Thursday 01/23/2025
Throughout the day in various spells I worked on collecting the videos for the VDV. Youtube doesn’t like you to download their videos and make it very hard, but there’s a very useful and well-designed website that can download the whole video or just its audio. Another useful site allows me to take an audio file of music and shift its pitch up or down, or pull out the vocals leaving the accompaniment. I used both of those extensively, first for downloading 20 videos and then for three songs where the performers need their backing track but with the pitch changed. At the end I had all the material I need to assemble the video which I may get done tomorrow. “May” because I have other things I need to catch up on then, too.
At 11 I sat in on a talk by Russell Wald, Executive Director of the Stanford Center for the Human use of AI. His main point was that the major companies (openai, anthropic, google) are sucking away all the talent and influence in this critical field, leaving no role for academia.
Codgerville 