ffdixon1's comments

I’m the co-founder of BigBlueButton, an open source virtual classroom we’ve been building since 2007.

About three years ago, we integrated tldraw into BigBlueButton as our whiteboard. It’s been an excellent upgrade over our old, simple whiteboard — tldraw is a fantastic project.

I'm also the CEO of Blindside Networks, the commercial company behind BigBlueButton. We have growing by the traditional open source business model: we offer hosting, engineering services for acceleration of features, and support contracts.

I understand the motive behind tldraw's change of license. Open source projects often get asked two contradictory questions: 1. Can I use your work for free? 2. Can you guarantee that you’ll be around in 5 years?

You can’t answer (1) without a solid plan for (2). Licensing changes are one way projects try to answer both of these questions.

We are no stranger to license changes, we recently rewrote the entire back-end of BigBlueButton and moved away from mongoDB to PostgreSQL + Hasura.

For us, moving to tldraw 4.0 would mean:

- As Blindside (the company): buying a commercial license — that’s straightforward as we are also a commercial company. - As BigBlueButton (the open source project): it would require every organization running BigBlueButton to obtain its own license key to tldraw.

There are pros and cons here. We want a world-class whiteboard in tldraw based on a sustainable open source project, but we also want to keep BigBlueButton’s community deployment model simple.

Curious how others in the HN community have handled integrating source-available components into open source projects. How do you balance sustainability with accessibility?

> (perhaps frustratingly for the student), force them to iterate through something to get an answer.

IMHO, I think feeling frustration is the whole point -- it's how our brains rewire themselves, it's how we know we are learning, and it's how we build up true grit to solve harder problems.

As we want to "feel the burn" in the gym, we want to "feel the frustration" when learning.

I re-read the abstract and they tried two different modes of ChatGPT-4, "base mode" and a "tutor mode". The tutor mode helped students more, but it cautioned at the end:

> Our results suggest that students attempt to use GPT-4 as a "crutch" during practice problem sessions, and when successful, perform worse on their own. Thus, to maintain long-term productivity, we must be cautious when deploying generative AI to ensure humans continue to learn critical skills.

I think the caution is the use of AI to circuit the real learning, even if AI is in a tutor mode, to avoid building up true grit.

Ultimately, in writing this article, my hope was that a student would read it and get angry, angry that over use of AI - using it as a crutch - is actually having a negative impact on their learning, and they would resolve to using it only for more efficiency and effectiveness, not a substitution for the true learning.

I was thinking of Richard Feynman’s approach to learning when writing this article. He was a genius, so I didn't want the analogy to be unrelatable. However, he really enjoyed understanding the first principles and that enjoyment gave him such a solid foundation. He put in the necessary hours to learn, and what a remarkable life he enjoyed because of it.

Oreos are food, but only good in controlled quantities. During covid, many of my co-workers cited putting on extra weight as they were unconsciously snacking on junk food when working at home. It was just to easy to have another bite when the plate of food was next to their mouse.

For learning, I think having an Oreo cookie (using AI) is OK once in a while, especially if your hitting a wall and can't get through, but it's a really, I think, a very steep slippery slope that leads to avoiding the learning process altogether.

I remember as a co-op student spending three days solving a particularly subtle bug in a C-based word processor. My grit was rewarded. On day three, I vividly remember staring at the code and the solution just popped into my head. That was one of the most formative experiences in my earlier years as a developer and feeling of elation never left me. I worry that AI will take these moments, especially early in ones career.

Our brains have not changed in hundreds of years, and I agree that the in person experience is actually the best. Humans learn best from humans. I'm trying to learn French, and Duo has been sad for a few weeks due to my absence, but its not having the same effect on me if it were a human French teacher was was sad with me.

Regarding failing students, I personally had to take summer school twice and still ended up failing grade 12 and repeating the entire school year. Why? I was too focused on computers and nothing else. In retrospect, taking summer school and repeating grade 12 actually helped me catch up at time when the stakes were low. If I hadn't, I would have definitely failed later in life when the costs were higher.

Is overuse of generative AI by students acting like hyperprocessed foods for learning?

Quick dopamine hits. Immediate satisfaction. Long-term learning deficits.

How to break this cycle? I wrote this article to try to answer this question.

I'd like to echo the impressiveness of tldraw. At the BigBlueButton project, an open source virtual classroom, we built tldraw into the core. It has saved us countless development hours as we stopped trying to build our own whiteboard and instead stood on tldraw's (very) wide shoulders. We've never looked back.

We use the demo servers (which have a lot of load) to test the latest builds. Try it now.

I am the Product Manager for BigBlueButton. We have been building out the project for the past 12 years to focus on one market: online learning.

With Covid-19, it has been a pretty intense 2020 for the BigBlueButton project In 2020, we’ve seen some large deployments of BigBlueButton (100's of servers serving thousands of simultaneous meetings). Such deployments do not deploy a single large core machine; rather, they deploy many individual BigBlueButton servers in a pool (see https://github.com/blindsidenetworks/scalelite). We don't have BigBlueButton structured where you can split across the components on separate servers: the recommended deployment is each server is a self-contained BigBlueButton installation.

There is a large community of users around the world using BigBlueButton. We, the core developers, have been focused on ensuring that BigBlueButton is solid and scales horizontally. We released 2.2.0 on March 29, 2020 and the current release, as of Nov 11, 2020, is 2.2.29. Those 29 iterations reflect a strong desire by the core development team to respond quickly to the demand and make BigBlueButton the best possible solution for virtual classrooms.

Regarding the packaging, behind the scenes there are a bunch of scripts that I wrote using fpm to build the packages, and it's all non-standard, has grown organically over the years, and needs to be updated.

We had planned to clean up the packaging in 2020 and include it in the core it so others can build and build upon it, but all that got put aside when Covid-19 hit and there was so much demand for the software. Instead, we focused all our development resources on improving the system for end users (security, stability, usability, and features).

We are looking forward to providing standard Debian packaging scripts for BigBlueButton in 2021, alongside making continuous improvements to BigBlueButton.

Our goal remains to make BigBlueButton the best virtual classroom system for online learning.

Regards,... Fred

We're in the process of moving away from an internal build system for the packaging to having the debian package scripts as part of the repo. This work is underway for BigBlueButton 2.3 (the next version) and beyond. Once we get them released, it's going to be a lot easier for others to build and contribute to the packaging.

I am the product manager for BigBlueButton. While we implement most of the capabilities you would expect in a web conferencing system, we focus on giving the instructor many ways to engage students for learning. Being open source has enabled many schools around the world to setup and run their own BigBlueButton servers. Thanks to our community, we're localized in over 25 languages, provide a pure HTML5 interface, and have been deeply integrated into many of the most popular learning management systems. Our road map will continue of focus on the teacher/student engagement. Needless to say, Covid-19 made a lot people take a closer look at BigBlueButton. We've been working on it for 10+ years now, and we're very determined to make it the most effective platform for virtual classrooms and build upon our community.

I grew up on Byte magazine. Love the covers and the articles on programming. My parents had bought me a TRS-80 Model I with Level III Basic and learned programming by typing in programs (and then debugging them) from Byte and other magazines. Did anyone ever type in the Scott Adams Treasure Island adventure game from the December 1980 issue? https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1980-12

OK, have to say this is pretty cool. Reading about how to do something is good, but ephemeral. Applying what you are learning (and making mistakes and figure out what went wrong) is a far better way to learn. Kudos to the author of this tutorial.

I must have ready ZMM at least seven times (so far) in my life. Back when I was taking an undergraduate, I read it the first time and was inspired to take as many English courses as I could. I wanted to be a technical writer. After a series of co-op work-terms in the field (the companies loved a tech writer who could also program), I landed a full-time job as a technical writer in a large telecommunications company. I would read ZMM on the bus to work for inspiration. Pirsig could write with such clarity that I tried to emulate him in my writing (as I'm sure all poor writers do). I eventually returned to programming as it was my first love. The job as a tech writer definitely improved my writing skills, and reading ZMM definitely improved my life.

Cool. I wish you all possible success in your project!

I'm the project manager for BigBlueButton. Our goal is to provide remote students a high-quality on-line learning experience. Building an open source web conferencing system is no small task, but it is very satisfying.

I noticed in their 'about us' they stated "That’s why we built dozeo". Funny, I thought they built dozeo using BigBlueButton :-).

Want to try another demo? We're adding webRTC audio to BigBlueButton. Check out http://webrtc.blindsidenetworks.com/.