[HN Gopher] How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]
___________________________________________________________________
How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]
Author : Tomte
Score : 864 points
Date : 2024-10-12 13:06 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| whyage wrote:
| 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.
| wdkrnls wrote:
| Sometimes knowing how to do something isn't nearly as important
| as badly wanting to do something
| alickz wrote:
| For some it can be far easier to find knowledge than it is to
| find motivation
| abenga wrote:
| 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.
| andoando wrote:
| Ive been working on for like 4 years now :[
| patcon wrote:
| 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/
| ikesau wrote:
| I'd watch if you made it. Big fan of pol.is : )
| thethirdone wrote:
| What is the actual math involved? From following the link in
| [1] I found almost no math content.
| sestep wrote:
| 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!
| killthebuddha wrote:
| 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.
| wruza wrote:
| 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.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| 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.
| wruza wrote:
| My bad, ph is not my first language's foneme.
| taneq wrote:
| We phorgive you.
| OrderlyTiamat wrote:
| I'm assuming Numberphile indeed, as that's the most likely
| for a Brady Haran channel with 3b3b as a guest.
| fragmede wrote:
| Yes, Numberphile, as confirmed by looking up Brady Haran in
| Wikipedia.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_Haran
| phlakaton wrote:
| His commencement addresses might _really_ freak you out, then!
| See e.g. https://youtu.be/z7GVHB2wiyg
| ozzydave wrote:
| One of the best commencement speeches I've seen.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Especially because when narrating the audio is better than
| someone being filmed casually, that small difference can get
| really weird
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| 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.
| pests wrote:
| I noticed a few of the people I watch revealed their face
| last year before the big collab with Mark Rober.
| ravetcofx wrote:
| I used to like AvE till COVID. Then he became an anti-masker
| conspiratorial nutjob.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I mean, kind of sounds like he never really changed, just
| your opinion of him did.
| zen928 wrote:
| 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.
| the_gorilla wrote:
| > 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.
| zen928 wrote:
| Duly noted.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| 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.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| 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.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| 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.
| ben_w wrote:
| > 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.
| lc9er wrote:
| 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.
| ben_w wrote:
| Mm.
|
| Humans are social animals, I find a lot of things makes a
| lot more sense through that lens -- shooting the
| messenger included.
| Zenzero wrote:
| > 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.
| electrondood wrote:
| 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.
| Zenzero wrote:
| 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.
| wruza wrote:
| 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.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| 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.
| ben_w wrote:
| > 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
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| > 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.
| ben_w wrote:
| 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.
| simianparrot wrote:
| 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.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Do you also not wear seatbelts?
| jemmyw wrote:
| > 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?
| simianparrot wrote:
| 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.
| josephg wrote:
| 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.
| simianparrot wrote:
| 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.
| josephg wrote:
| > 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.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| 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.
| empath75 wrote:
| 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.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| 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.
| likeclockwork wrote:
| Conspiracy theorists refusing to wear masks, which grant
| anonymity, made me realize that these people aren't
| actually paranoid they're just contrary.
| ben_w wrote:
| 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.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| 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
| Neywiny wrote:
| 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.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| 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).
| Neywiny wrote:
| 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.
| bogdanstanciu wrote:
| Always felt AvE stayed the same person he always, the same
| kind of commentary he always made. Low gov man with low gov
| sentiments.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| 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!
| GenerocUsername wrote:
| Oh awesome. Subscribed
| thecatspaw wrote:
| you might be interested in This Old Tony
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| This means you missed
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOCsdhzo6Jg which is hillarious
| teekert wrote:
| Same same, now imagine him singing...
| https://youtu.be/djzKCZHeVjY?si=mw0P14f_hUE_kIlW
|
| I love that people like this exist.
| Izkata wrote:
| 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.
| brianpan wrote:
| Well, now we know what the logo and the channel name is
| referencing! (His eye)
| quectophoton wrote:
| Randall Munroe from xkcd is a stick figure (cueball), and you
| can't convince me otherwise.
| phlakaton wrote:
| His "What if?" videos have his _actual voice,_ and it sounds
| nothing like a stick figure. Horrors.
| spankalee wrote:
| 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.
| mikeshi42 wrote:
| 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.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| It would probably be easier to add an 'export to js' option
| to Manim than to try to create an ergomic js library.
| dleeftink wrote:
| Check out Motion Canvas[0] by Jacob from aarthificial, prolific
| coder and animator [1].
|
| [0]: https://motioncanvas.io/
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/@aarthificial
| cloogshicer wrote:
| I second this. The Motion Canvas codebase itself is also
| fascinating. Extremely well written and documented.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Motion Canvas might be a great fit: https://motioncanvas.io/
| mistercow wrote:
| I wonder how the performance would be if you ran it in Pyodide.
| joshdavham wrote:
| Link to Manim: https://github.com/3b1b/manim
| srik wrote:
| and the community fork: https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim
| 1-6 wrote:
| I'm amazed at how much production goes into each of his videos.
| His YouTube play button is well deserved.
| doe_eyes wrote:
| 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.
| sbarre wrote:
| 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...
| doe_eyes wrote:
| 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.
| NavinF wrote:
| 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.
| doe_eyes wrote:
| 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.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| 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.
| NavinF wrote:
| - 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_...
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| 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.
| NavinF wrote:
| Where is that 4.1m number from?
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| 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.
| doe_eyes wrote:
| 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.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| 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.
| sbarre wrote:
| 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. :-)
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| 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 ?
| sbarre wrote:
| 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.
| quux wrote:
| 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.
| djeastm wrote:
| 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.
| falcor84 wrote:
| > 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.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| 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.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| > 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.
| vindex10 wrote:
| 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
| arjonagelhout wrote:
| 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 :)
| _ache_ wrote:
| The workaround that looks like "disable the feature I was
| working on". x)
| leetrout wrote:
| In larger companies this is how arsonist-firefighter engineers
| look impressive... fixing a bug they are responsible for while
| in a highly visible position
| skygazer wrote:
| 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.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| 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.
| taneq wrote:
| 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.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| 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.
| taneq wrote:
| > arsonist-firefighter engineers
|
| Brilliant, I'm stealing this phrase. :D
| andreareina wrote:
| 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.
| belter wrote:
| A persistent phenomenon:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefighter_arson
| vindex10 wrote:
| 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.
| qwertox wrote:
| 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.
| poszlem wrote:
| 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?
| rumblefrog wrote:
| 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.
| ganeshkrishnan wrote:
| 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
| kzrdude wrote:
| Voices like that must have a big impact on success, right? Both
| on youtube and for podcasts
| namaria wrote:
| This guy is a natural born educator. 'Content creator' doesn't
| begin to describe his value to society.
| kzrdude wrote:
| "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).
| the_gorilla wrote:
| 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.
| djeastm wrote:
| 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
| aanet wrote:
| 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
| Rastonbury wrote:
| That latest hologram video is one of the best quality YouTube
| videos I've ever seen
| jweir wrote:
| 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?
| owenpalmer wrote:
| I think 1-1 oral exams are the most accurate way to assess
| understanding.
| eviks wrote:
| The latter, too much effort would be spent on non-math stuff.
| Maybe wouldn't be an impediment, just very inefficient
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| 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.
| chris12321 wrote:
| 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.
| Rygian wrote:
| It's a whole subject in language design:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_(computer_science)
| epistasis wrote:
| 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?
| rzzzt wrote:
| 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.
| antonvs wrote:
| 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.
| meowface wrote:
| 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.
| dkga wrote:
| One of the best math communicators out there!
| rzzzt wrote:
| 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.
| stevenpetryk wrote:
| 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
| rzzzt wrote:
| Ah, so it has TeX/Metafont origins:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Modern
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| That comment bought back memories, I never noticed how CM
| looked similar to one of those old Borland stroke fonts.
| fb03 wrote:
| 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!)
| swyx wrote:
| it's a very groovy mutation.
| mbo wrote:
| 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
| 3abiton wrote:
| He's probably one of the few good creators that didn't totally
| sellout on youtube (looking at you Mark Rober).
| nikisweeting wrote:
| 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.
| vlad_ungureanu wrote:
| This is amazing, thanks for sharing!
| phibz wrote:
| I worked with a flash developer at its height and he used to say
| "it's ALL about the easing"
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