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Lots of things fall into this category. Speech is very low information density per time.

Thankfully speech recognition and AI summary is a thing now.




This type of phrasing is strange to me. I guess it depends on what you consider to be, and not to be, “information”.

Reading a bullet point summary of Moby Dick certainly would compress the time required to understand the plot.

Isn’t the prose or phrasing part of the transmission?


For most talks, I would say no. If I were going to a lecture by Pynchon (ha!) I would want to listen at 1x. For 99% of talks at conferences which are mostly just a way of communicating technical data, a text transcription that is then reduced in word count by 50% is probably only a very small loss (if that), and a 90%+ time savings.

This gives me an idea for a website. All of the talks of a conference, audio transcribed and LLM summarized into 3-minute reads.

It might be worth doing the whole INFOCON archive…




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