carpo

Haha, a valid concern. I had one other episode with about the same amount of pain a few years later. I was seeing a different dentist at the time who said there was an operculum (a flap of gum tissue) over one of my wisdom teeth that was inflamed. They cleaned it, explained how to keep it clean and said they'd only remove the tooth if it happened often as it was not impacting any other teeth, didn't have cavities and the root was very close to the nerve. I just make sure to clean that area really well.

When I was in my 20's (about 30 years ago now, before my career in IT had began) I went to the dentist in a lot of pain. They did x-rays and said all 4 of my wisdom teeth needed to come out. It would need surgery and would cost 750 per tooth, plus the anaesthesiologist costs. I was working for a low hourly wage in the IT section of a book store at the time, and could not afford that. They then said "no probs, we also offer loans for the procedure". I went home, took some more painkillers and looked into the loan. The interest rate and term would have made it cost thousands more.

(The bookstore I worked at paid low, but had one perk I loved: they let us borrow some of the books so we could learn what was good and give advice to customers. I took the job mainly for this reason, as I was really into 3D modelling and animation and thought I could teach myself. Alas, my old 486 PC could barely run the demos.)

That week I went to my bank to see if they'd give me a loan at better rates than the dentist, and to my shock they could, and would lend me up to 5k as a personal loan, and they said I could use it for anything. I went for it and got the loan.

I didn't go back to the dentist though. Went straight to a computer store and bought one of the latest Pentium PCs and my first ever dedicated GPU (a Matrox Millennium), then stopped at the pharmacy and bought the largest pack of ibuprofen they had.

I got a dream job doing 3D modelling and animation some months after that, transitioned into multimedia programming and have been a software developer ever since, so the ROI was pretty good. And I still have all my wisdom teeth.

I never liked eggplant as a kid, but my Chinese in-laws make some amazing eggplant dishes. My favourite is one where they cut it into inch thick slices, then slice the slice about 3/4 of the way through and stuff it with a seasoned pork mince, dust it with flour and deep fry until golden.

If I remember correctly, the original was like this too. I always used the sloop and would often beat much larger ships.

Yeah, it's been awesome! I'm so excited about tool calls and function use, the possibilities are huge. I ran it over 1494 videos that range in length from a few seconds to over 3 hours. Total duration 260 hours and a total size of 3795 GB. I don't know exactly how long it took to run, as I found some bugs I needed to fix when processing mkv files, but it was probably around 24 hours in total. That wasn't all LLM requests, but also the local Whisper transcription and frame extraction / analysis. I used gemini-3.1-flash-lite-preview for the content analysis and tagging. Analysis cost $9.22 and Tagging cost $2.72 and the results seem great (for comparison, I did 885 videos a few weeks ago with Sonnet and it cost $130 in total). Gemini seems much less verbose than Sonnet, even with the same prompt, so the descriptions are much shorter, but they seem very good. The tagging is great. Another added bonus has been that with the larger screenshots being sent, the LLM can now read much more of the text it sees on screen. Some of my videos are top-down showing me drawing and writing, and now it picks that up, so it's all indexed and searchable. I tested a few models with the RAG Chat feature, and the best one so far is GPT4.1-Mini. Before, when asking questions about the library or a video it was around 4 cents each query, now its averaging about half a cent.

Hey, just want to thank you for this suggestion. Spent this morning swapping to open router and changing all my prompts to use tools instead of XML. Not only is Gemma and Gemini much cheaper, the output tokens from the tool call are much less too. Cost to analyse one 20 minute video with 10 snapshots went from $0.21 to $0.009, and I'm even sending full HD snapshots instead of the 960x540 ones I was sending before (to save costs). The results so far are pretty good. It looks like the larger images are giving the model more context, so in some cases making the cheaper models results better than the expensive models. I'm going to run this over a few hundred videos today and see how it goes in bulk!

I originally limited mine to 10 frames spread evenly throughout the video, but it missed a fair bit of context at the analysis step, and didn't scale with length. So now when a video is loaded the app extracts a bunch of frames for the entire video, then calculates an image histogram and compares similarity to the previous one. There's some configuration so it doesn't send too many to the LLM, but still gets a good cross-section of frames to send.

You could also just use FFmpeg as it can do scene detection too. I tested both but liked the results from the histogram analyzer more.

Yeah, markdown works well if you're going to search through it with Claude Code or something like that. I built ClipScape as an Electron app with a local SQLite database, as I wanted an interface I could search and chat in and see the relevant thumbnails.

Very interesting. Thank you!

Cheers, I'll give it a try. How are those models at returning structured results? When I was writing the prompts for the analysis step and testing with older Claude models, it would have trouble structuring the XML consistently. Sonnet 4.6 handles it really well.

This is great. I wish I had enough ram for a local model. I just spent the last few weeks writing something very similar, but I made it a local Electron app with Whisper, ffmpeg and I added semantic search and embeddings for chatting with the videos. It talks to Claude for the vision analysis, tagging and video chat. Do you only send one image for yours? I used a customised scene detection algorithm to find multiple different images per video and then send them all in one request to Claude (along with the subtitles). It's definitely the most expensive part. Using Sonnet 4.6 for the analysis and Haiku for the tagging costs about $1 for an hour of footage, I can imagine it would be slow locally.

Can't you do both? Use AI and still learn and strive to be better.

But saying it's a confidence trick is saying it's a con. That they're trying to sell someone something that doesn't work. Th op is saying it makes then 10x more productive, so how is that a con?

That's not true. I've paid for a one time license for software before and received updates until the next major release.

Man I love that story.

Reading your comment made me think of the Roman generals returning to a triumph and someone constantly following them saying "memento mori", reminding them they are not a god. Now, instead of humility it would just be seen as a challenge.