[HN Gopher] A tool for capturing captions and transcripts from o...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       A tool for capturing captions and transcripts from online videos
        
       Author : mzs
       Score  : 56 points
       Date   : 2022-09-30 14:31 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (simonwillison.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (simonwillison.net)
        
       | mzs wrote:
       | blog post with details:
       | https://simonwillison.net/2022/Sep/30/action-transcription/
        
       | mmastrac wrote:
       | This is an amazing "misuse"/hack of GitHub Actions and probably
       | something that will cause major headaches for us in the future if
       | they decide to crack down on it. I love it.
        
         | swyx wrote:
         | why is it a misuse?
        
           | mmastrac wrote:
           | See the above comment:
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33037494
           | 
           | Kinda breaks the spirit of GHA, IMO. I like it, but I think
           | it's a bad path to start down. Entirely IMO, keep in mind.
        
       | simonw wrote:
       | This is the wrong link - this is just to a demo of the system.
       | 
       | https://simonwillison.net/2022/Sep/30/action-transcription/ is my
       | full write-up of the project
       | 
       | https://github.com/simonw/action-transcription is the project
       | repository.
        
         | dang wrote:
         | Ok, we've changed to the first link from
         | https://github.com/simonw/action-transcription-demo. Thanks!
        
           | simonw wrote:
           | Thanks!
        
         | mzs wrote:
         | Sorry I can't seem to edit the submission anymore, but you
         | edited the readme thankfully.
        
       | sixhobbits wrote:
       | any activity that places a burden on our servers, where that
       | burden is disproportionate to the benefits provided to users (for
       | example, don't use Actions as a content delivery network or *as
       | part of a serverless application*, but a low benefit Action could
       | be ok if it's also low burden); or
       | 
       | Not a lawyer but pretty sure that is a violation of their ToS
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | I'm very confident that what I've built here fits the set of
         | things that you are allowed to do with Actions.
         | 
         | The workflow I've written here is a shortcut for writing
         | content directly to the repository. You could go and run the
         | commands on your laptop and copy-and-paste the extracted
         | captions into a file and push them to the repo... but Actions
         | are specifically designed to automate that kind of process.
         | 
         | (Also: I've shown this to GitHub people who have worked on
         | Actions and they thought it was really cool.)
        
           | latchkey wrote:
           | Being confident/cool is irrelevant if GH legal decides that
           | this isn't a valid use of their ToS.
           | 
           | I would have reached out to GH to ask for permission instead
           | of asking for forgiveness.
        
             | simonw wrote:
             | I doubt GitHub have the support capacity to handle everyone
             | pinging them to ask permission any time they want to do
             | something interesting with Actions.
             | 
             | I'll take my chances. If they tell me it's not a supported
             | use-case, I'll update the project to tell people they
             | shouldn't use it.
        
               | latchkey wrote:
               | Exactly, they would probably say no since that is the
               | easiest answer.
               | 
               | Now that you're top of HN and they might see more abuse
               | of their systems, it'll just come more quickly.
               | 
               | Great work on the actions though, it is a pleasure to
               | read the source code. Learning a few tricks in there.
        
               | fragmede wrote:
               | Keep building and ignore the haters. I'm sure Github
               | deals with _actual_ abuse issues with Github Actions
               | (like trying to mine crypto) on a regular basis. This is
               | neat and interesting and at most they 'll rate limit it
               | if it gets too popular. Plus you're connecting to a
               | hosted paid service for the GPU backend side so it's not
               | all CPU time.
        
               | latchkey wrote:
               | I'm not a hater, I'm a realist. Services like this have a
               | free tier to encourage paid accounts. When people abuse
               | that free tier, everyone else suffers. It is not much
               | effort to ask the support team for permission. I've also
               | been on the devops team of having to run services like
               | this and it really isn't fun when people abuse it. It is
               | a lot of extra work.
        
         | striking wrote:
         | I think
         | 
         | > if using GitHub-hosted runners, any other activity unrelated
         | to the production, testing, deployment, or publication of the
         | software project associated with the repository where GitHub
         | Actions are used.
         | 
         | is far more pertinent, and can be solved by self-hosting a
         | runner.
        
           | mmastrac wrote:
           | Can you self-host a runner outside of GH enterprise?
           | 
           | EDIT: TIL you can! That's wild.
        
       | jackconsidine wrote:
       | Wow that's cool. I've been using Whisper from a script I wrote
       | which reads my Dropbox videos, transcribes them, and uploads both
       | to Notion. If anyone's interested feel free to reach out. [0]
       | 
       | I may pivot to this Github Action so my CPU doesn't explode.
       | 
       | [0] jack at koptional dot com
        
         | muratsu wrote:
         | why not put it on a gist/github repo and share it here?
        
       | jamesblonde wrote:
       | There is a severless machine learning course that includes GH
       | actions to implement serverless feature pipelines and serverless
       | batch inference pipelines.
       | 
       | https://github.com/featurestoreorg/serverless-ml-course
       | 
       | Disclaimer: I am involved in it.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2022-09-30 23:01 UTC)