I have never seen this format before but it does mirror what going down a rabbit hole of a particular topic looks like for the average curious person.

I liked it.

Watching the actual talk is much better: https://ripe86.ripe.net/archives/video/1126/

The linked PDF has clear page delineations, unlike the HTML page: https://ripe86.ripe.net/presentations/134-2023-04-whence-tim...

I thought it was a very fun, stream-of-consciousness kind of read.

I simply assume any "slides" format comes from porting over a live talk. Lazy, yes. Efficient, yes.

I was mostly confused about the images being above the line of text you're supposed to read before looking at the image.

"Here's a picture of an NTP packet"

picture of a man sitting at a desk

I mean, put a little gnome hat on him and I’d believe it…

When I gave the talk, I showed the slide before I talked about it. It’s normal to show the speaker notes below the slides in software like Keynote or Powerpoint.

That might be clearer if the header was just 'slides and notes from my talk', instead you actually claimed the opposite, that it's a 'blogified version', but it's not really - I tripped up on the same thing, and then got through several 'duplicate images', 'oh no very slightly different images', before it finally dawned on me that they were slides.

I can tell the talk would have been really enjoyable but I agree this format is just lazy for conveying that information.

I’ve clarified the introductory paragraph and added lines between each slide. Should be a bit easier to read now.

And when I shift a work to a new medium, I also shift over the conventions used to match that new medium -- and audience. It's an empathy thing.

You should be lucky someone produced free content for you to consume.

The sense of entitlement to accuse someone of lacking empathy because they didn't present it in your preferred format is literally crazy to me.

I don't feel entitled to anything, it was just a suggestion for how they can communicate better, which they ostensibly want. I constantly get lauded for good presentations, and see others do them with unforced errors, so I thought I'd do my part to level the playing field.

Ironically enough, aren't you doing the same thing now, berating me for giving free information the wrong way? How about just learning from the advice and moving on?

Sorry about that. I was more harsh then I intended. I might have misread your original reply as well. It appeared more of a complaint than advice, and I do agree it's good advice.

It's simply not intuitive in the way it was presented that the line of text was a footer for the picture. The text and pictures are mistakenly read as belonging to the same "layer", sequentially, which is not what the author intended. It's obvious what that intent was, but it's not structured correctly to be properly interpreted.

I was really bothered that on the website version, the NTP packet diagram is largely illegible. I hope that when they gave this talk on slides, you could read it.

TBH you aren’t supposed to read it, you either say to yourself, oh yes I recognise the NTP packet diagram; or, oh yes, that looks like a packet diagram; or, oh interesting maybe I should look at the NTP RFC. The slide was only up for a couple of seconds :-)

The thing about a good, simple network protocol is you can look at the packet diagram and start to understand how the protocol works. I think NTP fits the bill here.

Especially because half of the text just repeats what's on the slides and ultimately I didn't see an easy way to make the slides bigger. Like the NTP packet format slide was mostly unreadable.

After someone gives a talk in person, some of the things they can do online:

1. Mention that they gave a talk

2. Post a video recording online

3. Post the slides online, as-is (PDF or whatever) with no explanation

4. Lay out the slides on a HTML page, with accompanying text (what would have been said by the speaker), so that it's easier to read — while still being clear you're “reading” a talk.

5. Redo/rewrite the whole thing into text form, paragraphs and all.

The author here has done 1 to 4, and you're complaining they've not also done 5, but that's a lot of work and I don't begrudge someone not doing that. I'll be grateful someone presented their talk in a readable form in the first place.

[I do agree this page was hard to read, at least on mobile and at least in its initial version—it's much better now—but I've seen many others post these "annotated talks" online and the format itself is not necessarily bad: for instance see https://idlewords.com/talks/ (example: https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm) or https://noidea.dog/talks (example: https://noidea.dog/impostor) or https://simonwillison.net/tags/annotatedtalks/ (example: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/26/productivity/) — maybe just some minor tweaks to CSS like putting the text to the right of the images would make it easier to read.]