FFmpeg

So today we're shouting out the winner of a Populous badge, somebody who dropped an answer that was so good it outscored the accepted answer.

So congrats to Alex K. for answering FFmpeg usage to encode a video to H.264 codec format.

If you're curious about that, we'll have the answer for you in the show notes.

I'm Ryan Donovan.

So I think I do a lot of accounting with Cloud Code using, on the personal side, using scripts and Python instead of Excel.

Or I do video editing using FFmpeg and these libraries to render visuals and things like that.

And so I think most knowledge work is reducible to code and coding agents if you like think about it well, you know, and I think that that's like one, I think like big difference that I see like other people doing less of, I think.

We talked a little bit about the model and the harness.

One potential other data point from this conversation saying that maybe people should still be technical or learn how to code is I think earlier in the conversation, we talked about automating knowledge work.

And you mentioned that people who are technical had kind of a leg up because they could kind of understood how to coordinate Claude to do a variety of things.

Like you're calling FFmpeg to automate some video editing and like, I don't think someone who is not technical would have that thought.

So it does seem like even in this case where models are doing a lot, there's still so much value in being technical.

You tell it to read the install file.

You wire up FFmpeg.

If you need voiceovers, you feed it your 11 Labs API key.

The business angle here is huge.

And it's actually really difficult to think of stuff that is hard.

One thing I've been trying to do is I've been trying to take to optimise FFmpeg for ages, which I must say is quite hard.

It's one of those to the question about is this AGI is that I still find that if you have no idea what you're doing, it's not AGI because it doesn't do everything for you.

For me, FFmpeg, I have no clue how to optimize it.

I was like, it's running on my Linux box.

go optimize it it's like oh yes optimize 30 gain i run it on my mark no gain so it's like okay it's optimized for like that specific process and so on so there's still like a little bit of work you need to do to understand it so to me major or not it's still you there's still place for you as a human i i would definitely say say that but yeah it's it's been and i'm gonna pause have a video with a bunch of demos i've got some tabs open if if at some point you want to look at demos yeah it's it's amazing but yeah maybe maybe ryan i don't know what what what are your thoughts

And I spent my non-work time, my non-study time, study time was at the computer.

I would spend my non-study time at the computer feeding CDs into the machine to figure out how audio codecs worked and to learn the ins and outs of FFmpeg and how to make audio and video files sing on my computer.

That was a mastery that led to me being a full-time podcaster eventually.

Those things, like getting rid of the language that says I should be resting, not starting a new project, That is a number one rule for mastery, for relaxation under the mastery area.