A little hack to follow all the other hacks.

Folks. Back in my day, learning to program meant painstakingly piecing together code that printed “Hello World!” on the screen. Now people are hacking together the most fantastic real-time transcription tools in no time at all... and for some, it’s their first app ever. Getting to be a small part of that, both by trying to inspire people and as an investor in Klang, which makes it a concrete reality, brings an almost childlike, unguarded joy that’s hard to resist. Forgive me.

Anyways, when Klang released Pianissimo, its open Swedish speech-to-text model, last week, I was floored by how many people immediately started building and how much enthusiasm it sparked. Ten builds so far, including Olle Söderqvist’s Pianissimo Meet, which transcribes Teams and Zoom meetings locally in real time.

So what could be more natural than hacking together a tool to keep track of all the tools people are hacking together? 😇 Have you built something I’ve missed? Give me a shout in the comments.

An aside: 1. All my hacks always provide ways for both people and machines to access and use the information in whatever way suits them. 2. All my hacks use AI in different ways to try to bring out the less obvious. There’s plenty of potential for hits and misses, of course, but it always makes me think again. 3. All my hacks always try to find a way to measure value and prioritise accordingly. One example: trying to define an impact score and use it as the default sort.