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.
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.
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of the printing press and suggests one person standing at the front telling everyone what to write down may be outdated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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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'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 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?
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:
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?
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.
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.
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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.
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
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?
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.
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?
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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
> 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.
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.
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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 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.
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).
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 pretty accurate. Most videos exist just to be passively consumed, like the person you're responding to who listens to it while doing chores.
It's too nasal for my liking. Somehow detracts from the rigor that's there.
That latest hologram video is one of the best quality YouTube videos I've ever seen
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
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.
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. :-)
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.
> 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.
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 :[
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 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.
As I understand it Computer Modern is generated from strokes, so it makes sense for it to feel somewhat similar to other 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?
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:
which seems very odd to me. In Ruby you get: 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?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)