post--momentum

A few comments on this thread: Gwern is correct in his prior quote of how long these articles took. I think 50-200 hours is a pretty good range. I expect AI assistants could help quite a bit with implementing the interactive diagrams, which was a significant fraction of this time. This is especially true for authors without a background in web development. However, a huge amount of the editorial time went into other things. This article was a best case scenario for an article not written by the editors themselves. Gabriel is phenomenal and was a delight to work with. The editors didn't write any code for this article that I remember. But we still spent many tens of hours giving feedback on the text and diagrams. You can see some of this in github - e.g. https://github.com/distillpub/post--momentum/issues?q=is%3Ai... More broadly, we strug

There are a few things that need to come together for a complete diagram publishing system: * Converting hand-drawn sketches to tidy diagrams [1] * Converting tidy diagrams to look hand-drawn [2] * A textual DSL for diagrams (e.g. Penrose) * Support of declarative constraints for the diagram [3] * Animation of the diagram [4][5] [1] Paper https://www.fiftythree.com/think [2] rough.js https://github.com/pshihn/rough [3] Basalt https://www.anishathalye.com/2019/12/12/constraint-based-gra... [4] Distill https://distill.pub/2017/momentum/ source https://github.com/distillpub/post--momentum [65] g9.js https://omrelli.ug/g9/

If you are curious to see the code to produce that post you can check it out here: https://github.com/distillpub/post--momentum I was surprised to see that each post has its own html page and javascript library. I was expecting to see some form of rendering engine and a common javascript library.

As Gabe said, we mostly expect authors to produce diagrams and us to help edit them into outstanding articles. This is one example of the editing: https://github.com/distillpub/post--momentum/issues/1 We've also had a few designers volunteer to work with researchers on visualization. So, in special cases, we may match-make researchers with designers to produce a great article.