from Hacker News

Seam carving (2020) [video]

by ttsiodras on 4/17/21, 1:31 PM with 11 comments

  • by bmc7505 on 4/17/21, 4:55 PM

    This presentation is so good. It really helps you appreciate how wide the gap is between mediocre and excellent instruction. This video explains in 30 minutes that took years of classes in computer vision for me to grasp at an intuitive level. Convolution, gradient, energy based models, dynamic programming. Grant is a national treasure.

  • by gunshowmo on 4/17/21, 4:31 PM

    This man deserves so much respect. He even open-sourced the software he created to generate his videos, allowing more people to create similar helpful content.

    I'm sure a lot more kids would be interested in math if they were able to visualize the beauty of it in a more vivid manner than just chalkboard drawings.

  • by kepler471 on 4/17/21, 4:22 PM

    Here is the link the current (in-progress) course materials. It's a really nice site with each lesson posted as a notebook:

    https://computationalthinking.mit.edu/Spring21/seamcarving/

    or the previous (complete) course:

    https://computationalthinking.mit.edu/Fall20/

  • by contemplatcheez on 4/17/21, 3:59 PM

    Huge Sanderson fan and thought the video was excellent

    Also a huge Dali fan and like to think Salvador would have been delighted by Grant calling his self portrait ‘a weird/strange monster creature’

  • by wodenokoto on 4/17/21, 4:23 PM

    This is probably posted because there was a JavaScript seam carving demo on the front page earlier today.

    I think one of the interesting things about this demo being in Julia was that Julia was chosen for this “Introduction to Computational Thinking”-course over Python, because Python is too slow to do seam carving (and presumably it’s too cumbersome to bend numpy to do it as well - at least I couldn’t come up with a solution that didn’t require several loops)

  • by mxscho on 4/17/21, 4:01 PM

    Still impressed every time how well Sanderson is able to use his visualization and presentation skills to make explanations so good.

  • by threevox on 4/17/21, 4:23 PM

    Grant Sanderson, professional fucking legend