Interesting breakdown. But this format is horrible for conveying information. An improvement would be removing the slides, crafting some coherent paragraphs and then reinserting some of the more crucial images for support.
After someone gives a talk in person, some of the things they can do online:
1. Mention that they gave a talk
2. Post a video recording online
3. Post the slides online, as-is (PDF or whatever) with no explanation
4. Lay out the slides on a HTML page, with accompanying text (what would have been said by the speaker), so that it's easier to read — while still being clear you're “reading” a talk.
5. Redo/rewrite the whole thing into text form, paragraphs and all.
The author here has done 1 to 4, and you're complaining they've not also done 5, but that's a lot of work and I don't begrudge someone not doing that. I'll be grateful someone presented their talk in a readable form in the first place.
When I gave the talk, I showed the slide before I talked about it. It’s normal to show the speaker notes below the slides in software like Keynote or Powerpoint.
That might be clearer if the header was just 'slides and notes from my talk', instead you actually claimed the opposite, that it's a 'blogified version', but it's not really - I tripped up on the same thing, and then got through several 'duplicate images', 'oh no very slightly different images', before it finally dawned on me that they were slides.
I don't feel entitled to anything, it was just a suggestion for how they can communicate better, which they ostensibly want. I constantly get lauded for good presentations, and see others do them with unforced errors, so I thought I'd do my part to level the playing field.
Ironically enough, aren't you doing the same thing now, berating me for giving free information the wrong way? How about just learning from the advice and moving on?
Sorry about that. I was more harsh then I intended. I might have misread your original reply as well. It appeared more of a complaint than advice, and I do agree it's good advice.
It's simply not intuitive in the way it was presented that the line of text was a footer for the picture. The text and pictures are mistakenly read as belonging to the same "layer", sequentially, which is not what the author intended. It's obvious what that intent was, but it's not structured correctly to be properly interpreted.
I was really bothered that on the website version, the NTP packet diagram is largely illegible. I hope that when they gave this talk on slides, you could read it.
TBH you aren’t supposed to read it, you either say to yourself, oh yes I recognise the NTP packet diagram; or, oh yes, that looks like a packet diagram; or, oh interesting maybe I should look at the NTP RFC. The slide was only up for a couple of seconds :-)
The thing about a good, simple network protocol is you can look at the packet diagram and start to understand how the protocol works. I think NTP fits the bill here.
Especially because half of the text just repeats what's on the slides and ultimately I didn't see an easy way to make the slides bigger. Like the NTP packet format slide was mostly unreadable.
1. Mention that they gave a talk
2. Post a video recording online
3. Post the slides online, as-is (PDF or whatever) with no explanation
4. Lay out the slides on a HTML page, with accompanying text (what would have been said by the speaker), so that it's easier to read — while still being clear you're “reading” a talk.
5. Redo/rewrite the whole thing into text form, paragraphs and all.
The author here has done 1 to 4, and you're complaining they've not also done 5, but that's a lot of work and I don't begrudge someone not doing that. I'll be grateful someone presented their talk in a readable form in the first place.
[I do agree this page was hard to read, at least on mobile and at least in its initial version—it's much better now—but I've seen many others post these "annotated talks" online and the format itself is not necessarily bad: for instance see https://idlewords.com/talks/ (example: https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm) or https://noidea.dog/talks (example: https://noidea.dog/impostor) or https://simonwillison.net/tags/annotatedtalks/ (example: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/26/productivity/) — maybe just some minor tweaks to CSS like putting the text to the right of the images would make it easier to read.]