This seems related to one of my favorite automation tricks, which is that if you have some task that you currently do manually, and you want to write a script to accomplish that task, you can write a script of the form
echo "Step 1: Fetch the video. Name it video.mp4";
read; # wait for user input
echo "Step 2: Extract the audio. Name it audio.mp3"
read; # wait for user input
echo "Step 3: Break the audio up into overlapping 30 second chunks which start every 15 seconds. Name the chunks audio.XX:XX:XX.mp3"
read; # wait for user input
echo "Step 4: Run speech-to-text over each chunk. Name the result transcript.XX:XX:XX.srt"
read; # wait for user input
echo "Step 5: Combine the transcript chunks into one output file named transcript.srt"
read; # wait for user input
You can then run your script, manually executing each step before pressing “enter”, to make sure that you haven’t missed a step. As you automate steps, you can replace “print out what needs to be done and wait for the user to indicate t hat the step has completed” with “do the thing automatically”.
I like this a lot. You are programming for the human brain now.
It also seems nice that can implement each step in this program in executable code, and then you don’t need to perform that step manually. You might even write little helper programs to perform the tasks, which can then later be used if you decide to automate the script more.
It also seems useful for developing an algorithm. Often I might want to understand what my brain is doing and have an algorithm that emulates what my brain is doing.
Maybe this method can be used to write down a very high-level description of the steps that I think my brain is doing and then see whether me now following that procedure blindly leads to the correct result. If you get the correct result, you can then try to fill in more details, automating each individual step a bit more, and then checking if you still get the same result, and so on.
This seems related to one of my favorite automation tricks, which is that if you have some task that you currently do manually, and you want to write a script to accomplish that task, you can write a script of the form
You can then run your script, manually executing each step before pressing “enter”, to make sure that you haven’t missed a step. As you automate steps, you can replace “print out what needs to be done and wait for the user to indicate t hat the step has completed” with “do the thing automatically”.
I like this a lot. You are programming for the human brain now.
It also seems nice that can implement each step in this program in executable code, and then you don’t need to perform that step manually. You might even write little helper programs to perform the tasks, which can then later be used if you decide to automate the script more.
It also seems useful for developing an algorithm. Often I might want to understand what my brain is doing and have an algorithm that emulates what my brain is doing.
Maybe this method can be used to write down a very high-level description of the steps that I think my brain is doing and then see whether me now following that procedure blindly leads to the correct result. If you get the correct result, you can then try to fill in more details, automating each individual step a bit more, and then checking if you still get the same result, and so on.