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How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]

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Re: How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]

#211

Post by aakresearch »

AlexeyBelov wrote: post #208
aakresearch wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel it is fruitless to continue this conversation as it doesn't seem that we may find agreement, but if you insist..

(In the following paragraph "you" is mostly figurative, not personal)

Yes, I let a lot of anger and emotion into the reply to the bunch of diatribes which, themselves, were unsubstantiated attempts at gaslighting, full of derogatory rhetoric. This - hooking up on provocation - I consider a mistake on my part. However, if we omit my venting (the posts I was replying to would be reduced to zero without it), every point I made stands true, as it was observable reality at the time. Its "incoherence" is just a reflection on the described phenomena. It is not my fault that nothing in the "pandemic response" had any rhyme or reason. No matter how many times you repeat your aposteriori-constructed "presentation" which you wish to be true. That you don't care or dare to engage with my points makes me even more confident that they are valid and makes me care even less about what you may think of me. In fact, I wear "not normal" and "unhinged" badges from you with pride. And you wouldn't want to hear me speaking about it all in my mother-tongue, which you (personally) and me are likely to share - now, that would be "unhinged", but surely "coherent". Unfortunately I'm not equally mastered in English, which makes it another mistake to pick fights with local purveyors of "truth". I've been one of your political/cultural/intellectual "tribe" only few years ago, but your actions and words made me not able to associate with it forever anymore, under any circumstances. I invite you (personally) to recall the relevant saying about not wanting to do certain private business on the same field.

Putting a lid on it now, as I'm, probably, walking on the edge of HN posting guidelines, if not over it yet. There's certainly no "intellectual curiosity" or "good faith" expressed here by any participants, myself included.

Re: How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]

#212

Post by hbogert »

aanet wrote: post #41

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

Yeah i feel the same, however sometimes I just think math is only appreciated until you're older for a lot of people and that's when you gravitate towards these kinds of channels.

Re: How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]

#213

Post by Doxin »

throw_pm23 wrote: post #173
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.

As I understand it Computer Modern is generated from strokes, so it makes sense for it to feel somewhat similar to other stroke fonts.

Re: How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]

#215

Post by majewsky »

doe_eyes wrote: post #21
1-6 wrote: post #19

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…

> There is an insane amount of effort that goes into producing high-quality videos

Agreed. I once heard an estimate of 1 hour of editing for 1 minute of video, and I find that to be an extremely low-end estimate in my experience. And then, editing is only one part of the process. I spend possibly more time on writing (from outline to prose to revisions) than on editing, even when including basic motion graphics.

> In contrast, on YouTube, an algorithm essentially decides once.

This contradicts the experience that I have with YouTube as a creator. For reference, this is my channel: https://www.youtube.com/@XyrillPlays/videos - Just a silly little gaming channel. Ignore the bulk of the videos that are just VODs; if you sort by "Popular", you can see that practically all the views are on a handful of edited videos.

There is one edited video there early on, which currently has 7.6k views, even though it was posted in a phase of the channel where videos got single-digit views. If it were true that "an algorithm decides essentially once", this would needed to have happened right then and there, except that it didn't. This video got 42 views "on its own", without any promotion of any kind. But here's the thing, as you said yourself:

> 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.

The same applies to YouTube videos. When I posted another edited video later, I put that previous video as an end card. And just that miniscule click-through traffic alone was enough to have the older video get picked up by the algorithm.

And why did the newer video get picked up? Because I posted it to the subreddit and the Discord for the game. Video analytics on YouTube give a breakdown of where people are coming from, and it was very obvious how the first 100 or so views came from those places. Then after that, something clicked in the algorithm, as though it had become attuned to who might be interested in the videos, and it started recommending the video to people. From one moment to another, 85% of views are coming from algorithmic recommendations, which was 0% before.

With the most-watched video on the channel, which is nearing 200k views as of right now, it actually gained traction with the algorithm right away because I had for the first time a pre-existing subscriber base to get the video off the ground on its own, but it has not really stopped accumulating views. It has certainly flattened off a bit, but I've definitely benefited from the game in question having its 1.0 release recently. I'm also seeing people share my video on the subreddit every once in a while in the same way how people repost old blog posts to HN every now and then.

Re: How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]

#216

Post by chris12321 »

epistasis wrote: post #73
chris12321 wrote: post #69

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?

In languages I'm most familiar with, you can't access variables defined outside of the function within the function unless the variable is a class or global variable. So for example in Python you can do:

  >>> x = "hello"
  >>> def test():
  ...     print(x)
  ...
  >>> test()
  hello
which seems very odd to me. In Ruby you get:

  irb(main):001> x = "hello"
  => "hello"
  irb(main):002\* def test
  irb(main):003\*   puts x
  irb(main):004> end
  => :test
  irb(main):005> test
  (irb):3:in `test': undefined local variable or method `x' for main:Object (NameError)
This makes much more sense to me, since x is defined outside of the scope of test, so why should test have access to it?
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