I’m the co-founder of BigBlueButton, an open source virtual classroom we’ve been building since 2007.
About three years ago, we integrated tldraw into BigBlueButton as our whiteboard. It’s been an excellent upgrade over our old, simple whiteboard — tldraw is a fantastic project.
I'm also the CEO of Blindside Networks, the commercial company behind BigBlueButton. We have growing by the traditional open source business model: we offer hosting, engineering services for acceleration of features, and support contracts.
I understand the motive behind tldraw's change of license. Open source projects often get asked two contradictory questions:
1. Can I use your work for free?
2. Can you guarantee that you’ll be around in 5 years?
You can’t answer (1) without a solid plan for (2). Licensing changes are one way projects try to answer both of these questions.
We are no stranger to license changes, we recently rewrote the entire back-end of BigBlueButton and moved away from mongoDB to PostgreSQL + Hasura.
For us, moving to tldraw 4.0 would mean:
- As Blindside (the company): buying a commercial license — that’s straightforward as we are also a commercial company.
- As BigBlueButton (the open source project): it would require every organization running BigBlueButton to obtain its own license key to tldraw.
There are pros and cons here. We want a world-class whiteboard in tldraw based on a sustainable open source project, but we also want to keep BigBlueButton’s community deployment model simple.
Curious how others in the HN community have handled integrating source-available components into open source projects. How do you balance sustainability with accessibility?
> (perhaps frustratingly for the student), force them to iterate through something to get an answer.
IMHO, I think feeling frustration is the whole point -- it's how our brains rewire themselves, it's how we know we are learning, and it's how we build up true grit to solve harder problems.
As we want to "feel the burn" in the gym, we want to "feel the frustration" when learning.
I re-read the abstract and they tried two different modes of ChatGPT-4, "base mode" and a "tutor mode". The tutor mode helped students more, but it cautioned at the end:
> Our results suggest that students attempt to use GPT-4 as a "crutch" during practice problem sessions, and when successful, perform worse on their own. Thus, to maintain long-term productivity, we must be cautious when deploying generative AI to ensure humans continue to learn critical skills.
I think the caution is the use of AI to circuit the real learning, even if AI is in a tutor mode, to avoid building up true grit.
Ultimately, in writing this article, my hope was that a student would read it and get angry, angry that over use of AI - using it as a crutch - is actually having a negative impact on their learning, and they would resolve to using it only for more efficiency and effectiveness, not a substitution for the true learning.
I was thinking of Richard Feynman’s approach to learning when writing this article. He was a genius, so I didn't want the analogy to be unrelatable. However, he really enjoyed understanding the first principles and that enjoyment gave him such a solid foundation. He put in the necessary hours to learn, and what a remarkable life he enjoyed because of it.
Oreos are food, but only good in controlled quantities. During covid, many of my co-workers cited putting on extra weight as they were unconsciously snacking on junk food when working at home. It was just to easy to have another bite when the plate of food was next to their mouse.
For learning, I think having an Oreo cookie (using AI) is OK once in a while, especially if your hitting a wall and can't get through, but it's a really, I think, a very steep slippery slope that leads to avoiding the learning process altogether.
I remember as a co-op student spending three days solving a particularly subtle bug in a C-based word processor. My grit was rewarded. On day three, I vividly remember staring at the code and the solution just popped into my head. That was one of the most formative experiences in my earlier years as a developer and feeling of elation never left me. I worry that AI will take these moments, especially early in ones career.
Our brains have not changed in hundreds of years, and I agree that the in person experience is actually the best. Humans learn best from humans. I'm trying to learn French, and Duo has been sad for a few weeks due to my absence, but its not having the same effect on me if it were a human French teacher was was sad with me.
Regarding failing students, I personally had to take summer school twice and still ended up failing grade 12 and repeating the entire school year. Why? I was too focused on computers and nothing else. In retrospect, taking summer school and repeating grade 12 actually helped me catch up at time when the stakes were low. If I hadn't, I would have definitely failed later in life when the costs were higher.
About three years ago, we integrated tldraw into BigBlueButton as our whiteboard. It’s been an excellent upgrade over our old, simple whiteboard — tldraw is a fantastic project.
I'm also the CEO of Blindside Networks, the commercial company behind BigBlueButton. We have growing by the traditional open source business model: we offer hosting, engineering services for acceleration of features, and support contracts.
I understand the motive behind tldraw's change of license. Open source projects often get asked two contradictory questions: 1. Can I use your work for free? 2. Can you guarantee that you’ll be around in 5 years?
You can’t answer (1) without a solid plan for (2). Licensing changes are one way projects try to answer both of these questions.
We are no stranger to license changes, we recently rewrote the entire back-end of BigBlueButton and moved away from mongoDB to PostgreSQL + Hasura.
For us, moving to tldraw 4.0 would mean:
- As Blindside (the company): buying a commercial license — that’s straightforward as we are also a commercial company. - As BigBlueButton (the open source project): it would require every organization running BigBlueButton to obtain its own license key to tldraw.
There are pros and cons here. We want a world-class whiteboard in tldraw based on a sustainable open source project, but we also want to keep BigBlueButton’s community deployment model simple.
Curious how others in the HN community have handled integrating source-available components into open source projects. How do you balance sustainability with accessibility?