4 ms·

Creating Technical Presentations with Vim [video]

behnamoh 4y ago
[flagged]
- behnamoh 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - jakeogh 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - behnamoh 4y ago
      In case you can’t read, there’s a difference between copy catting a website and using AI generated text while referencing it.
      - jakeogh 4y ago
        That's not the part of the comment I thought was relevant. It's just a program. Why refer to it as an intelligence?
  - nequo 4y ago
    If there is nothing to add, then adding nothing is better than to let the AI talk. I think that the AI adds negative value. It is dangerous to engender the idea that ChatGPT or any other LLM presents you with a reliable summary of any body of knowledge. These models are compelling because their output reads like the writing of a real human being. Humans have an inclination to not lie, and this makes us trust it. But this is terribly dangerous. When a LLM's output is wrong or even deceptive, there's no indication of it whatsoever. In that way, normalizing LLM-generated content is a perfect road to automated misinformation.
    - rramadass 4y ago
      Very well said! I think this applies generally to everything AI related. The common man has no idea, does not think and is easily fooled by all the hype. However, my fear is that AI generated content masquerading as Knowledge will become mainstream sooner rather than later. How we as a Society deal with it is yet to be defined. PS: Melanie Mitchell's Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans is a must read for the "common man".
    - behnamoh 4y ago
      > In that way, normalizing LLM-generated content is a perfect road to automated misinformation. Not if it's fact-checked. I know in certain contexts it might be misleading, but the way I look at it, it's like word-play: the AI gives you several nonsense ideas until one of them is right. In this example, I was delighted to see ChatGPT talk about some Vim functionalities that are relevant to the link.
- sebosp 4y ago
  This brings me back 20 years ago when I first saw markov chains on an IRC bot that would reply to you as well. I was so amazed that even very rarely it could generate valid-ish combinations, of course we are the ones that would interpret it or have to twist it in so many different ways to "make sense of it". But little by little the nonesense wore out and the bot was just understood as a garbage generator, that you would read now and then when you were bored and had really nothing to do but to talk to a bot and see if any of the strings made valid sense, just for fun see when it would generate something that, to one human being, could be a valid point in a big context, literally throwing words in the air and trying to make sense of the resulting sentence as some sort of philosophical game. At least back then it was just 10 or 15 words per generated garbage batch. The other thing this reminds me of is the book "Children of Memory", funnily enough I was listening to it when the chatgpt craze started, there's two characters that crack me up, two corvids, no spoilers, but they live in pairs and have access to quotes from earth bibliography and live in a distant future in an alien planet, one would quote things such as "my kingdom for a horse", and the other would reply "but you don't know what it means! what even is a horse... We lost that data to make space for something more relevant to our times" and they would hold this discussions about meaning, they really cracked me up and to me chatgpt is one of the corvids, I hope the other corvids arrive soon and we can get some popcorn at the level of nonesense feedbackless garbage discussions, sort of like that beautiful tale of the seven blind men that want to learn what an elephant is like, each touches a different parts of the elephant and hold discussions about how their contextual interaction is the one truth, one talks about the tail, another the husks, another the trump, another the leg and so on...
graypegg 4y ago
I can appreciate the effort to warp something into doing a task it wasn’t designed for. That is cool! But life is too short to not use a slides tool. Manually aligning bullet points, moving around ascii art, all of the settings to remove the vim status bar and a custom syntax mode to style text… I don’t know what you gain other than oh-that’s-not-google-slides brownie points. Your time is probably better spent working on the presentation.
- jolmg 4y ago
  > I don’t know what you gain other than oh-that’s-not-google-slides brownie points. Well, there's at least better version control with git, and the other general benefits of plain text. If you have a bunch of presentations, easier to search among them based on content if they're plain text. Though, presentations being presentations, the fact that they generally lack content to be useful on their own without their presenter, makes them kind of disposable as documents.
  - msravi 4y ago
    Or you can use LaTeX with Beamer. You have the goodness of plain text search and git and a nice pdf with slide controls when you want to present. https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Beamer https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Beamer
    - goffi 4y ago
      pandoc has the killer feature to use beamer to convert markdown to a good looking presentation. It's the simplest and quickest way of doing a presentation I'm aware of, you can just focus on the content: `pandoc -t beamer some_presentation.md -o some_presentation.pdf` For diagrams, I'm using draw.io (it seems that it's called diagrams.net nowadays), it's FOSS, easy to use and feature-full. It's then easy to add it in the presentation by using the markdown syntax for images.
mg 4y ago
This is pretty cool. I wonder what's the best way to have the presentation in a single file instead of using multiple files to switch between slides. My first approach would be to start each slide with something like # Slide 1 Switching slides then can be done with a keyboard alias that searches for the next/previous instance of "^# Slide [0-9]". To avoid having the next slide visible at the bottom of the screen, one could put enought empty lines at the end of each slide. This would actually be a bit cumbersome. Maybe there is a better solution? Another problem I see is margins. In a nice presentation, there is a good bit of margin around the content. Unfortunately, VIM has no concept of margin. And emulating it with newlines and spaces is very cumbersome. As you cannot easily change it.
bArray 4y ago
My personal setup is to write a presentation using markdown and use pandoc [1] with LaTeX beamer mode, then output to PDF. This is with a custom theme. I think I could be inspired to come up with something somewhere in-between. Doing manual layout adds a lot of burden, but visually the result is nice. Maybe add something to automatically run some code blocks (like Jupyter Notebooks [+]), and we have a really good time. [1] https://pandoc.org/ https://pandoc.org/ [+] Fun note: I wrote something like Jupyter notebooks to run code for LaTeX presentations automatically maybe some 10 years ago.
jasonjmcghee 4y ago
You can create presentations with markdown using RevealJS. They are surprisingly high fidelity. You can even do line by line code highlight animations etc. All defined with markdown. https://revealjs.com/markdown/ https://revealjs.com/markdown/

[flagged]

behnamoh 4y ago
[flagged]
- jakeogh 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - behnamoh 4y ago
    In case you can’t read, there’s a difference between copy catting a website and using AI generated text while referencing it.
    - jakeogh 4y ago
      That's not the part of the comment I thought was relevant. It's just a program. Why refer to it as an intelligence?
- nequo 4y ago
  If there is nothing to add, then adding nothing is better than to let the AI talk. I think that the AI adds negative value. It is dangerous to engender the idea that ChatGPT or any other LLM presents you with a reliable summary of any body of knowledge. These models are compelling because their output reads like the writing of a real human being. Humans have an inclination to not lie, and this makes us trust it. But this is terribly dangerous. When a LLM's output is wrong or even deceptive, there's no indication of it whatsoever. In that way, normalizing LLM-generated content is a perfect road to automated misinformation.
  - rramadass 4y ago
    Very well said! I think this applies generally to everything AI related. The common man has no idea, does not think and is easily fooled by all the hype. However, my fear is that AI generated content masquerading as Knowledge will become mainstream sooner rather than later. How we as a Society deal with it is yet to be defined. PS: Melanie Mitchell's Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans is a must read for the "common man".
  - behnamoh 4y ago
    > In that way, normalizing LLM-generated content is a perfect road to automated misinformation. Not if it's fact-checked. I know in certain contexts it might be misleading, but the way I look at it, it's like word-play: the AI gives you several nonsense ideas until one of them is right. In this example, I was delighted to see ChatGPT talk about some Vim functionalities that are relevant to the link.
sebosp 4y ago
This brings me back 20 years ago when I first saw markov chains on an IRC bot that would reply to you as well. I was so amazed that even very rarely it could generate valid-ish combinations, of course we are the ones that would interpret it or have to twist it in so many different ways to "make sense of it". But little by little the nonesense wore out and the bot was just understood as a garbage generator, that you would read now and then when you were bored and had really nothing to do but to talk to a bot and see if any of the strings made valid sense, just for fun see when it would generate something that, to one human being, could be a valid point in a big context, literally throwing words in the air and trying to make sense of the resulting sentence as some sort of philosophical game. At least back then it was just 10 or 15 words per generated garbage batch. The other thing this reminds me of is the book "Children of Memory", funnily enough I was listening to it when the chatgpt craze started, there's two characters that crack me up, two corvids, no spoilers, but they live in pairs and have access to quotes from earth bibliography and live in a distant future in an alien planet, one would quote things such as "my kingdom for a horse", and the other would reply "but you don't know what it means! what even is a horse... We lost that data to make space for something more relevant to our times" and they would hold this discussions about meaning, they really cracked me up and to me chatgpt is one of the corvids, I hope the other corvids arrive soon and we can get some popcorn at the level of nonesense feedbackless garbage discussions, sort of like that beautiful tale of the seven blind men that want to learn what an elephant is like, each touches a different parts of the elephant and hold discussions about how their contextual interaction is the one truth, one talks about the tail, another the husks, another the trump, another the leg and so on...

I can appreciate the effort to warp something into doing a task it wasn’t designed for. That is cool! But life is too short to not use a slides tool. Manually aligning bullet points, moving around ascii art, all of the settings to remove the vim status bar and a custom syntax mode to style text… I don’t know what you gain other than oh-that’s-not-google-slides brownie points. Your time is probably better spent working on the presentation.

jolmg 4y ago
> I don’t know what you gain other than oh-that’s-not-google-slides brownie points. Well, there's at least better version control with git, and the other general benefits of plain text. If you have a bunch of presentations, easier to search among them based on content if they're plain text. Though, presentations being presentations, the fact that they generally lack content to be useful on their own without their presenter, makes them kind of disposable as documents.
- msravi 4y ago
  Or you can use LaTeX with Beamer. You have the goodness of plain text search and git and a nice pdf with slide controls when you want to present. https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Beamer https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Beamer
  - goffi 4y ago
    pandoc has the killer feature to use beamer to convert markdown to a good looking presentation. It's the simplest and quickest way of doing a presentation I'm aware of, you can just focus on the content: `pandoc -t beamer some_presentation.md -o some_presentation.pdf` For diagrams, I'm using draw.io (it seems that it's called diagrams.net nowadays), it's FOSS, easy to use and feature-full. It's then easy to add it in the presentation by using the markdown syntax for images.

mg 4y ago

This is pretty cool. I wonder what's the best way to have the presentation in a single file instead of using multiple files to switch between slides. My first approach would be to start each slide with something like # Slide 1 Switching slides then can be done with a keyboard alias that searches for the next/previous instance of "^# Slide [0-9]". To avoid having the next slide visible at the bottom of the screen, one could put enought empty lines at the end of each slide. This would actually be a bit cumbersome. Maybe there is a better solution? Another problem I see is margins. In a nice presentation, there is a good bit of margin around the content. Unfortunately, VIM has no concept of margin. And emulating it with newlines and spaces is very cumbersome. As you cannot easily change it.

bArray 4y ago

My personal setup is to write a presentation using markdown and use pandoc [1] with LaTeX beamer mode, then output to PDF. This is with a custom theme. I think I could be inspired to come up with something somewhere in-between. Doing manual layout adds a lot of burden, but visually the result is nice. Maybe add something to automatically run some code blocks (like Jupyter Notebooks [+]), and we have a really good time. [1] https://pandoc.org/ https://pandoc.org/ [+] Fun note: I wrote something like Jupyter notebooks to run code for LaTeX presentations automatically maybe some 10 years ago.

jasonjmcghee 4y ago

You can create presentations with markdown using RevealJS. They are surprisingly high fidelity. You can even do line by line code highlight animations etc. All defined with markdown. https://revealjs.com/markdown/ https://revealjs.com/markdown/