Fast Is Slow, Slow Is Smooth, Smooth Is Fast
My D&D transcription pipeline got about a third faster. I did it by taking away twenty-four of the thirty-two threads it was using, and by not using the fastest GPU in the house.
Neither of those was the plan. The plan was to throw a 5090 at it.
Fast is slow
I’ve written before about how the session reports get made: record the Discord audio, transcribe it with speaker labels, hand the transcript to an LLM, edit the result into narrative prose. That post described a pair of bash scripts wrapping WhisperX. Since then the scripts have been replaced by a single Go binary that does the same job without PyTorch, without a Hugging Face token, and without a Python environment to rot.