thinking about this logically.

Adult content is obviously freely available to any child or adult with minimum technical skills. What makes LLMs different is that it's "the new thing" and people respond differently to "the new thing".


Won't somebody think of children‽


As someone who grew up in a 3rd world country and whose mother owned a clothing factory, this product seems...fine? The response is an indication of how little people know about how their t-shirts and shoes are made.


It's nuanced. If it allows you to find outliers (low performers to manage and high performers to praise), that's fine. If you try to push everyone further and further to their breaking point and make them trade the same amount of money for more of their time and more importantly health, it's certainly not fine.


>As someone who grew up in a 3rd world country and whose mother owned a clothing factory, this product seems...fine?

People in western countries find things like sweatshops to be objectionable.

>The response is an indication of how little people know about how their t-shirts and shoes are made.

People in western countries are well aware of how their shirts are made, and don't like it, and try to avoid it when possible specifically because they find sweatshop conditions objectionable.


I'm not sure what data you're using to prove this but it seems like many of the largest brands in the US are still using sweatshop labor [1]. Many still have no idea of what's going on in Xinjiang [2]

1. https://yoursustainableguide.com/brands-that-use-sweatshops/ 2. https://whatishappeninginxinjiang.com/brands-linked-to-xinji...


Are you trying to make the point that people don’t care or aren’t aware of the fact that their clothes are made in sweatshops by linking to a western blog extensively detailing the brands that use sweatshops with the implied point that you should avoid them because they are bad?

Sweatshops are bad. Westerns know this. They don’t want sweatshops.

Seeing YC back a sweatshop management application that uses AI to help managers harass their workers is sad. It would be similar to them investing in faster slave ships in the 1850s.


I'm saying that people _say_ they have issues with sweatshops but when push comes to shove they're willing to buy the Nikes.

I'm not trying to make a decision here on right vs. wrong just pointing out that most people _say_ they care but they're not really willing to do much about it.


I wonder if you'd think differently if your mother was a worker rather than an owner?


Ah ok, my bad then, it's a perfect product and we shouldn't change anything at all then. Let's continue to treat humans as machines, especially in 3rd world countries, who cares right ? Even they say it's fine.


TBH I'd rather buy shirts where I know that people doing them have been well-treated


The people who worked in these companies are usually incredibly grateful for the opportunity to do seated work indoors for reasonable wages.

Applying Western labour practices to third world countries would prevent them from ever developing...hurting the very people we all want to help.


But the lack of the practices shouldn't give the owners free reign to better themselves more while depleting others in the name of "wanting to help".


Looool "those people should thank us for colonizing their countries, we brought them road"...


Applying those practices to western employment will mean no one can afford what those grateful people make.


No, we know, and we're not okay with it either. I understand it's often an improvement over other options for employment. That makes it understandable and even supportable to some extent, not okay.

Here in the US, we spent centuries fighting and dying for better options. Tools like this are used to launder the dismantling of the results of all that work through a fantasy of objective metrics.


I watched my mother spend 30 years building her company...it's hard enough to build a manufacturing company in 3rd world country. Applying Western labour standards would make it impossible.

The way out of poverty is to through. You need to create enough value to be able to afford the airconed offices where everyone sits on an Aeron with a macbook pro.


I'm sitting on a $70 ikea chair, in a flat reconverted to an office, right under the roof, with no AC and I have 1st gen base model m1

FAANG is an exception, even in the west


Yeah, I was going to say "through to what?"

Enough people have to have enough money to be able to buy the things made in a factory someone's mom spent 30 years on for that factory to exist. These tools are being used to dismantle the "what" people strive for. It's precarity as a service.


This looks really great. Are you planning on adding shortcut keys anytime soon?


We actually are planning to really lean into the "Desktop assistant" style of things, so yes absolutely. Like how on Mac you can cmd+space to launch spotlight, we can offer the same functionality alongside everything else.

WIP!


One way of doing this that might save you some effort is writing a plugin for Raycast, but I have no idea whether this covers the use cases you have in mind.

Seems doable: https://github.com/raycast/extensions/blob/main/extensions/o...

(Not affiliated, I just have Raycast installed and use it sometimes)


Thanks <3

2023 was not the ideal time to be operating a tech recruitment company, but we pulled through.


Author of the blog post here.

I wrote blogposts for two reasons: 1. To think through things 2. To get external perspectives from interesting people

This definitely ticks the second box, so thank you.

Could you suggest anything to papers/books to read about Wins Above Replacement?


I probably don't have any sources better than an average google would get. I am not super knowledgable about baseball, I have just come across that statistic and thought it was interesting which keeps it knocking around. https://thebaseballguide.com/war-in-baseball/ was a pretty good overview of it for me though.


Would be extremely weird for someone to do phishing with YC applications.

Either way, it's a verified Stripe domain: https://support.stripe.com/questions/verified-stripe-domains


Does anyone know which South Africa startup was in this batch?


Also really curious, as I feel we are quite a small startup community and would have heard something.


I'm curious about the brazilian one.


The Brazilian company is bxblue. https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/18/bxblue/


fintech is getting insanely huge in brazil right now.


Agreed. Fintech is huge in all growing emerging markets, especially those driven still on top of cash. No credit card infrastructure to mess with - move right onto digital wallets. China is the obvious example.


I do not think the opportunity in Brazil, for fintechs, is about people using cash. More than 100 million have a bank account, with a card, and more than 70 million have a credit card[0]. Almost every place you go you could use a credit card to pay, including churches and street vendors.

But, is too expensive and too much bureaucracy to take a loan. Big Banks is one of the sectors that most profits in Brasil[1], so they do not care so much about small and personal loans. Or loans to small companies. And the legislation sucks too, politicians have passed a new law that will make even harder to make Angel Investments[2]. Is too risky and expensive for everyone that want to loan money to people. Loan money to government is more profitable and almost without risk to Big Banks and mutual funds. So, there is a huge opportunity to disrupt this.

[1]http://www.infomoney.com.br/mercados/acoes-e-indices/noticia... ( portuguese) [2]http://convergecom.com.br/tiinside/21/07/2017/investidor-anj...


In case anyone is curious - these videos were shot in and around Cape Town, South Africa.


Whatsapp is an outlier in many ways and comparing them with any company will make that company seem bloated. As for the comparison, Whatsapp has no monetization model, no marketing and a simpler product.


WhatsApp charges a subscription fee after the first year of $1/year.

When you have several hundred million users, that adds up. An effective monetization model, if unusual in SV.


They used to send me messages about that yearly few but they always ended up extending my membership for free every few months. Then they stopped asking. WhatsApp is de facto free.


But it actually doesn't charge that subscription fee. At least not to the overwhelming majority of its users.


I really do not understand what the logic is here. They already have your loyalty presumably, and it's not a high sticker price.


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