My aim with Then & Now is always to present the best information possible, in the best way possible, so that we can learn about history and philosophy together.With that in mind I've been thinking about whether there's a better way to archive the scripts. Sometimes, I've made a video years ago and forgotten almost everything about the topic until I get a few reminders. I think this is common. I've started working on a way to look up the key points, arguments, quotes, etc of the big videos in a memorable way. I want to help us remember what we've learned.
BUT full disclosure:
I've been using Anthropic's Claude to do this. I've asked it to work exclusively from the scripts to create an engaging website. I then double-check everything myself.
If you have any ethical objections to this let me know. I will obviously never use AI to write scripts, or replace research. This is foundational to Then & Now (I hate AI for many reasons, but I'll defer that conversation for another day). But using it to code seems, on balance, reasonable to me, as software engineers themselves do this. Plus it will be for members only so will help support Then & Now.Patreon is a communal conversation between us so let me know what you think, both ethically and on how the website looks, how the info is presented, etc. If this works, I might continue by adding all the big videos. This is an experiment and work in progress: