> It's a transcript of a podcast.

That's almost the perfect definition of "lazy journalism".

Not to mention it litters the actual cockroach topic with writerly pontification on a specific subset of NY culture, some distorted view of valor, and generational differences.

It's tiring. It's also part of what makes NY so unattractive these days.

Is it such a travesty that someone decided to include a personal anecdote as a throughline? Does every article published need to be hard-hitting "journalism"?

Sometimes it's nice to listen to something with some personality, something that isn't so plain. I'm not in a rush today.

There's a whole world between "including a personal anecdote" and "making the entire article about your anecdote and sprinkling in some actual content"

No, I don't care about their kids and whether they are brave or not. What does that have to do with cockroaches? Who cares about their kids? Why are we even talking about kids here?

>> It's a transcript of a podcast.

> That's almost the perfect definition of "lazy journalism".

They produced, edited, interviewed multiple people including one of the people who worked directly on the project in question, and then provided a transcript of their conversation to make it accessible to a wider audience and that's lazy journalism?

Agree there was a lot of filler, but to be fair, your odd out-of-place zinger is just as annoying as the podcast. Fairly unattractive. And the cycle continues.

Except this is a comment section for discussion, so it's appropriate to discuss and point out this issue which IMHO contaminates nearly all forms of media today.

Who wants to read a transcript of a podcast. 99% invisible does this so much better - a long podcast with all the details, accompanied by a short article with photos. More work of course, but that's what the AI solves.

People who can't hear, just for example?

And fwiw, "this isn't condensed enough" could be applied to 100% of novels, achieving a 100% compression rate, since none of it is useful.

I'm very sorry if you're the one person with a cockroach infestation that has to be eradicated right now and you critically depend on the information in this one article and don't have access to any other resources, but maybe just accept that there are different writing styles for different things, audiences, and even over time for the same person.

> People who can't hear, just for example?

I don't see why people who can't hear would like to read a transcript of a podcast rather than an article either.

All good conversations ebb and flow, and the interview process is just trying to distill the conversation to some entertaining or useful end. Some would use A.I. in an attempt to distill it more, and may find some gem or morsel worth consuming, but miss the depth and value of the conversation itself. It may be time saving for information transfer, but at the expense of the connection that a conversation grants the participants (and to a slightly lesser degree listeners).

Remember that this technology was developed for the NSA because of the data deluge it's surveillance systems created. Who had time to listen to hours of recorded phone calls looking for potential dangerous activity? Speech to text helped alleviate the problem for a short while, but when the internet took away the monopoly the phone companies had on long-distance calls, the volume of international calls went ballistic, and the NSA needed a way of filtering the data to something more useful. In comes A.I. to the rescue!