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How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]

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Re: How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]

#171

Post by skhunted »

wruza wrote: post #164
skhunted wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 i…

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.

Re: How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]

#172

Post by thecatspaw »

ravetcofx wrote: post #29
cruffle_duffle wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 used to like AvE till COVID. Then he became an anti-masker conspiratorial nutjob.

you might be interested in This Old Tony

Re: How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]

#173

Post by throw_pm23 »

rzzzt wrote: post #83

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.

That comment bought back memories, I never noticed how CM looked similar to one of those old Borland stroke fonts.

Re: How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]

#174

Post by CoastalCoder »

taneq wrote: post #139
skygazer wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]

#175

Post by BlueTemplar »

taneq wrote: post #106
AKluge wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prov…

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 ?

Re: How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]

#176

Post by BlueTemplar »

sbarre wrote: post #87
doe_eyes wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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 ?

Re: How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]

#177

Post by BlueTemplar »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #114
doe_eyes wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> 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.

Re: How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]

#179

Post by snake42 »

skhunted wrote: post #142
a1j9o94 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]

#180

Post by simianparrot »

ben_w wrote: post #110
cruffle_duffle wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

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.

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