Hacker News: SamPatt

New comment by SamPatt in "Uncovering insiders and alpha on Polymarket with AI"

SamPatt — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 02:20:45 +0000

Yes. This is why copy-trading often fails.

New comment by SamPatt in "Uncovering insiders and alpha on Polymarket with AI"

SamPatt — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 22:29:21 +0000

You can see when they buy or sell a position. It's on the blockchain so it's all public. And yes, copying positions is called copy-trading and it's extremely popular.

Orders aren't public though. Only the actual trades. This is important because by the time the trade is known by others very often the edge is gone. Especially if you have other people watching the same trader and they all try to copy the trade at the same time.

New comment by SamPatt in "My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood"

SamPatt — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 18:29:21 +0000

Ah I understand you now. Yes I could have had a service do the digitizing then only done delivery myself. And given the time investment that probably would have been more sound. I don't think I'd do it all myself if I did it again.

I didn't know Gemini models were that capable. I admit I'm still skeptical about this approach though - even if it were capable of accurately labeling people and locations across decades, there's no way it could know when a scene is of personal interest. I kept a running log for each sibling as I was manually doing the labeling, knowing what they'd want to see, which presumably is only possible for me and my siblings to do with any accuracy.

If AI could ever do that then we've definitely hit ASI!

New comment by SamPatt in "My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood"

SamPatt — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 17:46:59 +0000

I'll have to try that next time

New comment by SamPatt in "My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood"

SamPatt — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:25:04 +0000

Yup, you nailed it. This was my exact concern.

New comment by SamPatt in "My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood"

SamPatt — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:24:19 +0000

It wasn't about having the videos held hostage, but about the ease of accessing and viewing them. I didn't want to do DVDs at all - frankly, that's just a bad experience to go through 200+ hours of unlabeled video.

New comment by SamPatt in "My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood"

SamPatt — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:12:11 +0000

Hi gwern!

My siblings are very much not developers. That's a lot of data for them to download, store, and figure out a way to view.

I was worried they'd just see a list of filenames and not put in the effort. By creating a streaming experience, I thought they'd actually watch them.

You might be correct that Gemini could have helped, I didn't test it, but much of the knowledge of who was in a scene, where it was, and why it would matter is inside my head. I doubt any model could effectively label locations and people over 20 years of video.

As to the opportunity cost - I'm currently looking for work, so mine is undoubtedly lower than yours!

New comment by SamPatt in "My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood"

SamPatt — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:01:17 +0000

I'm sorry to hear that. I agree. I'm fortunate. I hope that you can enjoy the memories as best you can.

New comment by SamPatt in "My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood"

SamPatt — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:00:07 +0000

Bro, you're paranoid. I'm the author. Look at my blog. I write my stories myself. I wrote a geoguessr article last year that hit the top of HN.

Yes, I've used VLC. But I'm using a fairly new machine and hadn't installed it yet.

Why does it strain credulity to make this myself? I explain it step by step. I enjoy using AI to build stuff myself.

New comment by SamPatt in "My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood"

SamPatt — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:53:02 +0000

I'm glad you enjoyed it!

I posted this 5 days ago, and it didn't seem like anyone saw it then, so I'm happy folks are enjoying it now.

New comment by SamPatt in "My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood"

SamPatt — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:50:27 +0000

I would absolutely try that first.

New comment by SamPatt in "My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood"

SamPatt — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:49:46 +0000

It's the Big Video8 cartel astroturfing.

New comment by SamPatt in "My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood"

SamPatt — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:47:57 +0000

Really? I'm the author and I can't conceive of any way this could be considered marketing. It's a personal project, I'm selling nothing.

But I am looking for work, so hey, if anyone is hiring and they enjoyed the post, then email me.

New comment by SamPatt in "My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood"

SamPatt — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:42:42 +0000

It's a joke; my grandma worked as a switchboard operator in the 1940s for two weeks. As she says, she "disconnected half of Washington DC."

We often refer to government agents as "feds." I wasn't considering an international audience with my title, apologies!

New comment by SamPatt in "My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood"

SamPatt — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:39:13 +0000

Glad you enjoyed it. Definitely get some good videos.

New comment by SamPatt in "My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood"

SamPatt — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:35:55 +0000

I have a NAS backup as well.

New comment by SamPatt in "My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood"

SamPatt — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:34:41 +0000

Thank you, and thanks for the suggestion, I'll look into that.

New comment by SamPatt in "My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood"

SamPatt — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:33:48 +0000

Immich is great, after doing this project I installed it for our current family photos and it works well, although I keep hitting a bug where older photos are blurred and never load. I need to investigate that.

New comment by SamPatt in "My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood"

SamPatt — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:30:58 +0000

Thanks for the tip! Part of the issue of automated scene detection was that there isn't any way to get the other metadata, such as who is in the scene or the date.

But I could have probably auto split the entire file at the start then just do that metadata per file. Although I found being able watch the entire video was quite nice.

My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood

SamPatt — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 14:33:22 +0000

Article URL: https://sampatt.com/blog/2025-12-13-my-grandma-was-a-fed-lessons-from-digitizing-hundreds-of-hours-of-childhood/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46934513

Points: 210

# Comments: 85