How do you optimise your slides, audio or video when delivering online teaching?

There are many learning theories out there, but Mayer’s Multimedia Learning Theory is epic.

Read this thread + use his theories to improve learning transfer

Non-ideal slide to get started👇

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A long time ago I coded up a feature for SocialCoder which converts a link - any link - to a short URL. I use it all the time for sharing links to volunteer profiles and to volunteer opportunity listings.

The feature doesn't care what the link contains, it just hashes the URL, including any query params, and returns a shortened code.

More recently, around Christmas time, I added another feature where I can click a button to send a template notification to a charity that their new listing has been reviewed and published. I call it a next-steps email.

For the past few weeks, its all been working well. Its nice to keep automating things that previously were done by hand.

Fast forward to today.

A new opportunity listing is posted by a charity.

I review and publish it, tweet about it, then click a button to send the charity an emailed notification of next steps.

How to make a "Briefcase" icon in @figmadesign.

🧵 thread 👇

In a 24 x 24 pixel artboard, use the rectangle tool (R) to draw a 18 x 10 pixel rectangle positioned horizontally centered and 6 pixels from the top of the artboard.

Using the ellipse tool (O), draw a 96 x 96 pixel circle and align the top to the center/top of the rectangle. Select both shapes and use the boolean tool to intersect the group.

Using the ellipse tool (O), draw a 48 x 48 pixel circle and align the bottom to the center/bottom of the rectangle. Select both shapes and use the boolean tool to intersect the group.

Flatten the shape (command + E) and double click it to make it editable. Select the top left and right points and give them a 2 pixel corner radius. Select the bottom left and right points and give them a 1 pixel corner radius.

Ever wondered how the JVM debugger 'Evaluate' feature works in IDEs? Long ago I thought that the Java debug interface (JDI) actually allows you to specify the expression and get back its value.

However, this is not quite possible: there's no Java language compiler inside the JVM. When the process is paused JDI allows you to read or write any variables and fields or even execute an existing method with given arguments. But nothing like addition or multiplication.

On the other hand, #IntelliJIDEA debugger allows you to evaluate even statements! You can write there `for`, `if`, `while`, `switch` - whatever. You can even declare local variables. So how this works?

The answer is simple: IDEA debugger has a built-in interpreter for Java! If you access an existing variable or a field, call a method or instantiate an object, it queries JDI. Otherwise, IDE itself does all the calculations.

The amusing thing is that debugger authors didn't bother to make it as strict as Java itself, so the language inside the interpreter is a much more permissive version of Java. For example, you don't need to initialize variables there! Default values like 0 are used automatically.

The New York Times article about SlateStarCodex is finally out and it is...bad. There's a lot I could parse, but let me just walk you through one paragraph that is so misleading as to be

Take the first sentence of this paragraph. Now, technically the clause--"who proposed a link between race and IQ"--could simply modify "Murray" and have nothing to do w/ SSC.

But 99% of readers are going to assume that the clause actually defines SSC's alignment with Murray. In other words, the author is strongly implying that SSC shares Murray's racist beliefs.

And that would be big(!)...if it were at all true. It is not. Indeed, if you go to the hyperlink, you'll find that SSC's purported "alignment" has nothing to do with Murray's "Bell Curve."

What SSC & Murray agree about is that poverty is partly hereditable and thus very sticky, so much so that the proposition job retraining programs will meaningfully address mass economic disruption is a pie-in-the-sky fantasy.

@zkat__ I'm in the position that I actually find npm / yarn the best ecosystem. Whenever I use something else I always end up stubbing my toe into something thats missing / feels wrong.

Ex. Cargo seems to neither have a concept of devDependencies nor peerDependencies.

I also can't understand why it wouldn't have an "add" command to add a new dependency. And I'm no fan of Toml, json is greate (easy to parse and build tooling around), and the better option in my opinion would be json5.

C / C++ seems to just not have language package managers. The linux / bsd crowd seem to have decided that the system package manager also should be the language package manager. Which might have been fine if every Linux distro used the same system package manager.

Instead we end up with a N x M problem. Where we have a bunch of different operating systems and they all support multiple system package managers. So there's no easy way of distributing, referencing and updating C / C++ packages.

It is also my opinion that the compiler / runtime should be a package dependency. I don't like Rust's split between rustup and cargo (they should have been one tool). Similarly it would be better if you added Node as a dependency to package.json, that way we wouldn't need NVM.

I’m quoted in this, which does about as good a job overviewing the topic as a New York Times profile can be expected to.

Major oversights in it as I see.

First, It does not acknowledge the fact that Yudkowsky is, at heart, a complete crank. This remains, to my mind, crucial to understanding the rationalist community’s influence on the world: they’re sci-fi writers being mistaken for scientists.

You can’t really understand the harmful effects of SSC until you realize that it’s part of a larger movement of bullshit artists serving as cult leaders to the techbros.

Second, and more importantly, it never really explains the harm that’s being done by Scott Siskind and his followers. It comes close, noting that “SJWs” were the only group not welcome in SSC, but it doesn’t capture the harm of that because it doesn’t unpack the term.

What is meant in practice when “SJWs” aren’t welcome in a space is that marginalized people speaking of the harm they experience are silenced.

That’s it. That’s the meaning.