Haha, the way maths is taught at university hasn't changed in centuries.
Let's not pretend this has all been figured out and perfected. Heck, most maths professors I encountered in my studies could trace their scientific lineage straight back to C.F.Gauss[1] and that's how they taught. Don't get me wrong, some were great teachers, others not so much, but there are valid alternatives to the classic lecture.
Very different types of lectures. Small chunks of info, lots of graphical representations, etc. These are very different that the type of lectures I had in school.
His lectures are terrible explanations and he doesn’t use professional looking graphics. Khan Academy is not a good product. My opinion refers solely to the math content.
The traditional lecture does have a lot of value, however, we are also quite certain that the instructional experience can be improved through the addition of visualizations and simulations. This is especially true for interactive visualizations where the learner can ask, "What if ...", experiment, and see the results of their interactions.
The lecture format is very old and would not have persisted if it didn't provide a good value. At the same time, it's age also implies that there is room for improvement.
The vast majority of students never ask, “what if…” The vast majority just want to know the mechanics of doing the problems well enough to pass the test. At the time a student is taking Calculus 1 they don’t ask questions about why it works. They just want to know, for instance, the rules of differentiation. Later in life, when they have intellectually matured, videos like 3Blue1Brown are interesting and fascinating. The vast majority of students would not learn well from 3Blue1Brown type videos.
The lecture format has only been competing with high-production-values video for a decade or two, and with interactive examples for much less than that.
The Gutenberg Method of teaching acknowledges the existence of the printing press and suggests one person standing at the front telling everyone what to write down may be outdated
If you’ve experienced that one great teacher that inspired genuine interest in a subject where you previously had none? It’s historically hard to scale, but I think that’s the potential here and it’s a subject that a lot of people lack interest in but has wide reaching impact
Here’s a thought for you. What percentage of the population wants to be mathematically literate given the amount of effort needed to gain that literacy? In my 30 years of teaching math at the college level the anecdotal evidence I have is that this number is quite low. Why do you think the number of mathematically literate people should be significantly higher than what it is?
What methods of teaching will work for those who don’t want to do the work to be mathematically literate?
Pretty much everyone has ideas and opinions on teaching and what would work. It is easy to tell when such opinions are made by people with no experience teaching. In the same way a professional carpenter can tell when some wood work was done in an amateurish way.
Why do teachers do things the way they do? Is it because they are mostly stupid, incompetent people who haven’t thought as much about their job as amateurs have? Everyone has “the solution” but, yet, that great insightful idea doesn’t take off. Is it a conspiracy on our part? Perhaps it’s because that solution doesn’t work at scale.
Single-person made animations and applets became available only ten years ago and still require a programmer. We collectively lived under a rock for ages and entered the world of computers and smartphones few minutes ago. Considering the inertia, you had no time to check if this particular solution works at scale. Why are you so pre-opposed to it?
I can only think of: because nothing works at scale in education and it’s generally slow as hell.
I’ve done things like this. Back when Flash was around and Captivate was first out I created interactive lecture videos. One in particular was, I thought, really good. It was an explanation of how progressive tax systems work and how the amount of tax paid is a piecewise defined function of salary. Included in the videos at various places were concept questions. The video would stop at such a question and when you answer it would continue.
What was the result of this? Most didn’t watch the video and those that did didn’t finish it. Students largely don’t watch lecture videos or videos of any kind regarding math. For online courses students are using AI programs to do their work. They answer questions that should take minutes in seconds.
Most of the people I’ve responded to on the thread I started have no idea what they are talking about.
Are you trying to imply that you have some teaching experience of your own? You're doing an incredibly bad job of establishing your credibility in this thread. Try being less combative and providing some substantive explanations for why you're so strongly convinced that there's no room for improvement over the status quo.
In particular, I'm curious how you come to the conclusion that high-quality video content cannot work better for "the vast majority of students" than sitting in a lecture hall. Do you have any theories about what kind of student good video content can work well for?
..why you're so strongly convinced that there's no room for improvement over the status quo.
I didn’t make this claim. I said that videos like 3Blue1Brown’s videos would not work in the classroom for most students. I further said that there was a reason things are done the way they are.
Imagine going to a place of business and seeing people doing their job. A job you’ve never done before. You start giving advice on what they should do. Most likely your views would not carry much weight or be worth much consideration.
I was under the impression that our education system is more about keeping children off the streets while both parents go to the office/factory than really educating them. This was especially visible during covid.
In that sense I agree with you: videos won't do the job.
On the other hand there is this one guy making videos that, I believe, reached way more people than any single teacher would. How does that count for scale?
Can we agree that there is room for both and that these videos are a nice addition?
Check out https://sinerider.com/ too! A friend of mine who helps Grant Sanderson sometimes with 3B1B stuff built it, it's an awesome math education game like LineRider but using formulas to build the tracks.
I love both 3b1b and SineRider, both have had more impact on my intuitive understanding of function composition than anything else.
To me it appeared more like he was aware of a limitation in the new rendering logic he was working on in the backend, and that he knew a simple (high level) workaround.
In larger companies this is how arsonist-firefighter engineers look impressive... fixing a bug they are responsible for while in a highly visible position
I've been in this situation before, there's a fair amount of "we can do the thing in x time but it'll have these issues, or do it right in x+y time." The quick option gets chosen, things chug along happily for some time, then we hit the limitation and I remember what the issue was. I couldn't even say that the decision to do the quick thing was the wrong one.
I was the young "tech guy" inside the business development department at Earthlink in the mid 90s. The bizdev folks would propose ideas and I would think them through and realize there were technical issues, and when I shared my concerns, they would all be disheartened. But, sometime later, I would figure out a way around the "problem". They were perpetually grateful, but after a number of these iterations, I got the sense that I was mainly solving problems that I had invented. I actually even shared my concern about that with my boss, and he dismissed it – I think they enjoyed the rollercoaster ride.
I once worked one project with (against?) a guy who saw his job as ‘finding problems before they happen’. It was fine at first but as the project progressed, he became more and more focused on proving that the project would fail. Every molehill was a mountain, and flat ground was just a tapestry of molehills. Eventually I realised that if the project didn’t fail, he felt superfluous.
I'd see it more as making test cases IRL. you're finding problems to consider and making sure your solution can address for that (even if the solution already did). I'd still be relieved having someone would could consider potential issues that swiftly by my side.
"Mountain out of a molehill" is better than lots of other possible approach angles. The core behaviour is grappling with the problem and looking for solutions.
He knew about the bug, but developing this software is not his main job, producing videos is.
The fact that he knew the place, the reason, and came up with a workaround live demonstrates that he invests time into improving his toolkit. And not occasionally, but actively.
I feel like quite a few of the content creators I watch are starting to “show their face”, though the big one that comes to mind is the Real Engineering guy. A few of his newest videos have had him acting a bit like a host, interviewer and narrator.
It’s also weird when some of these creators swap with somebody else, like veratasium has had his producer do some of the videos instead.
I mean he was 100% right about all of that; history will not look fondly upon societys hysterical reaction to Covid, so… I think he took a lot of shit for “coming out of the closet” in that regard and he’s never been the same. There was (and apparently still are) a lot of incredibly sanctimonious busy body’s out there who absolutely loved the power trip Covid gave them and they were more than happy to harass, threaten, and be incredibly disrespectful to people who disagreed with the mainstream narrative.
As somebody in the same boat as AvE, watching people who you knew and respected turn against you the way so many people did is pretty brutal and fucks you up pretty good. Honestly it was scary as fuck how so people completely lost their minds after being fed non-stop fear porn and propaganda. Lots of parallels to some pretty fucked up atrocities—I can now see how “normal people” can turn so evil and corrupt they’d kill their neighbors and families. Multiple people I knew and respected wished me a horrific death for expressing my opinions… I’m sure if we continued this conversation and it was allowed on this forum you too would verbally wish at my death. Scary fucking shit.
I mean god forbid anybody express any disagreement with perhaps the most authoritarian, unscientific power grab in human history. The shit that went down was pure evil. Thank god some people had the courage to speak out against it even if it cost them so dearly.
Disagreement is healthy. What was unhealthy is that it was dangerous to disagree.
People who thought we should just ride covid out were, more often than not, simply unaware of the nuances of covid vs a cold or something similar. People who thought we should hide in our homes until it was eradicated were similarly unaware of the implicit harms of that choice.
A healthy discourse with people willing to concede and compromise would have landed us somewhere sane. Disagreement would have been part of finding a sensible conclusion.
What failed was our ability to do just that. Somehow we totally blew it.
We were all told to shut the fuck up and listen to a handful of cherry picked “doomsday experts” who refused to follow their own data, didn’t follow their own science and refused to acknowledge that society has millions of problems beyond one very single, very specific thing.
And if we didn’t follow their edict’s or if we were to express any doubt of any kind, we were evil alt-right grandma killers who deserved horrible Covid deaths.
Heathy discourse was absolutely not allowed. You were either 100% on board with whatever crazy shit your local politicians threw against the wall or you were a pile of shit sub human scumball. Didn’t matter they had no definition of success, no long term gameplan, no acknowledgment of the harms they were causing… in fact it didn’t even matter that these experts and politicians didn’t follow their own policies, you were told to suck it up buttercup this is the “new normal” and it’s forever.
I don’t think this is a “both sides have a good argument” kind of deal. What the Covid “side” did was abhorrent and history will not look fondly on them at all.
> We were all told to shut the fuck up and listen to a handful of cherry picked “doomsday experts”
No, you were told to out aside your opinions and allow people educated in epidemiology to guide a rapidly changing situation. It turns out the there were too many people with a chip on their shoulder to make the policy recommendations effective.
> if we were to express any doubt of any kind, we were evil alt-right grandma killers who deserved horrible Covid deaths.
Pointless hyperbole.
> no acknowledgment of the harms they were causing
Such as?
> What the Covid “side” did was abhorrent and history will not look fondly on them at all.
Reading between the lines it seems like you have many baked in assumptions that distort your perception of the event.
Thank you. The revisionism in this thread is ridiculous.
There was no oppressive regime forcing you to do anything. There were common sense, effective public health recommendations for mitigating a novel virus that spread faster than anything we'd seen, whose death rate was not known, and for which we had no vaccine or mitigation except for masking/distancing.
No one was forcing you to stay indoors. You were asked to wear a mask around other people, and most private businesses chose to require customers and employees to wear one, as is their right.
What revisionism? There was nothing sensible, measured, effective, justified, "common sense" or genuine in the "response" to that "pandemic". I came to believe that it was not even well-intended beyond the first couple of months. No, in my book, authorities lying and manipulating to save their own arse and cover incompetence cannot be absolved or rationalized as well intended.
What you describe is the idealistic picture of how it, perhaps, should have unfolded. You may even genuinely believe it is what actually transpired, and sure as hell you want us to believe the same, but reality disagrees. We remember how it was and we "have receipts".
In Victoria (AU) people were definitely not "asked" but very much demanded to perform all these theatrics.
I remember watching some news with police wallowing in pride of scolding and ultimately fining a man who they "caught" sitting in his own car "outside of property boundary" after curfew, apparently needed to escape a heated family situation. By sitting alone and unmasked in the car he would surely cause a mass-spreading of your beloved "virus". We were, in fact, forced to stay indoors. What is the other meaning of "curfew"?
In other multiple examples people were jumped from behind by police, tasered, hand-chocked and even rammed by police cars - again, for being found in "non-compliance" with this nonsense. There was no lack of footage showing people forcibly masked by police.
Other measures included arresting people in their homes for "inciting" on social media, large scale deployment of armored vehicles, helicopters and drones to spy on those having BBQ "over allowed number of visitors". Tear gas and rubber bullets for transgressors. Mounted police "kettling" of protesters of such "measures". Care to quantify anti-viral properties of curfews?
We knew all there was to know very early in the show. Diamond Princess was perfect in-vivo experiment. A sardine can full of old farts had 700 out 3700 "infected". Pardon, "tested positive" - I imagine with a PCR test. I wonder was the PCR test at the time used at 40 cycles, which is enough to find traces of this "deadly virus" in orange juice and machine oil? Apparently 14 people later died "from" the "virus". Interestingly, both "tested positive" and "died" were reported after half- to one-and-half-months since vessel was fully abandoned. I can only conclude that those poor 14 were ventilated to death, as it was a preferred method of disposal at the time. Is it even so much over the "baseline" for 3000 septagenarians regardless of covid or any other malaise?
Epidemiology has proven itself to be full of it and unable to take on any new learnings. I suspect it was always like that. "People educated in epidemiology to guide a rapidly changing situation" were even unable to follow their own "guidance"! When they were "blowing off steam" in underground orgies or similarly unable to hold their urges. Do you need reference for that?
There was no justification for anything. Masks were mandated on a whim. Premier of the state went from "wearing a mask for this virus is a waste of mask" to "you are an extremist and far-right if you don't wear one" in one day. Some "health advice" was cited, but request to release that advice later on was denied, and denied it stays to this day. Apparently, it was "not in public interest" to release. Yeah, sure. I totally believe it wasn't pulled out of.. thin air.
On a personal front, not showing unbounded enthusiasm was branded "conspiratorial thinking" and "actively wanting 10% of over-60s dead". By people I considered friends, not less.
So, who really engages in revisionism and newspeak here? Who is an extremist - the one who shuns a useless mask or those who point a (rubber bullet) gun at them or break into their home with handcuffs? What is this derogatory, offending rhetoric spouted from highest level of political and bureaucratic power, if not gaslighting? Who is "spouting full throated delusions as fact"?
I cannot possibly fit all my points into this HN post, or I won't have any time left to work today. But for every bit of nonsense we have a pile of receipts completely refuting it. Even if some "measures" in isolation could be argued reasonable, the whole well was so deeply poisoned that it is absolutely impossible to look at it positively. My most charitable interpretation is that they wanted the measures to be first and foremost visible, and effectiveness or even necessity was not a priority. But my appetite for being charitable went away too, as the stench of their BS was overwhelming. It probably does not matter for establishing the truth, as the trenches have been dug out and the war is declared for many decades ahead. Covid enthusiasts' camp "won the battle" - we were all subjected to all these outlandish orders and demands. Did it help in the end? I do not understand. Not only they were successful with inflicting the maximum pain, but they also now demand us to remember it fondly??? Why? How twisted one's mind has to be? Or is it intoxication from the high of righteousness? Righteousness is a hell of drug, indeed.
If I may address the "such as?" insinuation in the GP post. I'm sure they aren't really genuine in wanting to hear the answer. Otherwise their claimed "education" would have allowed them to see at least some of reasons. If "education" doesn't stand for "brain-washing" and "indoctrination", as it mostly does these days, unfortunately. But I would like to point out at least some political harm. Prior to 2020 I didn't care about politics at all. I do not "consume" news, I didn't know my state's Premier name, and only know our federal PMs for the laughing stock they are, "left" and "right" alike. I can say I was largely onboard with "consensus" on "climate change" and an "ally" on most cultural "issues". But living through the stress of three-year-long torrent of vile, unadulterated lies not only broke my physical body (I developed a condition which will finish me much sooner than I would like), but also made me feeling so incredibly dirty for even remotely associating with that camp. If anything was "baked into my perception", it was by this experience only, not by my apriori position or any media influence. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to wash off this filth, but the only way I'll be able to live with myself and not to finish myself off before my condition does it for me is to deny, defy and sabotage every initiative of everyone who sits atop of this pyramid or wants to climb up to it. No matter how "educated" they are, it is now proven to me that they have less capacity to reflection and learning than even the worst LLMs of today. In fact, calling them "bots" or "NPCs" is an insult to bots or NPCs. In my opinion all they deserve is Nuremberg trial and guillotine, and by association all others who are willingly singing the same song.
As expected, instead of a cogent argument for why you believe what you do, you simply deliver a rambling stream of anger and emotion.
Fundamentally, COVID public health recommendations revolved around minimizing transmission and preservation of medical resources while awaiting development of treatment options. No amount of ranting about being forced to sit in your house, other people being mean to you, or political gamesmanship changes that. No amount of complaining about imperfect solutions like masking or distancing detract from the overall validity of why they were recommended.
As a doctor I have had to have this kind of talk with people over and over. The underlying biology cares zero for your schedule or convenience in life. Given how noncompliance is a constant problem on an individual healthcare level, it's not surprising that we ended up with millions of people just like you who can't follow simple instructions and formed communities in support of their collective failure to do so.
Yeah, it was a mistake to expect anything beyond thought-stopping cliches that were delivered by you. In hindsight it was a mistake to post at all. I don't think you've read my post anyways, or you've processed it on a level below a typical LLM.
Righteousness is the most potent drug of them all, is it not? No need to answer.
Have a good day.
Yes, absolutely. You just don't see how it looks from the outside, so it all appears normal to you. It absolutely isn't normal and makes you look unhinged.
Exactly. It's maddening seeing all of these uneducated people spouting full throated delusions as fact and everyone else allows these people to have room to spread their nonsense.
Im frankly pretty shocked that HN, which usually has a relatively educated user base compared to most other sites, is allowing this kind of drivel from people who have no idea what they are talking about.
I’ll never understand the people that want their offense at being labeled a “Typhoid Mary” to be taken as seriously as their anti-social, Typhoid Mary behavior.
Two people being treated unequally doesn't tell you who was being treated unfairly.
In her case, if there were indeed comparable cases of people repeatedly refusing to follow medical isolation, it's the others who were unfairly given freedom to continue to infect and kill innocent people.
Somehow? For some internally obvious reason I never expected that.
One person is clever, two can talk, a group is clueless and a crowd is an idiot. It is only expected that any non-standard regulation will meet all sorts of resistances and division across axes most of which will make no sense even.
Personally I believe that the best way to handle it is not an open information, but total social manipulation into FUD with proper control points. But that’s incompatible with democracy and all. It’s not because I’m an inherently bad anti-humanist, I just don’t see how that could work cause it’s absolutely naive. A crowd is a separate being from a human that stands in it, and it requires non-human interaction. Treating it as just a set of humans to whom you speak directly is an error.
I meant more so from an individual point of view. Any health authority literally did need to use forms of manipulation to get desirable results, but it’s clear from where I was looking that they did it with the express intent of saving lives at first. Eventually they had to work in a strange grey area where protecting lives and the economy was essential, and it often looked dubious because they didn’t clearly comply with their initial missions. At least in the US and Canada, it seems.
I was more disturbed by how individual people handled the situation, even with people they were close with. It was remarkable how rapidly relationships fell apart over covid. And slightly beyond that as well, into the “crowd” category, but like you say… That’s arguably more predictable.
Heh, welcome to humanity. It’s a very thin line we are closely revolving around and when it bends, all goes to hell. You were basically given a chance to see how complex, different and often obsolete or contradictory are the fundamental beliefs that drive people. That’s why you sometimes meet someone you can’t predict or understand (we tend to write it off and stick to our circle, thinking it’s just a deviation). Covid measures simply dropped a highly potent contrast into the society. It’s all smiles and flowers until a little change.
Welcome indeed. I can be cynical at times (I try not to be) but some aspects of how the pandemic played out truly surprised me. And confused me.
I like to think I know better now. But, I’m also reminded that I’m still young. I was 35, and way too accustomed to quiet Canadian life. The biggest news we saw over on this side of the country for a long time was a hockey riot, otherwise things happening elsewhere (generally speaking).
Then again, maybe the hockey riot was all I needed to know going into the pandemic, haha. I should have learned more from that.
What scares me so much about the Covid debacle is that despite all the information that's been coming out about how most of the restrictions placed on people -- like hindering people from gathering _outside in the sun_ -- and effectiveness of both pharmaceuticals and PPE's -- of which I won't name any because then I'll be booted out of here quite quickly I imagine -- despite all of this data, government hearings around the world, and respected studies.
Despite all that, people still cling to the fantasy that it was comply or be complicit in the death of anyone who died from covid.
You're absolutely right. It was and remains scary as all hell.
Early in the pandemic we just didn’t know what the death rate from Covid would be. 1%? 0.1%? Or maybe 10%? How many people get long covid, and how bad is it? Does it kill the old or the young? What is the death rate for people who get Covid, and can’t go to hospital because there are no beds?
If Covid were to wipe out 10% of the population, all the draconian measures make a lot more sense. Slow it down as much as possible, reduce pressure on hospitals and give scientists time to make a vaccine.
But it turns out the death rate from Covid wasn’t that bad - and Americans would, in hindsight, largely prefer a 1% (or whatever) mortality rate over the inconveniences of masks, staying at home, and so on. But a lot of things weren’t obvious early on like they are now. We didn’t know that.
If there’s another pandemic in our lifetime, there’s almost no chance society takes those preventative measures a second time. Let’s hope we don’t get something a lot more deadly.
We figured out very quickly, that mainly old people were at danger.
The lockdowns happened, when this was known for sure.
"If Covid were to wipe out 10% of the population, all the draconian measures make a lot more sense."
And no one even claimed back then, that a unhospitalised 10% death rate was expected.
In my understanding as a parent - the old in charge freaked out and locked everyone in, to protect mainly themself - yet the young generation suffered the most of it, despite not being at danger from the disease as well. So trying to prevent the collapse of the hospitals did made sense - but not the way it was done, at the expense of the younger generation.
Locking people indoors with limited ventilation and no UV radiation is never going to be a reasonable approach. Why? Because UV radiation kills viruses very fast and thus drastically reduces their capacity to spread between hosts. Not to mention the obvious factor of air circulation in a near-infinite dimension thinning out particles per cubic meter within seconds. Also turns out fresh air is generally good for sick people too. So is sunlight.
Studies on the coronavirus circulating showed this at the very beginning of 2020. And that’s just one of the anti scientific measures that were taken.
> Studies on the coronavirus circulating showed this at the very beginning of 2020.
This is only "obvious" with the benefit of hindsight. There was a mountain of rushed studies early on reporting all sorts of conflicting "facts" about covid. Of course using what we know now, you can look back and cherrypick a lot of great stuff from the pile of early results. But that doesn't mean you could have done the same thing in early 2020. How could you tell which studies to believe? Everything was rushed, had small sample sizes and nothing had been replicated yet.
At the start of 2020 it wasn't clear how long viral particles stayed airborne, and whether you could even contact covid from breathing it in, or if you needed physical contact of some sort. I remember one scare where people were worried you could catch covid from the cardboard used for amazon packages - before we realised covid dries out and dies if it lands on materials like that. Thats not true of all viruses.
Government policy, science and software share something in common: They can happen fast or happen well. You can only pick one. Rushed science gets small things wrong. Rushed software is buggy and brittle, and rushed government policy makes mistakes.
Its easy to forget, but the start of 2020 was a madhouse.
In the early 2020s, studies have shown everything and their opposite, so you can cherry pick anything that supports your view. I find it was a particularly interesting time because it showed how "messy" science really is. In normal times, you typically don't see scientific results before you have at least some amount of certainty. Some research get through the cracks (ex: LK-99), but not to the extent of what happened in the early days of the pandemic.
Also covid and other diseases spread well in open air summer festivals where UV is at its peak. And for covid specifically, we had peaks in the summer, where, again, people tend to get out and UV is high.
IMO we should have had more draconian lockdowns much sooner, when it would have slowed the spread more effectively, and we should have opened up much more quickly once the initial wave went through and it was clear that it had already spread every where. Especially the schools, once it was clear that kids weren't especially badly affected by it.
There's basically 4 categories of people that fucked up the discourse about lockdowns:
1) Health professionals who in a well-intentioned way recommended what _would actually work_ to stop the spread of the disease: ie -- a complete draconian lockdown, without considering what would happen if that draconian lockdown wasn't actually complete (that it would still spread quickly and widely)
2) Paranoid conspiracy theorists and anti-science types who believed that the lockdowns were part of some nefarious agenda.
3) People who wanted (and still want) a permanent lockdown for their own reasons -- whether for the valid reason that they have some kind of immune disorder or because of crippling social anxiety or introversion or because they just liked working from home
4) Professional doom sayers and rabble rousers who got engagement on social media from pushing apocalyptic scenarios (on both sides of the issue)
---
They were all so loud that like the rational voices in the room (ie: People who supported a lock down early and then wanted to open up more quickly as we learned more about how it spread and how it got treated) just got shouted down, with really negative consequences -- like how all the far right crazies got voted into school boards on this issue and then got into all kinds of stupid shit (banning books, etc). It was crazy to keep schools closed even after it was clear that the virus was in a pandemic stage and kids weren't really affected by it and schools weren't a major vector for transmission, and it was especially crazy to keep them closed after the vaccine came out.
Somehow people got in their mind that the goal was an eradication of covid and that _was never possible_ once it escaped Wuhan. The goal was the slow the spread until it was endemic in order to give us time to learn how to treat it effectively and to stop hospitals from being overwhelmed. Once it's was endemic, we were never going to stop it.
Wasn't a lot of the authoritarian concern around COVID based on the idea that "this is just the beginning, today they require masks, tomorrow they'll require implanted tracking devices"?
I think history will look at the COVID years and see a remarkable and worldwide pandemic, and society made some rules to try to deal with it, some of the rules may have been a bit much, or poorly informed, but after a few years things were back to normal.
I don't see COVID being more than a blip on any radar. If future historians analyze the history of authoritarianism, there will be lots of things more significant than the COVID years I think.
I didn't make that particular leap, but it does also explain why none of the people "worried" that Gates put a microchip in the vaccines seem fussed about Musk developing an actual brain microchip.
> Multiple people I knew and respected wished me a horrific death for expressing my opinions
Someone here took exception to me saying that I have never had any trouble with wearing masks, went and left a generically threatening comment on my blog.
> I mean god forbid anybody express any disagreement with perhaps the most authoritarian, unscientific power grab in human history. The shit that went down was pure evil.
Are you still talking about the wearing masks during a global pandemic that lowered global life expectancy by about 2 years, or to put it differently "killed between 1 and 3 times as many as the literal Holocaust"?
> wearing masks during a global pandemic that lowered global life expectancy by about 2 years, or to put it differently "killed between 1 and 3 times as many as the literal Holocaust"?
And forcing people to wear completely useless cloth masks for years did almost nothing to change those numbers. Same with virtually every single other non-pharmaceutical intervention.
Virus is gonna virus. You can’t stop it and even if you could it doesn’t make the means to do so ethical, legal or moral.
There's a reason nurses and surgeons wear masks, and it isn't fashion. And calling it "cloth" is like saying "silicon" can't take pictures or do maths — surgical masks (when real and not scams to rip off emergency government funding) are carefully engineered specifically to be useful in this kind of context.
And we literally can and have made interventions that work on viruses. Even non pharmaceutical ones — that's one reason why condoms are so promoted.
Several non-pharmaceutical interventions have been demonstrated to be effective for covid, specifically. Real masks — N95 for example, not generic 'cloth' — were one of the ones that reduced probability of infection, with different probability depending on if your were measuring "person has virus and wears mask, probability they infect person at 2m distance in 5 minutes?" or "person wearing a mask and doesn't have virus, chance of them being infected when standing 2m from an infected person without a mask for 5 minutes?" and all the other combinations and variations because stats is hard.
They also work like this on influenza, IIRC, but not the common cold. That (not the imperfections) is on purpose, and is why medical staff wear them as standard.
Hand sanitizer, which sold out, as I understand it that didn't help at all with covid, but the memes around it probably reduced something else.
> even if you could it doesn’t make the means to do so ethical, legal or moral.
I have yet to meet a militant nudist — you are, after all, objecting to being forced to wear something you dismiss as "cloth", which is what your clothes are made of — but PPE seems to wind up a lot of people. Condoms, to use a previous example, but also seatbelts.
Nurses and doctors wear masks to protect the patient from their own moisture droplets which may contain contaminants when breathing or talking. Same with dentists.
Do note they don’t wear N95 masks so they can’t filter smaller particles like viruses. It’s just to protect you from their saliva and breath droplets and spreading larger bacteria.
N95 masks are fairly effective if worn precisely and close fitting, but barely anyone used those because they are harder to breathe in.
A cloth mask or thin medical mask does practically nothing except protect others from larger droplets.
He did multiple vidjayos debunking spontaneously combusting oily rags and then offhandedly mentions that 9/11 was an inside job. You've got your forensic engineering priorities backwards!
From what I've seen about AvE he was mostly against the (batshit insane) reaction from the federal government to the truckers convoy in Ottawa. That's the only video that he made specifically about COVID I think (I don't know if he mentioned something else in other videos though). Not sure if that makes him a nutjob lol
Early on he made fun of people who wore masks. I'd watched almost every video for years before that but as one of many impacted by others not taking covid seriously, I went cold turkey.
Tbh it's fine to make fun of that, as long as it's not insulting or conspirational. I've seen tons of humour about masks and mask wearers in the past few years, which makes sense considering how widespread masks were. It's not about taking COVID seriously or not imo, but I guess it depends on one's sense of humour. The way some people who took COVID very seriously acted was very funny, regardless of intentions.
Still, maybe I've missed something ( I don't watch AvE Usually, and watched only a few of his videos in general).
People deal with grief differently and that's ok, but for me it meant cutting out people who made fun of things that would've kept more of my family alive (I also stopped laughing at covidiot memes). If everyone masked & vaxxed, we could've done so much better. But when public figures turn it into a "thing", it doesn't help anyone. I won't be able to find the video but I do remember AvE making very toxic masculinity comments about masks. Just wasn't what I needed at the time. I'm sure if I hadn't seen that specific part I would still be watching him.
Framed differently, it sounds like the youtuber opportunisticially divulged some of their true thoughts on topics slowly over time that would have alienated members of their audience had they known who and what they were initially supporting. Pretty cowardly, but not an uncommon tactic amongst his similar peers.
In light of receiving new information that goes against your own tenants against poorly researched misinformation, changing your opinion isn't really a noteworthy response.
Framed in an insane way by someone looking to denigrate someone they don't like. I have no idea who you're targeting but you obviously have a chip on your shoulder.
He started revealing his face in 2020 as a way to help people maintain human connection during lockdowns. A huge number of the comments on the video were about his channel name and icon, one of his eyes actually looks like that.
He featured multiple times before with Matt Parker and Brady Haran (NF), strange that you missed it. Although I guess even in this niche channel preferences vary wildly.
I absolutely love his voice. Its so calm and soothing that I can have his video running on the side while I am doing my chores and can still learn stuff.
Content creators like this deserve the recognition
"Content creator" is like calling a good cook "grub producer". I don't understand why youtubers themselves keep using it. Content is the emptiest word (and we shouldn't use it like that IMO).
Probably because they see all the data behind the scenes and know how the sausage is made with respect to what brings in $$. Capturing the attention of humans is just a psychological manipulation exercise. We're mice being given dopamine injections on a regular schedule
Omg I would love to make an explainer on bridging algorithms[1] with this tool! I've been a huge fan of their use in participatory democracy processes since 2016 (using tools like Pol.is), and have wanted to make a contribution to increasing literacy around the foundational math involved <3
Had I known about Manim back when his Summer of Math Exposition[2] was happening, I def would have dived in!
I had no idea this existed, thanks so much for the link! Reading their paper right now, and I'd love to see your explainer once you make it :) My website is linked from my profile, send me a link on social media if you ever get around to making that explainer!
It's also what bums me out about YouTube. There is an insane amount of effort that goes into producing high-quality videos - orders of magnitude more than would go into putting together a well-illustrated blog post.
As with blogs, a lot of this effort is wasted unless you get lucky. But with blogs, at least you have multiple good shots at visibility. Maybe you'll make it to the top of HN, maybe on X, maybe somewhere else. Even within a single platform, you usually have multiple tries. If you don't get noticed right away, there's still hope that someone else shares your content down the line.
In contrast, on YouTube, an algorithm essentially decides once. If you don't already have a zillion subscribers, it shows your video to a couple of people, more or less at random. If they don't engage, that's the end of the road.
There are surprisingly few venues for video content outside YT, at least not on a scale that would matter on YT! For example, if you want to get to the top of HN, non-video content has much better odds. Many tech- or science-centric subreddits discourage or ban videos too.
YT is a fairly closed ecosystem that's both insanely resource-intensive to participate in, and that doesn't give creators too many second chances. My specific claim is that it's more of a crapshoot than running a blog. There are so many great science visualizations with 50 views.
HN is relatively tiny and HN's allergy to video is not representative of the internet.
Just create clips from your video and post them on insta, tiktok, twitter, FB, etc. That's the internet at large. If people are interested, they'll watch the full video.
HN is small as a discussion community, but it is huge in terms of the traffic it generates to top-ranked URLs. There are fairly mainstream publications that optimize for HN, and I have spoken to marketers and PR people who described HN as by far the most significant source of traffic to their sites.
It doesn't necessarily translate to sales or lasting attention, but if you're after brand recognition or SEO, it's great. Spend some time on /newest to see how many organizations are desperate to get a piece of this.
It's not really that small and I don't know why people say that.
Last time I saw stats, it was five million monthly visitors. It's small as a platform. It's smaller than Reddit or Facebook, but those aren't discussion communities.
There aren't huge numbers of subreddits larger than five million people and last I looked the largest tended to be about trivial BS.
Last I checked, HN is the largest serious tech discussion board on the planet.
I've gotten traffic from HN and /r/programming, and the influx from HN is larger. I think it's a function of two things. First, /r/programming is higher-volume (i.e., more front-page links per day). Second, Reddit subscriber counts are not DAU / MAU, it likely includes a ton of inactive accounts.
Funny I just looked and Reddit says r/programming is 4.1m which last I checked is less than the 5 million unique visitors HN was getting a few years ago when I last saw stats by the moderator and I don't know what it's at now.
Twitter works completely differently from most platforms and isn't a unified community.
I'm not super active on social media, and I find that all the big/main aggregator sites (like HN and Reddit and others) have become victims of their own success and good stories just fall off the front page very quickly, and so you miss a ton of stuff unless you're checking all the time, and I don't have that kind of time.
Link aggregators aren't good at "long tail"... So your good stories are only really discoverable when they're hot, and get progressively harder to discover over time.
Google search just sucks now, it's all shopping links and SEO trash, even if you search for fairly specific subjects.. You can still find what you want but you have to wade through so much garbage...
Plus there's no discovery. Like pretty much all search engines you can typically only find what you're searching for as opposed to finding new unknown things that are within your topics of interest.
For better or worse I find that YouTube is one of my best resources for surfacing new and interesting things pretty often, and quite regularly from channels big and small that I've never watched before. YT is great at long tail..
So it has become a major source of discovery for me, in many of my areas of interest (which aren't all tech).
Of course some content I don't like consuming as video, so I do sometimes find videos that cover interesting subject matter, which I'll then go search for articles or text-based content on instead.
I see, though I do consider that part of YouTube to be a net negative for everyone but Google considering how it's keeping people on the platform, and therefore less likely to look for more varied sources.
But what I meant is that people share links around, whether in public like here, or in one-on-one discussions (and blogs do have their own recommended lists), so it's quite possible that you would still have found out about them without any kind of algorithmic prodding.
For instance, to put this in practice, here's a science education focused personal website that I like a lot :
We all find content in ways that suit our time/resources/network etc.. I do get lots of links and recommendations from friends and co-workers (and on places like here), but I also get a lot of it from platforms, and I think that's a good thing.
I'm not anti-algorithm (not saying you are) and I believe it's one of many great ways to discover content, in this case in video form. And I think having it all in one place is a huge benefit.
Considering all the resources required to host video, I don't think it would be realistic for everyone to host their own stuff in that medium..
Not to mention how much of a creator economy exists thanks to the centralized platform that is YT. Tons of creators probably wouldn't even bother making their content if they didn't have somewhere with a built-in audience to post it to.
So I disagree with the idea that it's a negative for everyone but Google. Tons of people make a living thanks to that platform, with content they'd likely never be able to make a living from otherwise.
I'm not sure that resources were an issue even in 2006, much less today : P2P is older than that. Ease of use was an issue, but that's almost over thanks to the likes of PeerTube (even for streaming !), though of course it would be better if ISPs also jumped on board (like they did for e-mail and personal websites).
People were making videos even before YouTube started to become commercial, and they will keep making them after YouTube is gone (hopefully soon, considering how enshittified it became, but I'm afraid that with Google's money it will take a while). I disagree that th That you're calling it 'content' is a symptom of that corporatization.
Platforms are evil (and discovery algorithms are a big part of the problem), and especially the people not just using them, but particularly making a living from them are bad people (especially today, they had more than a decade to be aware of the issues). (This is on top of other qualities or faults they might have, of course.) And if there were no platforms, there would still be people making a living from the Internet (and the video format included), the possibilities are just too gigantic.
I'm calling it content because that's what it is. And it's the term that we use for it today.. I don't call it that because of Google, I call it that because that's what it's called. Language evolves.
Content creator is a blanket term for the writers, videographers, researchers, comedians, speakers, musicians, scientists, programmers, artists, architects, singers and every other profession making a living uploading videos to YouTube.
I certainly didn't want to type all of those, so I used the common shorthand. Even you knew what it meant. Not everything is sinister or evil. Sometimes it's just words.
99% (probably more) of people who use YT have never heard of PeerTube. I've heard of it and I've never once tried to use it, and I'm quite technical (I've built a video distribution platform).
You're delusional (sorry) if you think anything out there even comes close to the reach or ease of use of YouTube for the average person.
Look I'm not saying it's perfect either, or that there aren't problems with Google and the rest of big tech, and some of their products have drawbacks and downsides..
Anyways, I just realized I'm trying to have practical conversation and you're having an ideological one.. So maybe that's where this ends, we'll agree to disagree and move on...
From what YouTube creators are saying lately subscriber counts don’t matter anymore. So even if you have a zillion subscribers you’re still almost completely at the mercy of the algorithm.
I saw this, too. I know a Youtuber who has 2 million subscribers and their latest videos get about 5k views when they used to get 500k without a change in quality.
> If they don't engage, that's the end of the road.
As some counterexample anecdata, the YouTube algorithm is being quite generous to me lately, often giving me relatively low-view videos from years ago, some of which have been quite good. Maybe I'm just in a small a/b test, but it seems that videos do get multiple chances.
for better or worse, that's because video's infinitely easier to monetize in ways we've been conditioned with for decades. so the payouts for monetized videos are huge compared to a written blog where an ad can clutter and mess up the entire design (which loses you users, losing you better ad rates, and spirals down).
It's also a chicken and egg issue too. People simply watch more than they read most of the time. So videos target more people who gets more ad money who gets better ad rates etc.
I've done some porting between Python and JS based on Tensorflow in the past - and I suspect the poor ergonomics in JS for math/lists would probably ruin the experience a good amount.
Perhaps something like Pyodide can bridge the gap and make it easier to bring into the browser as well.
I assume that a considerable percentage of CS students or recent graduates (myself included, back in the day) dream about creating some sort of visualization tool, let alone an awesome one like this.
It's more likely having a specific immediate use case - creating his videos - was more important. Usually creating something for some abstract future use(r) will lead to almost zero motivation, at least for me.
I had the chance to use Manim during my college undergraduate project, it was very scrappy, but the library was very intuitive to use. And now this makes me wonder if there are other similar libraries like Manim for these more videographic oriented production.
Does the serif font in manim have any ties to Hershey fonts or the BGI vector fonts packaged with 90s Borland products? I guess any TTF font can also be rendered line-by-line but the animation does remind me of BGI example code running on slow IBM PCs.
I'm quite certain the typeface is Computer Modern (the primary font being CMU Serif, to be precise). It can be found by Googling it. I also distribute the fonts as an NPM library, since they are OFL. [1]
Very nice library, and nice to see he face behind the channel too. I now understand why it's 3blue1brown (wasn't aware that he has heterochromia in one eye at the ratio of his channel name, cool!)
Only if you're students were already expected to know know some programming, and you're fine making some boilerplate. Students already have so much on their plate as is, so trying to learn an API on top of understanding the concepts may be infeasible.
But students who do try to do that will definitely have a deeper understanding on average.
Lately I often think about 3Blue1Brown, Veritasium and Kahn Academy, how much good they are doing to this world.
Imagine having close to an unlimited amount of money at your disposal and a media platform which is capable of reaching close to every person on this planet. To give people a voice in a community, if they dare to or if they feel the need to.
The only thing you then lack is a platform for organizing communities instead of sowing the seeds of hatred, to use the tools provided by people like Grant Sanderson, Derek Muller, Grady Hillhouse and others, in order to help communities to improve their communities, towns, cities, and so on. To help them solve their problems, make them understand how problematic corruption, greed and abuse of power is.
While I was born in Germany, I lived for around 20 years in Peru, since I was a child. People are poor, but very kind hearted, politicians and the wealthy are corrupt.
This is what makes me feel so sad about Elon Musk, specially knowing that he grew up in South Africa.
I don't understand the Musk comment at the end. Can you please explain what you mean by that and what is the significance of him growing up in South Africa?
I'm going to find out a way to automatically hide comments referencing "musk". You can't even read about a 3Blue1Brown video without people somehow making it about him. Every thread, every day, it's just people talking about Elon Musk.
we have a HN API, so it's pretty straightforward once you understand it to make an extension/add-on.
The hard part from there is design decisions. Do you just have that comment disappear, or fade like a downvoted comment? if it disappears do you remove the entire thread? is a contextless match adequate? (say, someone was talking about deoderant?)
Manim is incredibly cool, but my biggest takeaway from the video is how insane it is that Python apparently lets you reference a variable in a function that was defined outside the scope of the function.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but isn't that standard for pretty much every C-style language? Define a variable outside a function, parallel to the function, and even though that variable is outside the scope of the function it's still accessible inside the function. Or did you mean something else?
Python has nested functions which does allow access to the nest...er function's variables. The rest does conform to expectations, you get to use parameters, locally declared variables and globals.
I'm not too familiar with Python, but isn't that just lexical scope, the same as most languages that support nested functions? Starting with the lambda calculus and all the languages it influenced, including even JavaScript.
Correct. It behaves like JavaScript and many other languages. You can't modify such variables in the outer scope from the inner scope unless you explicitly use the "nonlocal" declaration.
3B1B is doing god's work. May his tribe increase!!
I personally have benefited enormously from so many of his YT videos. I wish this is how Mathematics was taught in high-schools, Engg schools.
<3 <3
Eyebrow game is on point in this video.
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Haha, the way maths is taught at university hasn't changed in centuries.
Let's not pretend this has all been figured out and perfected. Heck, most maths professors I encountered in my studies could trace their scientific lineage straight back to C.F.Gauss[1] and that's how they taught. Don't get me wrong, some were great teachers, others not so much, but there are valid alternatives to the classic lecture.
[1] https://www.mathgenealogy.org/index.php
What are those valid alternatives that work at scale for a majority of the population?
One example that comes to mind is Kahn academy. They've built out new pedagogical methods.
There's also Unacademy a company I'm sure has helped millions of people learn new things.
Khan Academy uses lectures.
Very different types of lectures. Small chunks of info, lots of graphical representations, etc. These are very different that the type of lectures I had in school.
His lectures are terrible explanations and he doesn’t use professional looking graphics. Khan Academy is not a good product. My opinion refers solely to the math content.
The traditional lecture does have a lot of value, however, we are also quite certain that the instructional experience can be improved through the addition of visualizations and simulations. This is especially true for interactive visualizations where the learner can ask, "What if ...", experiment, and see the results of their interactions.
The lecture format is very old and would not have persisted if it didn't provide a good value. At the same time, it's age also implies that there is room for improvement.
The vast majority of students never ask, “what if…” The vast majority just want to know the mechanics of doing the problems well enough to pass the test. At the time a student is taking Calculus 1 they don’t ask questions about why it works. They just want to know, for instance, the rules of differentiation. Later in life, when they have intellectually matured, videos like 3Blue1Brown are interesting and fascinating. The vast majority of students would not learn well from 3Blue1Brown type videos.
Those students will not learn no matter what form of pedagogy you use. But 3blue1brown lectures are great for those who do want to learn
Yes. But in the classroom most students don’t want to learn. Hence my statement that it wouldn’t work in the classroom.
The goal of education is to educate that unvast minority and for them to become deeper specialists faster.
To hell with the majority which will forget it next week and go management or delivery. They are unimportant for the key idea of education.
The lecture format has only been competing with high-production-values video for a decade or two, and with interactive examples for much less than that.
Interactive examples using Macromedia Flash or Java applets are straight in the "a decade or two" time frame.
(The 3B1B one is of course also among the best :
https://eater.net/quaternions )
And, while it was before my time, universities might have had some before the World Wide Web ?
Video has been around for much longer than that too.
I'm also not sure why "high production values" is supposed to matter, aren't Feynman's video lectures good enough for you ?
> There’s a reason we teach things the way we do
Is it that nobody kwen how to make good videos before? Or do you mean that teaching cannot be improved?
The Gutenberg Method of teaching acknowledges the existence of the printing press and suggests one person standing at the front telling everyone what to write down may be outdated
https://www.physics.utoronto.ca/~key/PHY1600/PER%20Papers/Ef...
If you’ve experienced that one great teacher that inspired genuine interest in a subject where you previously had none? It’s historically hard to scale, but I think that’s the potential here and it’s a subject that a lot of people lack interest in but has wide reaching impact
Strict adherence to old methods due to overly restrictive and risk-averse governing bodies in educational institutions?
Ah, that must be why math literacy is ubiquitous.
Here’s a thought for you. What percentage of the population wants to be mathematically literate given the amount of effort needed to gain that literacy? In my 30 years of teaching math at the college level the anecdotal evidence I have is that this number is quite low. Why do you think the number of mathematically literate people should be significantly higher than what it is?
What methods of teaching will work for those who don’t want to do the work to be mathematically literate?
You are doing a terrible job at teaching math. but hey, you got your cushy guv-job so who cares about the next generation?
You don’t know whether or not I’m good at my job. A well reasoned response would be different than the one you gave.
Mind elaborating on what that reason is? Otherwise this comment just comes off as a drive-by dismissal…
Pretty much everyone has ideas and opinions on teaching and what would work. It is easy to tell when such opinions are made by people with no experience teaching. In the same way a professional carpenter can tell when some wood work was done in an amateurish way.
Why do teachers do things the way they do? Is it because they are mostly stupid, incompetent people who haven’t thought as much about their job as amateurs have? Everyone has “the solution” but, yet, that great insightful idea doesn’t take off. Is it a conspiracy on our part? Perhaps it’s because that solution doesn’t work at scale.
Single-person made animations and applets became available only ten years ago and still require a programmer. We collectively lived under a rock for ages and entered the world of computers and smartphones few minutes ago. Considering the inertia, you had no time to check if this particular solution works at scale. Why are you so pre-opposed to it?
I can only think of: because nothing works at scale in education and it’s generally slow as hell.
I’ve done things like this. Back when Flash was around and Captivate was first out I created interactive lecture videos. One in particular was, I thought, really good. It was an explanation of how progressive tax systems work and how the amount of tax paid is a piecewise defined function of salary. Included in the videos at various places were concept questions. The video would stop at such a question and when you answer it would continue.
What was the result of this? Most didn’t watch the video and those that did didn’t finish it. Students largely don’t watch lecture videos or videos of any kind regarding math. For online courses students are using AI programs to do their work. They answer questions that should take minutes in seconds.
Most of the people I’ve responded to on the thread I started have no idea what they are talking about.
Ooo “drive-by dismissal”, I like that phrase, gotta remember that one
what's the reason it doesn't work??
That’s a wild take
What’s wild is people who haven’t taught thinking they know better than people who do teach.
Are you trying to imply that you have some teaching experience of your own? You're doing an incredibly bad job of establishing your credibility in this thread. Try being less combative and providing some substantive explanations for why you're so strongly convinced that there's no room for improvement over the status quo.
In particular, I'm curious how you come to the conclusion that high-quality video content cannot work better for "the vast majority of students" than sitting in a lecture hall. Do you have any theories about what kind of student good video content can work well for?
..why you're so strongly convinced that there's no room for improvement over the status quo.
I didn’t make this claim. I said that videos like 3Blue1Brown’s videos would not work in the classroom for most students. I further said that there was a reason things are done the way they are.
Imagine going to a place of business and seeing people doing their job. A job you’ve never done before. You start giving advice on what they should do. Most likely your views would not carry much weight or be worth much consideration.
> There’s a reason we teach things the way we do.
Really? Whats the reason?
Efficacy, maximal effectiveness over a large population, and because it works better at scale than other solutions.
I was under the impression that our education system is more about keeping children off the streets while both parents go to the office/factory than really educating them. This was especially visible during covid.
In that sense I agree with you: videos won't do the job.
On the other hand there is this one guy making videos that, I believe, reached way more people than any single teacher would. How does that count for scale?
Can we agree that there is room for both and that these videos are a nice addition?
3Blue1Brown’s videos are great and a treasure. I’m glad he does what he does.
Check out https://sinerider.com/ too! A friend of mine who helps Grant Sanderson sometimes with 3B1B stuff built it, it's an awesome math education game like LineRider but using formulas to build the tracks.
I love both 3b1b and SineRider, both have had more impact on my intuitive understanding of function composition than anything else.
This is amazing, thanks for sharing!
It was impressive how he spotted a bug in his rendering engine and found a workaround for it in realtime!
https://youtu.be/rbu7Zu5X1zI?feature=shared&t=693
To me it appeared more like he was aware of a limitation in the new rendering logic he was working on in the backend, and that he knew a simple (high level) workaround.
Still impressive work :)
The workaround that looks like "disable the feature I was working on". x)
In larger companies this is how arsonist-firefighter engineers look impressive... fixing a bug they are responsible for while in a highly visible position
I've been in this situation before, there's a fair amount of "we can do the thing in x time but it'll have these issues, or do it right in x+y time." The quick option gets chosen, things chug along happily for some time, then we hit the limitation and I remember what the issue was. I couldn't even say that the decision to do the quick thing was the wrong one.
I was the young "tech guy" inside the business development department at Earthlink in the mid 90s. The bizdev folks would propose ideas and I would think them through and realize there were technical issues, and when I shared my concerns, they would all be disheartened. But, sometime later, I would figure out a way around the "problem". They were perpetually grateful, but after a number of these iterations, I got the sense that I was mainly solving problems that I had invented. I actually even shared my concern about that with my boss, and he dismissed it – I think they enjoyed the rollercoaster ride.
I once worked one project with (against?) a guy who saw his job as ‘finding problems before they happen’. It was fine at first but as the project progressed, he became more and more focused on proving that the project would fail. Every molehill was a mountain, and flat ground was just a tapestry of molehills. Eventually I realised that if the project didn’t fail, he felt superfluous.
I've been that guy at various points. I thought I was being a valuable counterweight to developers who weren't thinking things through.
But as you said, it can be taken to an unproductive excess.
I managed to calibrate myself out of that, but it took longer than I'd have liked.
I'd see it more as making test cases IRL. you're finding problems to consider and making sure your solution can address for that (even if the solution already did). I'd still be relieved having someone would could consider potential issues that swiftly by my side.
"Mountain out of a molehill" is better than lots of other possible approach angles. The core behaviour is grappling with the problem and looking for solutions.
> arsonist-firefighter engineers
Brilliant, I’m stealing this phrase. :D
A persistent phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefighter_arson
arsonist-firefighter engineers
Never heard that term. Love it. Definitely has described me on a few occasions.
He knew about the bug, but developing this software is not his main job, producing videos is.
The fact that he knew the place, the reason, and came up with a workaround live demonstrates that he invests time into improving his toolkit. And not occasionally, but actively.
I still believe it is cool.
Anyone know how the Python interactive REPL was working in the bottom-right hand corner?
EDIT: Looks like it's completely bespoke workflow: https://github.com/3b1b/videos?tab=readme-ov-file#workflow
He's probably one of the few good creators that didn't totally sellout on youtube (looking at you Mark Rober).
It's funny how, after years of hearing his voice and not seeing his face, seeing his face puts me in smack in the middle of the uncanny valley.
I feel like quite a few of the content creators I watch are starting to “show their face”, though the big one that comes to mind is the Real Engineering guy. A few of his newest videos have had him acting a bit like a host, interviewer and narrator.
It’s also weird when some of these creators swap with somebody else, like veratasium has had his producer do some of the videos instead.
The big reveal would be AvE.
I noticed a few of the people I watch revealed their face last year before the big collab with Mark Rober.
I used to like AvE till COVID. Then he became an anti-masker conspiratorial nutjob.
Always felt AvE stayed the same person he always, the same kind of commentary he always made. Low gov man with low gov sentiments.
I mean he was 100% right about all of that; history will not look fondly upon societys hysterical reaction to Covid, so… I think he took a lot of shit for “coming out of the closet” in that regard and he’s never been the same. There was (and apparently still are) a lot of incredibly sanctimonious busy body’s out there who absolutely loved the power trip Covid gave them and they were more than happy to harass, threaten, and be incredibly disrespectful to people who disagreed with the mainstream narrative.
As somebody in the same boat as AvE, watching people who you knew and respected turn against you the way so many people did is pretty brutal and fucks you up pretty good. Honestly it was scary as fuck how so people completely lost their minds after being fed non-stop fear porn and propaganda. Lots of parallels to some pretty fucked up atrocities—I can now see how “normal people” can turn so evil and corrupt they’d kill their neighbors and families. Multiple people I knew and respected wished me a horrific death for expressing my opinions… I’m sure if we continued this conversation and it was allowed on this forum you too would verbally wish at my death. Scary fucking shit.
I mean god forbid anybody express any disagreement with perhaps the most authoritarian, unscientific power grab in human history. The shit that went down was pure evil. Thank god some people had the courage to speak out against it even if it cost them so dearly.
Disagreement is healthy. What was unhealthy is that it was dangerous to disagree.
People who thought we should just ride covid out were, more often than not, simply unaware of the nuances of covid vs a cold or something similar. People who thought we should hide in our homes until it was eradicated were similarly unaware of the implicit harms of that choice.
A healthy discourse with people willing to concede and compromise would have landed us somewhere sane. Disagreement would have been part of finding a sensible conclusion.
What failed was our ability to do just that. Somehow we totally blew it.
We were all told to shut the fuck up and listen to a handful of cherry picked “doomsday experts” who refused to follow their own data, didn’t follow their own science and refused to acknowledge that society has millions of problems beyond one very single, very specific thing.
And if we didn’t follow their edict’s or if we were to express any doubt of any kind, we were evil alt-right grandma killers who deserved horrible Covid deaths.
Heathy discourse was absolutely not allowed. You were either 100% on board with whatever crazy shit your local politicians threw against the wall or you were a pile of shit sub human scumball. Didn’t matter they had no definition of success, no long term gameplan, no acknowledgment of the harms they were causing… in fact it didn’t even matter that these experts and politicians didn’t follow their own policies, you were told to suck it up buttercup this is the “new normal” and it’s forever.
I don’t think this is a “both sides have a good argument” kind of deal. What the Covid “side” did was abhorrent and history will not look fondly on them at all.
> We were all told to shut the fuck up and listen to a handful of cherry picked “doomsday experts”
No, you were told to out aside your opinions and allow people educated in epidemiology to guide a rapidly changing situation. It turns out the there were too many people with a chip on their shoulder to make the policy recommendations effective.
> if we were to express any doubt of any kind, we were evil alt-right grandma killers who deserved horrible Covid deaths.
Pointless hyperbole.
> no acknowledgment of the harms they were causing
Such as?
> What the Covid “side” did was abhorrent and history will not look fondly on them at all.
Reading between the lines it seems like you have many baked in assumptions that distort your perception of the event.
Thank you. The revisionism in this thread is ridiculous.
There was no oppressive regime forcing you to do anything. There were common sense, effective public health recommendations for mitigating a novel virus that spread faster than anything we'd seen, whose death rate was not known, and for which we had no vaccine or mitigation except for masking/distancing.
No one was forcing you to stay indoors. You were asked to wear a mask around other people, and most private businesses chose to require customers and employees to wear one, as is their right.
What revisionism? There was nothing sensible, measured, effective, justified, "common sense" or genuine in the "response" to that "pandemic". I came to believe that it was not even well-intended beyond the first couple of months. No, in my book, authorities lying and manipulating to save their own arse and cover incompetence cannot be absolved or rationalized as well intended.
What you describe is the idealistic picture of how it, perhaps, should have unfolded. You may even genuinely believe it is what actually transpired, and sure as hell you want us to believe the same, but reality disagrees. We remember how it was and we "have receipts".
In Victoria (AU) people were definitely not "asked" but very much demanded to perform all these theatrics. I remember watching some news with police wallowing in pride of scolding and ultimately fining a man who they "caught" sitting in his own car "outside of property boundary" after curfew, apparently needed to escape a heated family situation. By sitting alone and unmasked in the car he would surely cause a mass-spreading of your beloved "virus". We were, in fact, forced to stay indoors. What is the other meaning of "curfew"?
In other multiple examples people were jumped from behind by police, tasered, hand-chocked and even rammed by police cars - again, for being found in "non-compliance" with this nonsense. There was no lack of footage showing people forcibly masked by police. Other measures included arresting people in their homes for "inciting" on social media, large scale deployment of armored vehicles, helicopters and drones to spy on those having BBQ "over allowed number of visitors". Tear gas and rubber bullets for transgressors. Mounted police "kettling" of protesters of such "measures". Care to quantify anti-viral properties of curfews?
We knew all there was to know very early in the show. Diamond Princess was perfect in-vivo experiment. A sardine can full of old farts had 700 out 3700 "infected". Pardon, "tested positive" - I imagine with a PCR test. I wonder was the PCR test at the time used at 40 cycles, which is enough to find traces of this "deadly virus" in orange juice and machine oil? Apparently 14 people later died "from" the "virus". Interestingly, both "tested positive" and "died" were reported after half- to one-and-half-months since vessel was fully abandoned. I can only conclude that those poor 14 were ventilated to death, as it was a preferred method of disposal at the time. Is it even so much over the "baseline" for 3000 septagenarians regardless of covid or any other malaise?
Epidemiology has proven itself to be full of it and unable to take on any new learnings. I suspect it was always like that. "People educated in epidemiology to guide a rapidly changing situation" were even unable to follow their own "guidance"! When they were "blowing off steam" in underground orgies or similarly unable to hold their urges. Do you need reference for that?
There was no justification for anything. Masks were mandated on a whim. Premier of the state went from "wearing a mask for this virus is a waste of mask" to "you are an extremist and far-right if you don't wear one" in one day. Some "health advice" was cited, but request to release that advice later on was denied, and denied it stays to this day. Apparently, it was "not in public interest" to release. Yeah, sure. I totally believe it wasn't pulled out of.. thin air.
On a personal front, not showing unbounded enthusiasm was branded "conspiratorial thinking" and "actively wanting 10% of over-60s dead". By people I considered friends, not less.
So, who really engages in revisionism and newspeak here? Who is an extremist - the one who shuns a useless mask or those who point a (rubber bullet) gun at them or break into their home with handcuffs? What is this derogatory, offending rhetoric spouted from highest level of political and bureaucratic power, if not gaslighting? Who is "spouting full throated delusions as fact"?
I cannot possibly fit all my points into this HN post, or I won't have any time left to work today. But for every bit of nonsense we have a pile of receipts completely refuting it. Even if some "measures" in isolation could be argued reasonable, the whole well was so deeply poisoned that it is absolutely impossible to look at it positively. My most charitable interpretation is that they wanted the measures to be first and foremost visible, and effectiveness or even necessity was not a priority. But my appetite for being charitable went away too, as the stench of their BS was overwhelming. It probably does not matter for establishing the truth, as the trenches have been dug out and the war is declared for many decades ahead. Covid enthusiasts' camp "won the battle" - we were all subjected to all these outlandish orders and demands. Did it help in the end? I do not understand. Not only they were successful with inflicting the maximum pain, but they also now demand us to remember it fondly??? Why? How twisted one's mind has to be? Or is it intoxication from the high of righteousness? Righteousness is a hell of drug, indeed.
If I may address the "such as?" insinuation in the GP post. I'm sure they aren't really genuine in wanting to hear the answer. Otherwise their claimed "education" would have allowed them to see at least some of reasons. If "education" doesn't stand for "brain-washing" and "indoctrination", as it mostly does these days, unfortunately. But I would like to point out at least some political harm. Prior to 2020 I didn't care about politics at all. I do not "consume" news, I didn't know my state's Premier name, and only know our federal PMs for the laughing stock they are, "left" and "right" alike. I can say I was largely onboard with "consensus" on "climate change" and an "ally" on most cultural "issues". But living through the stress of three-year-long torrent of vile, unadulterated lies not only broke my physical body (I developed a condition which will finish me much sooner than I would like), but also made me feeling so incredibly dirty for even remotely associating with that camp. If anything was "baked into my perception", it was by this experience only, not by my apriori position or any media influence. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to wash off this filth, but the only way I'll be able to live with myself and not to finish myself off before my condition does it for me is to deny, defy and sabotage every initiative of everyone who sits atop of this pyramid or wants to climb up to it. No matter how "educated" they are, it is now proven to me that they have less capacity to reflection and learning than even the worst LLMs of today. In fact, calling them "bots" or "NPCs" is an insult to bots or NPCs. In my opinion all they deserve is Nuremberg trial and guillotine, and by association all others who are willingly singing the same song.
You really, really need professional help.
Case in point.
As expected, instead of a cogent argument for why you believe what you do, you simply deliver a rambling stream of anger and emotion.
Fundamentally, COVID public health recommendations revolved around minimizing transmission and preservation of medical resources while awaiting development of treatment options. No amount of ranting about being forced to sit in your house, other people being mean to you, or political gamesmanship changes that. No amount of complaining about imperfect solutions like masking or distancing detract from the overall validity of why they were recommended.
As a doctor I have had to have this kind of talk with people over and over. The underlying biology cares zero for your schedule or convenience in life. Given how noncompliance is a constant problem on an individual healthcare level, it's not surprising that we ended up with millions of people just like you who can't follow simple instructions and formed communities in support of their collective failure to do so.
Yeah, it was a mistake to expect anything beyond thought-stopping cliches that were delivered by you. In hindsight it was a mistake to post at all. I don't think you've read my post anyways, or you've processed it on a level below a typical LLM.
Righteousness is the most potent drug of them all, is it not? No need to answer. Have a good day.
> In hindsight it was a mistake to post at all.
Yes, absolutely. You just don't see how it looks from the outside, so it all appears normal to you. It absolutely isn't normal and makes you look unhinged.
Exactly. It's maddening seeing all of these uneducated people spouting full throated delusions as fact and everyone else allows these people to have room to spread their nonsense.
Im frankly pretty shocked that HN, which usually has a relatively educated user base compared to most other sites, is allowing this kind of drivel from people who have no idea what they are talking about.
Eloquent primer on "cogent argument" which is totally not "rambling stream of anger and emotion". Perfect basis for a healthy, respectful debate.
I'm really sorry I did bite on this provocation, but hope your post stays up for everyone to see and make their own judgement.
> What the Covid “side” did was abhorrent and history will not look fondly on them at all.
History will look on this the same way as it did on Spanish Flu:
Barely at all, even when it has valuable lessons for the next pandemic.
The former told me that people would stop wearing masks very very quickly.
I’ll never understand the people that want their offense at being labeled a “Typhoid Mary” to be taken as seriously as their anti-social, Typhoid Mary behavior.
Mary Mallon's case was singled out of many more similar cases. She was treated unfairly and with prejudice. No wonder she behaved "anti-socially".
Two people being treated unequally doesn't tell you who was being treated unfairly.
In her case, if there were indeed comparable cases of people repeatedly refusing to follow medical isolation, it's the others who were unfairly given freedom to continue to infect and kill innocent people.
Mm.
Humans are social animals, I find a lot of things makes a lot more sense through that lens — shooting the messenger included.
Somehow? For some internally obvious reason I never expected that.
One person is clever, two can talk, a group is clueless and a crowd is an idiot. It is only expected that any non-standard regulation will meet all sorts of resistances and division across axes most of which will make no sense even.
Personally I believe that the best way to handle it is not an open information, but total social manipulation into FUD with proper control points. But that’s incompatible with democracy and all. It’s not because I’m an inherently bad anti-humanist, I just don’t see how that could work cause it’s absolutely naive. A crowd is a separate being from a human that stands in it, and it requires non-human interaction. Treating it as just a set of humans to whom you speak directly is an error.
I meant more so from an individual point of view. Any health authority literally did need to use forms of manipulation to get desirable results, but it’s clear from where I was looking that they did it with the express intent of saving lives at first. Eventually they had to work in a strange grey area where protecting lives and the economy was essential, and it often looked dubious because they didn’t clearly comply with their initial missions. At least in the US and Canada, it seems.
I was more disturbed by how individual people handled the situation, even with people they were close with. It was remarkable how rapidly relationships fell apart over covid. And slightly beyond that as well, into the “crowd” category, but like you say… That’s arguably more predictable.
Heh, welcome to humanity. It’s a very thin line we are closely revolving around and when it bends, all goes to hell. You were basically given a chance to see how complex, different and often obsolete or contradictory are the fundamental beliefs that drive people. That’s why you sometimes meet someone you can’t predict or understand (we tend to write it off and stick to our circle, thinking it’s just a deviation). Covid measures simply dropped a highly potent contrast into the society. It’s all smiles and flowers until a little change.
Welcome indeed. I can be cynical at times (I try not to be) but some aspects of how the pandemic played out truly surprised me. And confused me.
I like to think I know better now. But, I’m also reminded that I’m still young. I was 35, and way too accustomed to quiet Canadian life. The biggest news we saw over on this side of the country for a long time was a hockey riot, otherwise things happening elsewhere (generally speaking).
Then again, maybe the hockey riot was all I needed to know going into the pandemic, haha. I should have learned more from that.
What scares me so much about the Covid debacle is that despite all the information that's been coming out about how most of the restrictions placed on people -- like hindering people from gathering _outside in the sun_ -- and effectiveness of both pharmaceuticals and PPE's -- of which I won't name any because then I'll be booted out of here quite quickly I imagine -- despite all of this data, government hearings around the world, and respected studies.
Despite all that, people still cling to the fantasy that it was comply or be complicit in the death of anyone who died from covid.
You're absolutely right. It was and remains scary as all hell.
Early in the pandemic we just didn’t know what the death rate from Covid would be. 1%? 0.1%? Or maybe 10%? How many people get long covid, and how bad is it? Does it kill the old or the young? What is the death rate for people who get Covid, and can’t go to hospital because there are no beds?
If Covid were to wipe out 10% of the population, all the draconian measures make a lot more sense. Slow it down as much as possible, reduce pressure on hospitals and give scientists time to make a vaccine.
But it turns out the death rate from Covid wasn’t that bad - and Americans would, in hindsight, largely prefer a 1% (or whatever) mortality rate over the inconveniences of masks, staying at home, and so on. But a lot of things weren’t obvious early on like they are now. We didn’t know that.
If there’s another pandemic in our lifetime, there’s almost no chance society takes those preventative measures a second time. Let’s hope we don’t get something a lot more deadly.
"Does it kill the old or the young?"
We figured out very quickly, that mainly old people were at danger.
The lockdowns happened, when this was known for sure.
"If Covid were to wipe out 10% of the population, all the draconian measures make a lot more sense."
And no one even claimed back then, that a unhospitalised 10% death rate was expected.
In my understanding as a parent - the old in charge freaked out and locked everyone in, to protect mainly themself - yet the young generation suffered the most of it, despite not being at danger from the disease as well. So trying to prevent the collapse of the hospitals did made sense - but not the way it was done, at the expense of the younger generation.
Locking people indoors with limited ventilation and no UV radiation is never going to be a reasonable approach. Why? Because UV radiation kills viruses very fast and thus drastically reduces their capacity to spread between hosts. Not to mention the obvious factor of air circulation in a near-infinite dimension thinning out particles per cubic meter within seconds. Also turns out fresh air is generally good for sick people too. So is sunlight.
Studies on the coronavirus circulating showed this at the very beginning of 2020. And that’s just one of the anti scientific measures that were taken.
> Studies on the coronavirus circulating showed this at the very beginning of 2020.
This is only "obvious" with the benefit of hindsight. There was a mountain of rushed studies early on reporting all sorts of conflicting "facts" about covid. Of course using what we know now, you can look back and cherrypick a lot of great stuff from the pile of early results. But that doesn't mean you could have done the same thing in early 2020. How could you tell which studies to believe? Everything was rushed, had small sample sizes and nothing had been replicated yet.
At the start of 2020 it wasn't clear how long viral particles stayed airborne, and whether you could even contact covid from breathing it in, or if you needed physical contact of some sort. I remember one scare where people were worried you could catch covid from the cardboard used for amazon packages - before we realised covid dries out and dies if it lands on materials like that. Thats not true of all viruses.
Government policy, science and software share something in common: They can happen fast or happen well. You can only pick one. Rushed science gets small things wrong. Rushed software is buggy and brittle, and rushed government policy makes mistakes.
Its easy to forget, but the start of 2020 was a madhouse.
In the early 2020s, studies have shown everything and their opposite, so you can cherry pick anything that supports your view. I find it was a particularly interesting time because it showed how "messy" science really is. In normal times, you typically don't see scientific results before you have at least some amount of certainty. Some research get through the cracks (ex: LK-99), but not to the extent of what happened in the early days of the pandemic.
Also covid and other diseases spread well in open air summer festivals where UV is at its peak. And for covid specifically, we had peaks in the summer, where, again, people tend to get out and UV is high.
IMO we should have had more draconian lockdowns much sooner, when it would have slowed the spread more effectively, and we should have opened up much more quickly once the initial wave went through and it was clear that it had already spread every where. Especially the schools, once it was clear that kids weren't especially badly affected by it.
There's basically 4 categories of people that fucked up the discourse about lockdowns:
1) Health professionals who in a well-intentioned way recommended what _would actually work_ to stop the spread of the disease: ie -- a complete draconian lockdown, without considering what would happen if that draconian lockdown wasn't actually complete (that it would still spread quickly and widely)
2) Paranoid conspiracy theorists and anti-science types who believed that the lockdowns were part of some nefarious agenda.
3) People who wanted (and still want) a permanent lockdown for their own reasons -- whether for the valid reason that they have some kind of immune disorder or because of crippling social anxiety or introversion or because they just liked working from home
4) Professional doom sayers and rabble rousers who got engagement on social media from pushing apocalyptic scenarios (on both sides of the issue)
---
They were all so loud that like the rational voices in the room (ie: People who supported a lock down early and then wanted to open up more quickly as we learned more about how it spread and how it got treated) just got shouted down, with really negative consequences -- like how all the far right crazies got voted into school boards on this issue and then got into all kinds of stupid shit (banning books, etc). It was crazy to keep schools closed even after it was clear that the virus was in a pandemic stage and kids weren't really affected by it and schools weren't a major vector for transmission, and it was especially crazy to keep them closed after the vaccine came out.
Somehow people got in their mind that the goal was an eradication of covid and that _was never possible_ once it escaped Wuhan. The goal was the slow the spread until it was endemic in order to give us time to learn how to treat it effectively and to stop hospitals from being overwhelmed. Once it's was endemic, we were never going to stop it.
Wasn't a lot of the authoritarian concern around COVID based on the idea that "this is just the beginning, today they require masks, tomorrow they'll require implanted tracking devices"?
I think history will look at the COVID years and see a remarkable and worldwide pandemic, and society made some rules to try to deal with it, some of the rules may have been a bit much, or poorly informed, but after a few years things were back to normal.
I don't see COVID being more than a blip on any radar. If future historians analyze the history of authoritarianism, there will be lots of things more significant than the COVID years I think.
Conspiracy theorists refusing to wear masks, which grant anonymity, made me realize that these people aren't actually paranoid they're just contrary.
Good point.
I didn't make that particular leap, but it does also explain why none of the people "worried" that Gates put a microchip in the vaccines seem fussed about Musk developing an actual brain microchip.
> Multiple people I knew and respected wished me a horrific death for expressing my opinions
Someone here took exception to me saying that I have never had any trouble with wearing masks, went and left a generically threatening comment on my blog.
> I mean god forbid anybody express any disagreement with perhaps the most authoritarian, unscientific power grab in human history. The shit that went down was pure evil.
Are you still talking about the wearing masks during a global pandemic that lowered global life expectancy by about 2 years, or to put it differently "killed between 1 and 3 times as many as the literal Holocaust"?
Because that's way out of touch if so.
https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
> wearing masks during a global pandemic that lowered global life expectancy by about 2 years, or to put it differently "killed between 1 and 3 times as many as the literal Holocaust"?
And forcing people to wear completely useless cloth masks for years did almost nothing to change those numbers. Same with virtually every single other non-pharmaceutical intervention.
Virus is gonna virus. You can’t stop it and even if you could it doesn’t make the means to do so ethical, legal or moral.
There's a reason nurses and surgeons wear masks, and it isn't fashion. And calling it "cloth" is like saying "silicon" can't take pictures or do maths — surgical masks (when real and not scams to rip off emergency government funding) are carefully engineered specifically to be useful in this kind of context.
And we literally can and have made interventions that work on viruses. Even non pharmaceutical ones — that's one reason why condoms are so promoted.
Several non-pharmaceutical interventions have been demonstrated to be effective for covid, specifically. Real masks — N95 for example, not generic 'cloth' — were one of the ones that reduced probability of infection, with different probability depending on if your were measuring "person has virus and wears mask, probability they infect person at 2m distance in 5 minutes?" or "person wearing a mask and doesn't have virus, chance of them being infected when standing 2m from an infected person without a mask for 5 minutes?" and all the other combinations and variations because stats is hard.
They also work like this on influenza, IIRC, but not the common cold. That (not the imperfections) is on purpose, and is why medical staff wear them as standard.
Hand sanitizer, which sold out, as I understand it that didn't help at all with covid, but the memes around it probably reduced something else.
> even if you could it doesn’t make the means to do so ethical, legal or moral.
I have yet to meet a militant nudist — you are, after all, objecting to being forced to wear something you dismiss as "cloth", which is what your clothes are made of — but PPE seems to wind up a lot of people. Condoms, to use a previous example, but also seatbelts.
Nurses and doctors wear masks to protect the patient from their own moisture droplets which may contain contaminants when breathing or talking. Same with dentists.
Do note they don’t wear N95 masks so they can’t filter smaller particles like viruses. It’s just to protect you from their saliva and breath droplets and spreading larger bacteria.
N95 masks are fairly effective if worn precisely and close fitting, but barely anyone used those because they are harder to breathe in.
A cloth mask or thin medical mask does practically nothing except protect others from larger droplets.
Do you also not wear seatbelts?
> I’m sure if we continued this conversation and it was allowed on this forum you too would verbally wish at my death
Do you think it might be personal rather than anything to do with your opinions?
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you might be interested in This Old Tony
He did multiple vidjayos debunking spontaneously combusting oily rags and then offhandedly mentions that 9/11 was an inside job. You've got your forensic engineering priorities backwards!
From what I've seen about AvE he was mostly against the (batshit insane) reaction from the federal government to the truckers convoy in Ottawa. That's the only video that he made specifically about COVID I think (I don't know if he mentioned something else in other videos though). Not sure if that makes him a nutjob lol
Early on he made fun of people who wore masks. I'd watched almost every video for years before that but as one of many impacted by others not taking covid seriously, I went cold turkey.
Tbh it's fine to make fun of that, as long as it's not insulting or conspirational. I've seen tons of humour about masks and mask wearers in the past few years, which makes sense considering how widespread masks were. It's not about taking COVID seriously or not imo, but I guess it depends on one's sense of humour. The way some people who took COVID very seriously acted was very funny, regardless of intentions.
Still, maybe I've missed something ( I don't watch AvE Usually, and watched only a few of his videos in general).
People deal with grief differently and that's ok, but for me it meant cutting out people who made fun of things that would've kept more of my family alive (I also stopped laughing at covidiot memes). If everyone masked & vaxxed, we could've done so much better. But when public figures turn it into a "thing", it doesn't help anyone. I won't be able to find the video but I do remember AvE making very toxic masculinity comments about masks. Just wasn't what I needed at the time. I'm sure if I hadn't seen that specific part I would still be watching him.
Oh awesome. Subscribed
I mean, kind of sounds like he never really changed, just your opinion of him did.
Framed differently, it sounds like the youtuber opportunisticially divulged some of their true thoughts on topics slowly over time that would have alienated members of their audience had they known who and what they were initially supporting. Pretty cowardly, but not an uncommon tactic amongst his similar peers.
In light of receiving new information that goes against your own tenants against poorly researched misinformation, changing your opinion isn't really a noteworthy response.
> Framed differently
Framed in an insane way by someone looking to denigrate someone they don't like. I have no idea who you're targeting but you obviously have a chip on your shoulder.
Duly noted.
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He started revealing his face in 2020 as a way to help people maintain human connection during lockdowns. A huge number of the comments on the video were about his channel name and icon, one of his eyes actually looks like that.
His commencement addresses might really freak you out, then! See e.g. https://youtu.be/z7GVHB2wiyg
One of the best commencement speeches I’ve seen.
He featured multiple times before with Matt Parker and Brady Haran (NF), strange that you missed it. Although I guess even in this niche channel preferences vary wildly.
What's NF? ChatGPT thinks it refers to Numberphile in this comment, but wouldn't that be NP? I've never seen Numberphile abbreviated as NF.
My bad, ph is not my first language’s foneme.
We phorgive you.
I'm assuming Numberphile indeed, as that's the most likely for a Brady Haran channel with 3b3b as a guest.
Yes, Numberphile, as confirmed by looking up Brady Haran in Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_Haran
Especially because when narrating the audio is better than someone being filmed casually, that small difference can get really weird
Randall Munroe from xkcd is a stick figure (cueball), and you can't convince me otherwise.
His "What if?" videos have his actual voice, and it sounds nothing like a stick figure. Horrors.
Same same, now imagine him singing… https://youtu.be/djzKCZHeVjY?si=mw0P14f_hUE_kIlW
I love that people like this exist.
This means you missed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOCsdhzo6Jg which is hillarious
Well, now we know what the logo and the channel name is referencing! (His eye)
I absolutely love his voice. Its so calm and soothing that I can have his video running on the side while I am doing my chores and can still learn stuff.
Content creators like this deserve the recognition
Voices like that must have a big impact on success, right? Both on youtube and for podcasts
This guy is a natural born educator. 'Content creator' doesn't begin to describe his value to society.
"Content creator" is like calling a good cook "grub producer". I don't understand why youtubers themselves keep using it. Content is the emptiest word (and we shouldn't use it like that IMO).
It's pretty accurate. Most videos exist just to be passively consumed, like the person you're responding to who listens to it while doing chores.
Probably because they see all the data behind the scenes and know how the sausage is made with respect to what brings in $$. Capturing the attention of humans is just a psychological manipulation exercise. We're mice being given dopamine injections on a regular schedule
It's too nasal for my liking. Somehow detracts from the rigor that's there.
Omg I would love to make an explainer on bridging algorithms[1] with this tool! I've been a huge fan of their use in participatory democracy processes since 2016 (using tools like Pol.is), and have wanted to make a contribution to increasing literacy around the foundational math involved <3
Had I known about Manim back when his Summer of Math Exposition[2] was happening, I def would have dived in!
[1]: https://bridging.systems/
[2]: https://some.3b1b.co/
I had no idea this existed, thanks so much for the link! Reading their paper right now, and I'd love to see your explainer once you make it :) My website is linked from my profile, send me a link on social media if you ever get around to making that explainer!
What is the actual math involved? From following the link in [1] I found almost no math content.
I'd watch if you made it. Big fan of pol.is : )
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"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That latest hologram video is one of the best quality YouTube videos I've ever seen
Link to Manim: https://github.com/3b1b/manim
and the community fork: https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim
I’m amazed at how much production goes into each of his videos. His YouTube play button is well deserved.
It's also what bums me out about YouTube. There is an insane amount of effort that goes into producing high-quality videos - orders of magnitude more than would go into putting together a well-illustrated blog post.
As with blogs, a lot of this effort is wasted unless you get lucky. But with blogs, at least you have multiple good shots at visibility. Maybe you'll make it to the top of HN, maybe on X, maybe somewhere else. Even within a single platform, you usually have multiple tries. If you don't get noticed right away, there's still hope that someone else shares your content down the line.
In contrast, on YouTube, an algorithm essentially decides once. If you don't already have a zillion subscribers, it shows your video to a couple of people, more or less at random. If they don't engage, that's the end of the road.
A YouTube video has a URL though. So just like a blog post, you can share it on all the same sites you mentioned with blog posts.
Plus you have the built-in audience of YouTube and the algorithm that can help with discovery..
"Build it and they will come" has never been true, for videos or blogs...
There are surprisingly few venues for video content outside YT, at least not on a scale that would matter on YT! For example, if you want to get to the top of HN, non-video content has much better odds. Many tech- or science-centric subreddits discourage or ban videos too.
YT is a fairly closed ecosystem that's both insanely resource-intensive to participate in, and that doesn't give creators too many second chances. My specific claim is that it's more of a crapshoot than running a blog. There are so many great science visualizations with 50 views.
HN is relatively tiny and HN's allergy to video is not representative of the internet.
Just create clips from your video and post them on insta, tiktok, twitter, FB, etc. That's the internet at large. If people are interested, they'll watch the full video.
HN is small as a discussion community, but it is huge in terms of the traffic it generates to top-ranked URLs. There are fairly mainstream publications that optimize for HN, and I have spoken to marketers and PR people who described HN as by far the most significant source of traffic to their sites.
It doesn't necessarily translate to sales or lasting attention, but if you're after brand recognition or SEO, it's great. Spend some time on /newest to see how many organizations are desperate to get a piece of this.
It's not really that small and I don't know why people say that.
Last time I saw stats, it was five million monthly visitors. It's small as a platform. It's smaller than Reddit or Facebook, but those aren't discussion communities.
There aren't huge numbers of subreddits larger than five million people and last I looked the largest tended to be about trivial BS.
Last I checked, HN is the largest serious tech discussion board on the planet.
- Individual subs like /r/programming are larger.
- HN is ~100x smaller than twitter which is itself not even in the top 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_...
I've gotten traffic from HN and /r/programming, and the influx from HN is larger. I think it's a function of two things. First, /r/programming is higher-volume (i.e., more front-page links per day). Second, Reddit subscriber counts are not DAU / MAU, it likely includes a ton of inactive accounts.
Yes, it's extremely hard to get an apples to apples comparison of data across different platforms.
I do my best to account for that.
I remain mystified by people who compare HN size as a community to Reddit or Facebook or Twitter (aka X) which are platforms, not communities.
Funny I just looked and Reddit says r/programming is 4.1m which last I checked is less than the 5 million unique visitors HN was getting a few years ago when I last saw stats by the moderator and I don't know what it's at now.
Twitter works completely differently from most platforms and isn't a unified community.
Where is that 4.1m number from?
I tried to edit my comment and missed the edit window. I was looking at the wrong sub.
R/programming is currently 6.5m, which doesn't matter because it doesn't invalidate my statement about the last time I checked.
If you want to claim r/programming is actually larger now, you need a current citation for HN traffic which you may not be able to find.
And keep in mind it's going to be tough to compare because Reddit members isn't actually a comparable figure to MAU, as noted elsewhere.
I've discovered so much content on YouTube that I would never have found if it was on someone's blog.
And on top of that I also find YT content through social media, blogs, forums, etc..
So I hear you, but I guess based on my own experience, I disagree! But that's cool, we can do that. :-)
Why do you think that you would never have found it ?
The best blogposts do get shared around, and for worse ones, is it that much of a loss that only few people find them ?
I'm not super active on social media, and I find that all the big/main aggregator sites (like HN and Reddit and others) have become victims of their own success and good stories just fall off the front page very quickly, and so you miss a ton of stuff unless you're checking all the time, and I don't have that kind of time.
Link aggregators aren't good at "long tail"... So your good stories are only really discoverable when they're hot, and get progressively harder to discover over time.
Google search just sucks now, it's all shopping links and SEO trash, even if you search for fairly specific subjects.. You can still find what you want but you have to wade through so much garbage...
Plus there's no discovery. Like pretty much all search engines you can typically only find what you're searching for as opposed to finding new unknown things that are within your topics of interest.
For better or worse I find that YouTube is one of my best resources for surfacing new and interesting things pretty often, and quite regularly from channels big and small that I've never watched before. YT is great at long tail..
So it has become a major source of discovery for me, in many of my areas of interest (which aren't all tech).
Of course some content I don't like consuming as video, so I do sometimes find videos that cover interesting subject matter, which I'll then go search for articles or text-based content on instead.
I see, though I do consider that part of YouTube to be a net negative for everyone but Google considering how it's keeping people on the platform, and therefore less likely to look for more varied sources.
But what I meant is that people share links around, whether in public like here, or in one-on-one discussions (and blogs do have their own recommended lists), so it's quite possible that you would still have found out about them without any kind of algorithmic prodding.
For instance, to put this in practice, here's a science education focused personal website that I like a lot :
http://av8n.com/
Thank you for sharing that link!
We all find content in ways that suit our time/resources/network etc.. I do get lots of links and recommendations from friends and co-workers (and on places like here), but I also get a lot of it from platforms, and I think that's a good thing.
I'm not anti-algorithm (not saying you are) and I believe it's one of many great ways to discover content, in this case in video form. And I think having it all in one place is a huge benefit.
Considering all the resources required to host video, I don't think it would be realistic for everyone to host their own stuff in that medium..
Not to mention how much of a creator economy exists thanks to the centralized platform that is YT. Tons of creators probably wouldn't even bother making their content if they didn't have somewhere with a built-in audience to post it to.
So I disagree with the idea that it's a negative for everyone but Google. Tons of people make a living thanks to that platform, with content they'd likely never be able to make a living from otherwise.
I'm not sure that resources were an issue even in 2006, much less today : P2P is older than that. Ease of use was an issue, but that's almost over thanks to the likes of PeerTube (even for streaming !), though of course it would be better if ISPs also jumped on board (like they did for e-mail and personal websites).
People were making videos even before YouTube started to become commercial, and they will keep making them after YouTube is gone (hopefully soon, considering how enshittified it became, but I'm afraid that with Google's money it will take a while). I disagree that th That you're calling it 'content' is a symptom of that corporatization.
Platforms are evil (and discovery algorithms are a big part of the problem), and especially the people not just using them, but particularly making a living from them are bad people (especially today, they had more than a decade to be aware of the issues). (This is on top of other qualities or faults they might have, of course.) And if there were no platforms, there would still be people making a living from the Internet (and the video format included), the possibilities are just too gigantic.
I'm calling it content because that's what it is. And it's the term that we use for it today.. I don't call it that because of Google, I call it that because that's what it's called. Language evolves.
Content creator is a blanket term for the writers, videographers, researchers, comedians, speakers, musicians, scientists, programmers, artists, architects, singers and every other profession making a living uploading videos to YouTube.
I certainly didn't want to type all of those, so I used the common shorthand. Even you knew what it meant. Not everything is sinister or evil. Sometimes it's just words.
99% (probably more) of people who use YT have never heard of PeerTube. I've heard of it and I've never once tried to use it, and I'm quite technical (I've built a video distribution platform).
You're delusional (sorry) if you think anything out there even comes close to the reach or ease of use of YouTube for the average person.
Look I'm not saying it's perfect either, or that there aren't problems with Google and the rest of big tech, and some of their products have drawbacks and downsides..
Anyways, I just realized I'm trying to have practical conversation and you're having an ideological one.. So maybe that's where this ends, we'll agree to disagree and move on...
From what YouTube creators are saying lately subscriber counts don’t matter anymore. So even if you have a zillion subscribers you’re still almost completely at the mercy of the algorithm.
I saw this, too. I know a Youtuber who has 2 million subscribers and their latest videos get about 5k views when they used to get 500k without a change in quality.
> If they don't engage, that's the end of the road.
As some counterexample anecdata, the YouTube algorithm is being quite generous to me lately, often giving me relatively low-view videos from years ago, some of which have been quite good. Maybe I'm just in a small a/b test, but it seems that videos do get multiple chances.
for better or worse, that's because video's infinitely easier to monetize in ways we've been conditioned with for decades. so the payouts for monetized videos are huge compared to a written blog where an ad can clutter and mess up the entire design (which loses you users, losing you better ad rates, and spirals down).
It's also a chicken and egg issue too. People simply watch more than they read most of the time. So videos target more people who gets more ad money who gets better ad rates etc.
> People simply watch more than they read most of the time.
This sounded like a wild statement, until I remembered how many people still watched TV for hours every day.
Wow. I really wish this were a JavaScript library so we could play with this in a browser and publish 3D animations to the browser.
Check out Motion Canvas[0] by Jacob from aarthificial, prolific coder and animator [1].
[0]: https://motioncanvas.io/
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@aarthificial
I second this. The Motion Canvas codebase itself is also fascinating. Extremely well written and documented.
I've done some porting between Python and JS based on Tensorflow in the past - and I suspect the poor ergonomics in JS for math/lists would probably ruin the experience a good amount.
Perhaps something like Pyodide can bridge the gap and make it easier to bring into the browser as well.
It would probably be easier to add an 'export to js' option to Manim than to try to create an ergomic js library.
Motion Canvas might be a great fit: https://motioncanvas.io/
I wonder how the performance would be if you ran it in Pyodide.
I assume that a considerable percentage of CS students or recent graduates (myself included, back in the day) dream about creating some sort of visualization tool, let alone an awesome one like this.
Sometimes knowing how to do something isn't nearly as important as badly wanting to do something
For some it can be far easier to find knowledge than it is to find motivation
It's more likely having a specific immediate use case - creating his videos - was more important. Usually creating something for some abstract future use(r) will lead to almost zero motivation, at least for me.
Ive been working on for like 4 years now :[
I had the chance to use Manim during my college undergraduate project, it was very scrappy, but the library was very intuitive to use. And now this makes me wonder if there are other similar libraries like Manim for these more videographic oriented production.
I worked with a flash developer at its height and he used to say "it's ALL about the easing"
Does the serif font in manim have any ties to Hershey fonts or the BGI vector fonts packaged with 90s Borland products? I guess any TTF font can also be rendered line-by-line but the animation does remind me of BGI example code running on slow IBM PCs.
I'm quite certain the typeface is Computer Modern (the primary font being CMU Serif, to be precise). It can be found by Googling it. I also distribute the fonts as an NPM library, since they are OFL. [1]
[1]: https://github.com/stevenpetryk/computer-modern
Ah, so it has TeX/Metafont origins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Modern
That comment bought back memories, I never noticed how CM looked similar to one of those old Borland stroke fonts.
Very nice library, and nice to see he face behind the channel too. I now understand why it's 3blue1brown (wasn't aware that he has heterochromia in one eye at the ratio of his channel name, cool!)
it's a very groovy mutation.
Could having students create their own videos using A Manim explaining aspects of maths be a good way to teach maths?
Or would it be more cumbersome and the tools be a distraction or impediment to understanding?
Only if you're students were already expected to know know some programming, and you're fine making some boilerplate. Students already have so much on their plate as is, so trying to learn an API on top of understanding the concepts may be infeasible.
But students who do try to do that will definitely have a deeper understanding on average.
The latter, too much effort would be spent on non-math stuff. Maybe wouldn't be an impediment, just very inefficient
I think 1-1 oral exams are the most accurate way to assess understanding.
Lately I often think about 3Blue1Brown, Veritasium and Kahn Academy, how much good they are doing to this world.
Imagine having close to an unlimited amount of money at your disposal and a media platform which is capable of reaching close to every person on this planet. To give people a voice in a community, if they dare to or if they feel the need to.
The only thing you then lack is a platform for organizing communities instead of sowing the seeds of hatred, to use the tools provided by people like Grant Sanderson, Derek Muller, Grady Hillhouse and others, in order to help communities to improve their communities, towns, cities, and so on. To help them solve their problems, make them understand how problematic corruption, greed and abuse of power is.
While I was born in Germany, I lived for around 20 years in Peru, since I was a child. People are poor, but very kind hearted, politicians and the wealthy are corrupt.
This is what makes me feel so sad about Elon Musk, specially knowing that he grew up in South Africa.
I don't understand the Musk comment at the end. Can you please explain what you mean by that and what is the significance of him growing up in South Africa?
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I'm going to find out a way to automatically hide comments referencing "musk". You can't even read about a 3Blue1Brown video without people somehow making it about him. Every thread, every day, it's just people talking about Elon Musk.
we have a HN API, so it's pretty straightforward once you understand it to make an extension/add-on.
The hard part from there is design decisions. Do you just have that comment disappear, or fade like a downvoted comment? if it disappears do you remove the entire thread? is a contextless match adequate? (say, someone was talking about deoderant?)
One of the best math communicators out there!
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Manim is incredibly cool, but my biggest takeaway from the video is how insane it is that Python apparently lets you reference a variable in a function that was defined outside the scope of the function.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but isn't that standard for pretty much every C-style language? Define a variable outside a function, parallel to the function, and even though that variable is outside the scope of the function it's still accessible inside the function. Or did you mean something else?
Python has nested functions which does allow access to the nest...er function's variables. The rest does conform to expectations, you get to use parameters, locally declared variables and globals.
I'm not too familiar with Python, but isn't that just lexical scope, the same as most languages that support nested functions? Starting with the lambda calculus and all the languages it influenced, including even JavaScript.
Correct. It behaves like JavaScript and many other languages. You can't modify such variables in the outer scope from the inner scope unless you explicitly use the "nonlocal" declaration.
It's a whole subject in language design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_(computer_science)