At 2026-09-03T15:02:47+0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote: > G. Branden Robinson wrote on Tue, Sep 01, 2026 at 11:11:22AM -0500: > > > Apart from that I see no gross formatting problems (which is a > > relief!), but I do observe that the slide content is much longer and > > "denser" (i.e., many more words on each slide or "foil") than is > > idiomatic in environments I'm used to. > > Yes, that is a deliberate choice. Since not everyone who is > interested in a topic is able to attend the relevant conferences > (because travel across continents is expensive and time-consumibg), i > tend to design my slides with the goal that people who read them > without attending the talk can get the same information (and sometimes > by studying them closely even more information) than attending the > talk would have provided. A side benefit is that those who attend > have an easier time deepening their understand by re-reading them > afterwards. > > I am well aware that there is a downside to this approach. People who > learn well from visual input and less well from spoken language, and > people who strenuously try to read all the text on the slides, may > feel confused or overwhelmed by the wall of text and fail to > concentrate on the spoken word without being able to read for > themselves during the talk either. > > The traditional method for avoiding that trap is by providing > traditionally lean slides (to support the talk without distractingfrom > the spoken word) and to provide a separate, longer academic paper, and > hence make the best of both worlds available. I have done that once > (for a two-day tutorial course), but for most shorter talks, i simply > did not find the time to prepare two documents, regarded > self-contained slides as an acceptable compromise, and preferred to > instead move on to new work. My impression is that few people in BSD > conferences go to the length of also writing a full-blown paper about > the topic of their talk.
It's unfortunate that a lot of FLOSS conferences simulate academic ones so half-heartedly. They're happy to book rooms for people to stand up and present slide decks, but they don't require the submission of formal papers to put forth the same material with the additional rigor afforded by the medium of hardcopy. In other words, FLOSS conferences often don't generate _proceedings_. While academic conferences can suffer from favoritism in organizing committees, without even a fig leaf of rigor and an expectation of critical engagement, a FLOSS conference can degenerate into an exercise of status and social positioning, dividing into classes--those who get the biggest rooms and best slots, those who get breakout sessions and/or slots on the last day when people are already departing for travel, and those who don't get to present at all. Further, for introverted types or people with a low tolerance threshold for practicing flattery of "thought leaders" (perhaps these traits are correlated), staying home and reading the proceedings can be both cheaper and more intellectually fruitful. Some people are in this field to learn things and solve problems. Others are in it to climb social and economic ladders. > > I note that economist Paul Krugman's slide deck style[5] should be > > well within groff mm's capabilities. :) > > [5] https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/krugman-slides.pdf > > Yes, that style is definitely closer to conventional recommendations > of frugality in slides. Occasionally, Krugman may even be be > overdoing sparseness - for example, on slide 9, saying what "AC" and > "MC" mean would hardly hurt. Alternating current? > Master of ceremonies? <scratch> Average cost and marginal cost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_cost I reckon "AC" and "MC" are about as idiomatic to that discipline as "DAG" is to computer science and software engineering. ;-) > Oh, and slide 16 contains only a thematic map, without even a caption > or legend. I guess one has to check the recording of the speech to find out what he was up to there! Talk given on the occasion of receiving a prize are frequently not peer-reviewed, but play the role of "surveys" of the field, or, sometimes, as opportunities for the figure thus awarded to try and elevate a proposition into the discourse above what empirical foundations can justify. The former is a respectable practice. Witness John Backus's paper upon receiving a Turing Award in 1978. https://worrydream.com/refs/Backus_1978_-_Can_Programming_Be_Liberated_from_the_von_Neumann_Style.pdf The latter is not. Witness racist and eugenicist Garrett Hardin injecting the concept of the "Tragedy of the Commons" into modern discourse in political theory and economics, and other fields besides. https://pages.mtu.edu/~asmayer/rural_sustain/governance/Hardin%201968.pdf The arguments of Hardin's paper have been steadily dismantled over the years, perhaps most prominently by Elinor Ostrom in work for which she won the Nobel (Memorial) Prize in Economics in 2009. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2009/illustrated-information/ Susan Jane Buck Cox also made an important contribution in 1985. https://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlcrest/api/core/bitstreams/e8836f80-341b-4e7e-b84a-05d744dda0ff/content The knowledge of the typical Googler or other tech bro, naturally enough, stops at Hardin's 1968 article. No matter how young they might be, they are innocent of the work of Cox and Ostrom. Why? Because they hear no one discuss it, whereas those above them in the corporate hierarchy are familiar with Hardin. A James Damore might attribute the existence of Cox and Ostrom's to "DEI initiatives in academia", but plenty of his colleagues who think their own politics much more liberal and better-informed than his are similarly innocent of their critiques. And why _is_ that? Why is Hardin's false insight both longevous and entrenched? It resembles James M. Buchanan's public choice theory, where the aggregate decisions of economic actors to collectively disadvantage people of (perceived) African descent, contrary to what might otherwise be economically rational, produces outcomes that the State must not disturb. It's a perverse anticipation of Surowiecki's "wisdom of crowds". If a community's aggregate decisions are driven by night riders, adverse possession, sundown ordinances, and lynchings, well then by God that's the genius of a "closely knit community", with which the Yankee federals mess only at their peril, and that of the people their Good Book teaches them are inferior. What do Hardin and Buchanan's models have in common? They are compatible with the prerogatives of socioeconomic elites. These ideas will never want for fellowships at generously endowed private "think tanks", whereas their critics are more likely to spend their entire careers as junior faculty at public universities. One definition of "leftism" is the application of critical thinking to any problem that a superordinate person tells you not to. > Regarding the on-topic parts (i may have missed some aspects due > to the volume of the thread): > > * .BVL 1cm > looks like a non-fatal oversight to me. > I won't fix it in the published source code; maintaining the > source code of old presentation slides is arguably not a very > good use of time. The point of providing the source in > addition to the actual slides is to help others find > inspiration, not to have others believe that the source > would format identically with a different formatter than > the one originally used. > > * Warning about syntax errors that used to be silently tolerated > is definitely a good idea. > > * Making syntax errors fatal that used to be silently tolerated > would be an unfortunate problem in manual pages (where we want > old pages to continue working), but not quite as serious in > other macro sets. Compare to old source code - you _can_ > take one of the programs contained in AT&T Version 7 UNIX > and compile it today, but you will have some porting work to do. > The same may apply to old books, papers, slides, etc. > > Still, it is wise to not gratuitiously break compatibility - > incompatible changes should deliver a clear benefit. > Causing .BVL 1cm to fail hard might for example be a step too far. I don't see any evidence that we're doing that. Today, I pushed a fix for the formatting error Deri identified, and that fix will be in the next groff 1.25 release candidate. https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=9cfe8d43a14e8eda6b0962409a2cc49f251b8911 > * Changing the default margins in a formatter may happen from > time to time, though it will of course make some old documents > look ugly, in particular when the authors of these documents > engaged in typographical fine-tuning. > Nothing can be done about that, really. > Sure, having defaults gratuitiously jump all over the place > all the time would be ridiculous, but saying that no default > can ever be changed would stymie progress. ...and, for the fully fledged full-service package, anyone who has tweaked their document to typeset _just so_ can specify their page margins explicitly with requests and macro calls at the top of the document. Regards, Branden
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