Beyond slide software

Three things a slide couldn’t do

Exhibit A · next
It can be interactive
A live D3 decision‑space explorer. Not a screenshot of one — I can drive it from here, and answer a question by changing the input.
../ai-slaves-human-masters-ida/01-entropy-explorer.html
Exhibit B · then
It can animate an argument
The development loop, moving. And a joke that isn’t one: it’s the same loop that built the slide you watched ten minutes ago.
../ai-slaves-human-masters-ida/03-development-loop.html
Exhibit C · then
It can render real data
Benchmarks the deck draws itself, rather than a picture of a chart someone pasted in nine months ago. Change the data, reload, it’s correct.
../ai-slaves-human-masters-ida/05-benchmarks-motoko.html

Look at the file paths. None of these three are in this talk’s folder. They’re from IDA Driving AI in May — different talk, different audience, same repo, loaded live from where they already live.

Composability

A talk is a JavaScript array

const PLAYLIST = [ { src: '../about-mark/about-mark.html', minutes: 1 }, { src: '00-death-by-powerpoint.html', minutes: 4 }, { src: '01-generate-the-medium.html', minutes: 7 }, { src: '02-teaching-taste.html', minutes: 8 }, { src: '03-live-build.html', minutes: 11 }, { src: '04-beyond-slide-software.html', minutes: 4 }, { src: '../ai-slaves-human-masters-ida/01-entropy-explorer.html', minutes: 2 }, { src: '../ai-slaves-human-masters-ida/03-development-loop.html', minutes: 1 }, { src: '../ai-slaves-human-masters-ida/05-benchmarks-motoko.html', minutes: 2 }, { src: '05-three-audiences.html', minutes: 6 }, { src: '06-whats-next.html', minutes: 3 }, { src: '07-steal-this.html', minutes: 3 }, { src: '../contact-mark/contact-mark.html', minutes: 0 }, ];
8 written for today
5 borrowed from other talks, unmodified

Nothing was copied. Those five entries are relative paths to files that belong to other talks and are still maintained there — fix a typo once and every talk that borrows it is fixed. Reordering a talk is editing an array, which is why I stopped dreading the email asking for “the same thing but twenty minutes.” That request now takes about a minute.

Blender + HTML

A live Blender scene in the browser

The slide contains the animated model itself. Rotate it from the stage, change the camera, or let it run as a restrained loop.

LIVEanimated GLB with camera controls PDFthe same component supplies a fixed poster LOADthe model arrives only when this slide appears
drag the production system

Blender is useful here because the subject is spatial: a production AI system has a core, connected services and information moving between them. The live deck uses the GLB. The PDF exporter sees the compressed poster instead, so the handout stays deterministic.

1 / 1