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bbvnvlt commented on Ask HN: Is there a spiritual successor to del.icio.us?    · Posted by u/tunnuz
sebsauvage · 4 years ago
Well... Shaarli. Dead simple to install, no fuss. https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli

I have been using it for the past 15 years with great satisfaction.

bbvnvlt · 4 years ago
I expected this to be higher up. I used pinboard for years, but finally decided it's not worth the money. Self-hosting this requires very little resources and knowledge. Super happy with it, use it daily.
bbvnvlt commented on USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)   news.usc.edu/174170/emily... · Posted by u/grzm
tomjakubowski · 5 years ago
> Teachers learning OBS will be as much of a game changer as teachers moving from overheads to powerpoint, I think.

Just an anecdote but as a chemistry student I remembered lessons taught from an overhead far better than those from powerpoint. There was a stark contrast between the lower division organic chemistry series whose instructors used overheads, and the upper division organic chemistry mechanisms class whose teacher used slides. Those slides were mostly bullets and diagrams, sometimes with crude animations which were meant to indicate nucleophilic attack or whatever. Just watching the lecturer draw diagrams and arrows and listening to them talk was far more helpful, for me.

The lightbox seems much more overhead like in presentation. I dig it, and I hope today's college students learn well from it.

bbvnvlt · 5 years ago
I actually hope more teachers go for the simple overhead option. I do, using an overhead webcam.

A physical overhead with the instructor's hand visible has been shown to work far better than presenting ready-made diagrams. It also works better than digital drawing, probably due to the natural inclusion of pointing gestures guiding students' attention [1].

There is also evidence (and good theoretical reasons to believe) that a transparent lightboard leads to unnecessary distraction/split attention. [2]

[1]: https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000065

[2]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.07.019

bbvnvlt commented on USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)   news.usc.edu/174170/emily... · Posted by u/grzm
ianbooker · 5 years ago
OBS is really the big enabler in (my) online teaching at the moment. I use an IPad with a drawing app, I draw on a predefined colored canvas and overlay it in OBS with a chromakey filter. If that is available to you, it is even cheaper. But then again, I am looking slightly down while writing..
bbvnvlt · 5 years ago
Gaze guidance actually appears to be pretty important [1].

For drawing diagrams, a physical overhead with the instructor's hand visible seems to work far better than digital drawing [2].

[1]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2019.103713 [2]: https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000065

bbvnvlt commented on USC professor’s DIY online teaching hack to engage students goes viral (2020)   news.usc.edu/174170/emily... · Posted by u/grzm
tsumnia · 5 years ago
Same! I don't do anything as elaborate as the article, but I use a combination of OBS, PowerPoint, GIMP, IDEs, and a cheap Wacom tablet to demonstrate all the concepts for my classes.

The "Khan Academy"-style drawing I think really helps keep learning online casual and conversational in a way just presenting slides doesn't.

bbvnvlt · 5 years ago
Yes! Educational research supports being casual and conversational. Although for drawing diagrams, a physical overhead with the instructor's hand visible seems to work far better than Khan style video.

See: Fiorella, L., & Mayer, R. E. (2016). Effects of observing the instructor draw diagrams on learning from multimedia messages. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(4), 528.

https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000065

bbvnvlt commented on OBS Studio 27.0   github.com/obsproject/obs... · Posted by u/TangerineDream
antman · 5 years ago
OBS is great! Microsoft Teams broke virtual cam support a couple of months back on windoss. Has anyone found a workaround to maybe fake OBS virtual cam as a physical one? I would be grateful!
bbvnvlt · 5 years ago
Do you mean the problem with the image from your OBS virtual camera turning green and glitchy? You seem to be able to fix this (in some cases) by using 1920x1080 at 30fps.

See https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/virtual-cam-output-gets...

bbvnvlt commented on The High-Flying Physics of a Plant’s Exploding Fruits   nytimes.com/2018/03/09/sc... · Posted by u/dnetesn
bbvnvlt · 8 years ago
Reminds me of my favorite title for a scientific (engineering) paper ever:

Shooting Mechanisms in Nature: A Systematic Review

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

(disclosure: I work in the same department as the authors, although not at all involved in this work)

bbvnvlt commented on The revolutionary ideas of Thomas Kuhn   the-tls.co.uk/articles/pu... · Posted by u/benbreen
glenstein · 8 years ago
You're definitely right that technology isn't merely applied science and your examples illustrate that well. Technological advances sometimes happen with blind trial and error rather than any theory. But my point was that nobody would get away with talk of paradigms and incommensurability in the context of technological progress the way Kuhn gets away with it in talking about scientific progress.

And those aren't the same thing, but they are close enough that we should wonder why the rules are different.

For Kuhn paradigm shifts are shifts of largely faith, and paradigms supposedly aren't "really" better or worse than one another. Any declaration that this is so is, Kuhn insists, an anachronistic re-interpretation from within a preferred paradigm rather than an actual insight into truth.

And as the article says, Kuhn frustratingly thinks the whole question of relativism implied by his philosophy is "beside the point." Which is even more frustrating than if the charge were answered positively or negatively. Having that kind of an attitude toward truth is like a banker saying it's "beside the point" whether you have any money in your bank account.

bbvnvlt · 8 years ago
> Technological advances sometimes happen with blind trial and error rather than any theory.

Not with blind trials, but technology has historically advanced (way) ahead of theory most of the time.

See, for instance, Clifford D. Connor's "A People's History of Science" or the authoratitive (in philosophy of technology circles) "What Engineers Know and How They Know It" by Walter Vincenti. One of the convincing cases Vincenti describes is the development of wing profiles. Structured, intelligent trial and error (parameter variation) to get to shapes that work, but no theory to speak of (nothing that helps the development, in any case).

The rules can be different because science and engineering are different. Linked, but separate.

And I've never gotten the relativism charge against Kuhn. In my reading, he doesn't claim one paradigm isn't "really" better than another. He claims that when paradigms compete, there is at that time not an objective test to select between them. That's why belief is required. But again, the proponents of a new paradigm believe (and do their best to argue, rationally) that it is better in some sense. More true.

There are many directions in which to move away from ignorance. That competing paradigms take such different routes away from falsity, that they're not both on one dimension, and that one is not incontrovertibly and obviously superior to the other in every way with reference to some imagined objective standard, does not mean that it isn't a step towards a more true and accurate representation of the world.

bbvnvlt commented on The revolutionary ideas of Thomas Kuhn   the-tls.co.uk/articles/pu... · Posted by u/benbreen
glenstein · 8 years ago
As Joe said, the relation of dependence is complex. You added an extra caveat, of it being "straightforward" which wasn't part of my claim and I would argue is not even a good faith interpretation of the claim.

And all of this seems lateral to the point I was making: can we really trust Kuhn's arguments, which demand we dispense with a notion of scientific progress or independent reality of scientific truths, when we would never take such an argument seriously if made about technology?

bbvnvlt · 8 years ago
You’re right, sorry, I jumped on your second paragraph a bit too eagerly. Pet peeve against the “technology is applied science” view.

That said, Kuhn definitely does not ask that we dispense with the notion of science making progress. New paradigms are accepted because they’re better, after all.

bbvnvlt commented on The revolutionary ideas of Thomas Kuhn   the-tls.co.uk/articles/pu... · Posted by u/benbreen
glenstein · 8 years ago
I think science and technology are closely intertwined, and for all the debate about scientific progress, I think it's indisputable that a term like "progress" can be meaningfully used to describe the gains in capability and complexity of technology over time. I don't think any analysis of technology would yield to an interpretation that insisted different technological ages were merely a succession of untranslatable frameworks to which no notion of progress could be descriptive. Some things worked better than others, and that was that.

And if it's true of technology, which depends on science, why couldn't it be true of science too? I'm not even sure there's a clear dividing line between them.

bbvnvlt · 8 years ago
Science and engineeing may be intimately intertwined, but technology does not "depend on" science in any straightforward way. People were reliably producing alloys before metallurgy, flight happened well before any meaningful understanding of aerodynamics, and most famously, steam engines led to the development of thermodynamic science, not the other way round.
bbvnvlt commented on The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant   nationalgeographic.com/ma... · Posted by u/deegles
pakitan · 9 years ago
Yeah, I was wondering about that. Some of those farms look like they have million(s) dollars worth of equipment and infrastructure. And farming isn't exactly a high-margin industry so starting a new farm must be quite a risky venture. Are there government programs that help with the financing or it's all private capital?
bbvnvlt · 9 years ago
There are both subsidies and loan programs.

As far as I know (I am not a farmer, nor do I know any greenhouse farmers very well), lots of it is private capital though.

One of the biggest banks in the Netherlands (Rabobank) has a (positive) reputation for financing farmers and other agricultural firms. (also a negative one due to the LIBOR scandal, incidentally)

u/bbvnvlt

KarmaCake day24November 7, 2016View Original