> To those saying it’s the work of an LLM: if it is I don’t care. It’s good.

It hit me when I woke up and I made a (human) haiku (well, sorta) about it:

"We already had Klingon and Elvish. Now we have LLMish."

That first animation should include the servers hosting the messaging platform. Or use a peer to peer application for that example.

I agree.

As someone who spends their own time developing open-educational resources (OER), I was extremely limited in what I could do pre-AI. Now, AI has supercharged my ability to elevate my work in ways I could have never done before, particularly in visualizations, interactive widgets, and even images (often SVG for me), all of which are necessary components to the resources I've been developing online since 2020 (COVID-era).

Given that my programming abilities are very limited as well as my time, AI has allowed me to develop the missing pieces to much of what I was creating. When used properly (as an expert in a field using AI as a tool), the end product can be completely transformed and elevated in ways that could never have been. I am so thankful that AI came along just at the right time for me to do the things I could have never accomplished before.

> What's the problem exactly? Is using AI for visualization considered a bad practice?

Some people just assume that anything "AI" has touched is automatically "slop" because ... AI! Probably at least partly due to how much actual "AI slop" is out there produced by people "holding the tool wrong". When used judiciously and properly, some of these language models can really be a useful tool and help create some quality stuff, but they're no substitute for a knowledgable human using the tool correctly to achieve the desired result (which is why so many people who misuse it to do all their thinking and work for them (without doing any of their part) inevitably produce the typical "slop" result).

Thanks for sharing. I hadn't read about this.

Thanks. Glad you liked it. That was my intention with these articles. To explain how most of the things which we take for granted evolved. Even I was able to learn so many new things and find gaps in my own understanding while writing it. I am only doing it because I felt other content on these concepts either just focused on the technicals completely or dumbed down the concepts too much so everyone could follow easily. This is just my attempt at explaining things in detail without making it hard to follow. Initially I had no plans of using any simulations, i was just thinking explaining things with just my writing and some diagrams, but I saw how I can explain things much better with a simulation.

Thanks. Glad you liked it.

I had no plans for inline interactive elements when I started out. It was just a plain static site using Astro, with my content in markdown files.

When I thought of including interactive elements, I saw that Astro supported MDX, which lets you embed custom JavaScript components. At the start I was just using plain JavaScript, SVG, and CSS transitions to do the animations, but as the simulations became more complex, I started using React to manage state better.

I have a feeling that on HN in general most if not all of the blog posts are mostly AI, and quite a bunch of comments as well. But that has always been an element of anon internet usage :-)

Thanks. I am glad you liked it. I just wanted to help everyone understand the concepts in detail. I felt the existing materials were either way too textbook like or very high level. This is just my attempt at explaining things in a more interesting way.

Being dismissive is one way to think yourself "better" than others. But on HN hastier reactions tend to be outright negative or out of context with long articles, as eyeballs actually evaluating the content will take some time before providing constructive criticism.

Hi, author here. Thanks for reporting this. Simulations were only downloaded when it scrolled into view. I deployed the change to download all simulations on page load and only play them when it scrolled into view.

Thanks. Glad you liked it. This was my intention. Just trying my best to explain things I understand in a very clear and interesting way.

> and it almost always comes across as preachy and just plain wrong

This is the half of that sentence that gets you an upvote from me.

I'm not as sure about the first part of your comment though, because it's really only a certain subset of users here doin' it. Most of the rest of us don't really seem to care nearly as much about such petty things as hunting down users of "AI" to publicly shame them for it as that small group does. Now actual "slop" (often obvious) is maybe a bit more universally hated here (and elsewhere, I'm sure), but that's a whole different phenomenon from the AI "witch hunters".

Thanks, glad you liked it. I have deployed few fixes in the mobile view. Added a horizontal scroll for simulations without reducing the size

Thanks. Glad it was useful.

To me it just suggests that the blog is going to explore the topic at a low level, ie, discuss the transmission of bits of data via cables or radio waves, rather than discussing HTTP or TLS or whatever. Which in general is something I find quite interesting. (I haven't read this article yet so don't know if it's actually good, and the other comments don't give me much hope.)

+1 usually a sign of midwit and mediocrity. not once I seen "first principles" blogs have any value.

My own personal "pet peeve" cliche phrase is anything that is "literally" (except it's really figurative) something. So many people for so very long have used "literally" to mean the literal opposite of it's actual meaning. Even when they don't use it to mean it's actual opposite meaning, they'll still often use "literal" to describe a thing that is in no way actually literal. It just "grinds my gears" to hear it.

My thoughts on reading it (and looking around your site) was that you were building these explanations to help cement your own understanding of the topics and that you were just sharing the results because you thought it might be helpful to others as well. Knowing that you actually built it with the intent to teach just makes me think that it's nice of you to try to be a teacher even if there's a few folks who want to be jerks about your efforts. The world needs more teachers (and learners, too). Gaining, improving, and sharing knowledge is one of humanity's true super-powers. Without it, we'd all still be living like animals in the wild. Thank you for your efforts to contribute in a positive way. At least you're actually making stuff, unlike many of them what gotta always just complain about the things other people make and never actually make anything themselves.

This is a great article. The current knee-jerk reaction to AI is nothing but human negativity bias. There is a colossal amount of information here akin to what you might find in an intro to computers class. I appreciate seeing things like this.

for the record, i only meant the visuals/CSS. i just do not understand the LLMs' recent insistence on this inaccessible design language and its ubiquity. vibe-coded frontends have always looked poor but at least they were readable until this recent trend took over.

there were no comments when i was posting mine, so i wanted to clarify i didn't mean to pile on the ai-written accusations. didn't seem like that was the case to me from the parts i've read. i'm just in the corner shouting at the claudes for being bad at frontend.

Hi, author here. Sorry, you felt that way. I did put lot of effort in communicating my understanding, and used Claude only for review and visualizations.

How were you able to pick this up? Not challenging your assertion. Just really curious. Can you point to some clues? I read it (with my own eyes). I can't see actual evidence the text itself is artificial or at least, that it is not human-curated.

I wonder whether mathematicians got the same reaction when calculators appeared: "You didn't compute every step by hand, so the result doesn't count."

Hi, author here. Sorry for the bad experience. I'll put more effort on the design and reading experience