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Comment by elcapitan | Hacker News Reader

I watch quite a few tech talks (via Youtube, mostly conferences), mostly to familiarize myself with concepts, and tbh I rarely have issues being "bored" by talks like the ones described as boring in this post.

I get bored, however, by fluffy talks that have lots of memes and pictures and big text and anecdotes. In any reasonably complex actual tech talk, you'll have concepts that need slides with a bit of text and maybe even formula (or code), simply because the audience will sometimes get distracted or forget what you said a minute ago. I find that perfectly fine and better than the alternative.

So overall this seems to be advice for people who wish their tech talks were actually TED talks.

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The worst is when someone derails their own talk by putting up pics of their dog or cat and saying "oh yeah, there's my cat, Marbles, he's super cute and thinks he's helping". Of course they can't just do it one time, so they have to sprinkle Marbles the cat through the entire presentation. The audience gets distracted, everyone says "aww", and by the end you realize you didn't absorb any value from the last 20 minutes.

This annoys me too, especially since you can add a pet as fluff (pun intended) to a talk, while also integrating them as an example. I use my dog to demo things all the time. "here's our sample user, Lucy. She's not too smart, so let's see how she navigates this UI". That's just a good speaking tactic.

And that is incredibly effective. You're using your dog pics to anchor ideas in people's heads!

When people remember your preso, they'll remember the dog images, but those will all represent some meaningful take-away from the talk.

Exactly! Brian Holt did this effectively in his (excellent) React course for Frontend Masters. He started off by introducing his dogs... And then built a pet adoption app. Brilliant, lots of hooks (literal and figurative) involving cute puppies literally built in to the project.

Yeah this is a great example of how to do it. Just enough of a change up to refocus attention on what you're saying.

Yeah at least that's more clever and legitimately humorous.

And more importantly, it's on-topic. Adding flavor to a presentation can be tricky, you can't just toss unrelated information in there and keep the audience focused, you have to integrate it into the data you're presenting.

We're engineers, social intelligence isn't our specialty, but this is pretty easy to codify.

Yeah the second I see a random animated gif or a reference to marvel or something like that it's like someone flipped a switch in my brain to "off". I almost immediately check out. I just want you to tell me what the thing is, what it does, and how to use it, I don't need to see that "shut up and take my money" meme again.

Perhaps we can collectively train a Deep Learning model to skip those boring parts ...

But collaboratively editing the videos would already be a step forward.

If only YouTube allowed us to write some plugins ...

Sponsorblock is a similar premise, just crowdsourced rather than ai.

I used to be super into conference talks. But now I just google the title and skim an article on it. I sometimes see talks of handful of professional conference speakers instead of people who looks like they were forced to give a speech.

If you are into Python, Raymond Hettinger and Brandon Rhodes is all you need.

Well I can tell you this advice would improve my student's talk 100%.

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