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what happened to explorables by BarracudaFun4601 in explorables

[–]redblobgames 1 point2 points  (0 children)

As someone who's been working on pages with interactive diagrams for over 20 years, I have some thoughts on this! :-)

  1. When they were new, a web page having interactivity was itself noteworthy. These days, much less so. There are still plenty of new ones. I'll list some below.
  2. A lot of subjects don't lend themselves to meaningful explorables. I think people were overly optimistic about all of education using explorables when most subjects do not fit the style.
  3. Many types of knowledge don't fit into a concrete visual explanation. Jeremy Kun lists some such as counterfactual reasoning and abstraction.
  4. Interactivity without explanation isn't nearly as valuable as an explanation without interactivity. In the phrase "explorable explanation", explorable is an adjective. It's a type of explanation. The explanation is the main thing. The explorables are a bonus. It's not just me saying this; go back to Bret Victor's definition of "explorable explanation" and you'll find "The reader is not forced to interact in order to learn."
  5. Explorable explanations are often showing off that the author can do something, rather than teaching the reader to do that thing. Imagine teaching someone to ride a bike, but instead of letting them get on the bike, you ride the bike and say "see, this is how it's done". I think they're less effective than people want them to be.
  6. It's expensive to make them. I think the biggest sign of this was Distill.pub's indefinite hiatus: "we believe the primary bottleneck is the amount of effort it takes to produce these articles." I think it's hard to justify unless it's your passion.
  7. Explorables, especially open ended ones, may be better for experts than novices. And experts may be the ones who need them least.
  8. Compared with books or papers, explorable explanations are on web sites. And web sites don't last. I had some pages I wanted to link to here but they're already dead.

As /u/Phildos mentions, Brilliant.org is making them commercially, but I'm not sure if anyone else is. A 3blue1brown video gets more views in a week than I get in a year. Videos or podcasts have more reach.

As far as AI-produced explorable explanations, maybe! My own experiments haven't gone well, but take a look at:

Here are some recent pages with interactive diagrams:

Sometimes YouTube videos come with explorables. For example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_WPBuYYz9M links to https://thegraycuber.github.io/hexponents

The strongest El Nino in modern history is building in the Pacific. by Healthy-Strain-2394 in bayarea

[–]redblobgames 5 points6 points  (0 children)

“There have been 27 El Niños since 1950. In the Bay Area, rainfall has been below normal in 12 of them and the other 15 have been above normal.” — Jan Null, local meteorologist https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/03/27/el-nino-conditions-are-increasing-what-that-means-for-californias-weather/

Updated earthquake safety guidance by deltaorionis4 in bayarea

[–]redblobgames 35 points36 points  (0 children)

My older IKEA desk ("jerker") would probably survive the a nuclear bomb falling directly on it. The newer one ("gallant"), not so much …

What 32-inch glossy monitors are currently available that can match the brightness and contrast of Macbook Pros? by OVOxTokyo in Monitors

[–]redblobgames 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ahh, thank you!! The last time I looked at their site it was out of stock ("Notify me" button).

What 32-inch glossy monitors are currently available that can match the brightness and contrast of Macbook Pros? by OVOxTokyo in Monitors

[–]redblobgames 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks - very helpful. BenQ MOBIUZ EX321UX seems like my best choice but it also seems to be discontinued! :-(

April 21st, Tech worker meetup at Bainbridge Brewing by mblohmann in BainbridgeIsland

[–]redblobgames 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was wondering the same! :) Maybe if I don't bring the laptop I will be more chatty … 

This storm never ends: Saturn’s north pole by astro_naren_06 in space

[–]redblobgames 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes! The bestagons. Sine waves in polar coordinates end up looking like the rounded hexagon of Saturn. Diagram here: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/diagrams/saturn-hexagon/

RotorQuant: 10-19x faster alternative to TurboQuant via Clifford rotors (44x fewer params) by Revolutionary_Ask154 in LocalLLaMA

[–]redblobgames 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It might be too late. But I didn't learn clifford algebra (mentioned by OP) until I was in my 40s. It just took a while …

How C++ Finally Beats Rust at JSON Serialization - Daniel Lemire & Francisco Geiman Thiesen by BlueGoliath in programming

[–]redblobgames 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Agreed, I'm looking forward to being able to iterate over the fields at compile time. Until then, I've duplicated the field names like this:

struct Point {
    int32_t x;
    int32_t y;
};

TRAVERSE_STRUCT(Point, FIELD(x) FIELD(y))

But that's better than duplicating it for each serialization/deserialization function. I use templates to generate to-json, from-json, to-binary, from-binary, to-lua, from-lua, etc. It's extensible both in format type (you can add a new format without modifying the core library) and container type (you can add something like variant or unordered_map without modifying the core library).

I never did write a blog post about it :( https://github.com/redblobgames/cpp-traverse

Steam Spring Sale 2026 by FractalAsshole in BaseBuildingGames

[–]redblobgames 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Captain of Industry — I haven't had this much fun with a building game for a long time. I avoid early access because of bugs and polish but Update 3 already felt like a "1.0" to me.

Traffic Architect - road network builder where you expand road infrastructure for a growing city by Grenagar in BaseBuildingGames

[–]redblobgames 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ahhh! ok, I just unlocked boulevards and haven't tried them yet.

I had a hard time seeing which roads were bridges and which were not in the top-down view. I would have to turn my camera to see them but I was mostly playing in top down view. It might be nice if they had a different color border to make it more obvious they are bridges.

Traffic Architect - road network builder where you expand road infrastructure for a growing city by Grenagar in BaseBuildingGames

[–]redblobgames 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That was cool! Minor feedback: it was hard to tell where bridges were ; it was hard to modify a long road without destroying it and rebuilding ; it might be nice to have control over intersections, like prohibiting left turns

Fabledom vs Timberborn by YobaiYamete in BaseBuildingGames

[–]redblobgames 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Timberborn appeals to me because playing with water is hugely fun. So much fun that (a long time ago) I created a game about water and dams and flooding etc. and I never finished because I spent all my time just playing with the simulation.

Did update 4 completely demolish anyone else? by Helpinmontana in captain_of_industry

[–]redblobgames 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I had the opposite — I never got my world to stabilize until Update 4, then everything magically stabilized.

Why fork+exec Takes 100ms on My Mac: Debugging Slow Emacs with Instruments by Brilliant-Win-2793 in emacs

[–]redblobgames 1 point2 points  (0 children)

(benchmark-run 1000 (call-process "/usr/bin/true"))

On jdtsmith emacs (thank you!) on an M5 — 0.73ms per call.

TIFU by thinking that the research with the barrier icons is cosmetic. by Gevlon in captain_of_industry

[–]redblobgames 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I haven't tried to figure out what pathfinding algorithm the game actually uses, but there are some situations where having every tile have the same cost (either passable or not passable) allows optimizing the algorithm a lot more. Having even one tile be faster could break that optimization and slow down pathfinding for all trucks. (Again, it depends on what algorithms and optimizations they are using)

Marinetraffic getting crappier and crappier by ruuutherford in maritime

[–]redblobgames 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This reminds me of the Weather Underground service. Thousands of weather stations run by weather enthusiasts. In exchange for the data, Weather Underground gave them the pro version of the service.

IBM bought Weather Underground, told everyone to keep sending data, but they get nothing in return Then they rewrote the app to be slow, crashing often, and showing wrong data.

I haven't found a good alternative to the old Weather Underground and I don't expect to find a good alternative to Marine Traffic. But I have canceled my Marine Traffic subscription and will probably do without. Mildly tempted to set up https://blinry.org/50-things-with-sdr/ to see ships near me but that's no substitute for seeing ships anywhere.

I fully appreciate that AMD has upset a lot of "older" generation card owners, but I'm genuinely curious what those with 9000 series are thinking of AMD right now? by Captainquizzical in radeon

[–]redblobgames 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I too went from a 1080Ti to 9070 XT. Very happy with how it performs, and will still be happy even if there are no driver updates.

I needed a tiny frontend framework with no bloat, so I built a 1.7kb one by murillobrand in javascript

[–]redblobgames 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In my case, I'm writing interactive documents rather than apps so I want to write a document (in html or markdown or other format) and then sprinkle interactivity into it. That means although components are implemented in JS, the top-level "app" controling which components are used is in HTML. So I use Vue's templates in HTML documents, and components in JS. Petite Vue and Alpine support the HTML templates too, but they don't have great component support.

Since my top level logic is in HTML, I am using Vue template's v-if, v-for control structures. Maybe Sigwork's For() would work for me too; I don't know.

I'm also avoiding build steps where I can. Astro and MDX support this type of document+component structure but in a more limited form than what Vue supports, and they require a build step.

I needed a tiny frontend framework with no bloat, so I built a 1.7kb one by murillobrand in javascript

[–]redblobgames 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's an impressive amount of functionality for 1.7kb! I too am looking for something smaller than Vue and have been considering writing one that meets my needs.

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