I'm not convinced that we can spend quality time with loved ones outside work while spending most of our time at work pretending, and doing useless or unnatural things. I think what you practise shapes you.
I was excited to check out lecture videos thinking they were public, but quickly saw that they were closed.
One of the things I miss most about the pandemic was how all of these institutions opened up for the world. Lately they have been closing down not only newer course offerings but also putting old videos private. Even MIT OCW falls apart once you get into some advanced graduate courses.
I understand that universities should prioritize their alumni, but there’s literally no cost in making the underlying material (especially lectures!) available on the internet. It delivers immense value to the world.
One of my favorite parts of the 2024 series on Youtube was when Prof B explained her excitement just before introducing UCB algorithms (Lecture 11): "So now we're going to see one of my favorite ideas in the course, which is optimism under uncertainty... I think it's a lovely principle because it shows why it's provably optimal to be optimistic about things. Which is kind of beautiful."
Those moments are the best part of classroom education. When a super knowledgeable person spends a few weeks helping you get to the point where you can finally understand something cool. And you can sense their excitement to tell you about it. I still remember learning Gauss-Bonnet, Stokes Theorem, and the Central Limit Theorem. I think optimism under uncertainty falls in that group.
I've seen arguments that opening up fresh material makes it easy for less honest institutions to plagiarize your work. I've even heard professors say they don't want to share their slides or record their lectures, because it's their copyright.
I personally don't like this, because it makes a place more exclusive with legal moats, not genuine prestige. If you're a professor, this also makes your work less known, not more. IMO the only beneficiaries are either those who paid a lot to be there, lecturers who don't want to adapt, and university admins.
I wish we would speed run this to where these super star profs open their classes to 20,000 people at a lower price point (but where this yields them more profit)
That's basically MOOCs, but those kinda fizzled out. It's tough to actually stay focused for a full-length university-level course outside of a university environment IMO, especially if you're working and have a family, etc.
(I mean, I have no idea how Coursera/edX/etc are doing behind the scenes, but it doesn't seem like people talk about them the way they used to ~10 years ago.)
They're still around and offering new online courses. I hope they don't have any problems to keep afloat, because they do offer useful material at the very least.
I agree it's hard, but I think it's because initially the lecturers were involved in the online community, which can be tiring and unrewarding even if you don't have other obligations.
I think the courses should have purely standalone material that lecturers can publish, earn extra money, and refresh the content when it makes sense. Maybe platform moderators could help with some questions or grading, but it's even easier to have chatbot support for that nowadays. Also, platforms really need to improve.
So, I think the problem with MOOCs has been the execution, not the concept itself.
Most MOOCs are venture funded companies not lifestyle business so they will not likely do sensible user friendly things. They just need to somehow show investors that hyper growth will happen. (Doesn't seem like though that it did happen)
Most of the MOOCs were also watered down versions of a real course to attempt to make them accessible to a larger audience (e.g. the Stanford Coursera Machine Learning course that didn't want to assume any calculus or linear algebra background), which made them into more of a pointless brand advertisement than an actual learning resource.
I understand what you mean, but I disagree it's mostly or pure branding.
I'd argue that even watered down versions can be useful as a bridge to more advanced courses and material, provided you have access to both.
Personally, I benefited from that ML course by Andrew Ng, because I got the vocabulary and introductory math knowledge to proceed to courses and textbooks on linear algebra. It wasn't the only thing that helped, sure, but it helped.
There were also other STEM and non-STEM MOOCs which brought me free knowledge I probably would've never pursued or paid for otherwise.
They are mostly used for professional courses. Learning python, java, gitlab runners, micro services with NodeJS, project management and things like that
On the flip side, that'd require many professors and other participants in universities to rethink the role of a university degree, which proves to be much more difficult.
This is awesome! I’ve given up learning graphics programming in the past due to the fragmented ecosystem of libraries. It just felt overwhelming. This seems exactly what I’ve been missing.
This is amazing!! I've found myself writing selenium scripts to automate tasks for my dad's job (things such as getting a name from a spreadsheet, putting that name in a website's search box and from there repeating the same actions for 100s of names) and saved him a ton of time. Making browser automation more accessible by just showing the machine how to do it will definitely make lots of people's lives easier. Can't wait to mess around with it.
Interesting, sounds like the kind of stuff we're excited about helping with! Would love to hear what you think once you try it, email is in my bio if you're open to a chat.
I was at a talk given by the president of Embraer-X (that's an Embraer subsidiary that looks into these riskier ventures), and he got into the details of how they validated their business plan of using these vehicles for urban transportation.
They offered helicopter rides to one of Rio's major airports and charged R$100 per passenger (according to him, that's an accurate estimate of future prices once they make their eVTOL) at a loss just to see if there was demand. They got booked the entire year in advance.
I have faced this myself, and the aimless excitement can create a lot of frustration in new programmers. Programming is a unique tool in the sense that it has the ability to glaringly show the programmer's lack (or wealth) of vision.
I have been journaling for 2 years on and off. In the beginning it had extremely positive effects on my development as a person.
After a while the sense of effectiveness that came from writing constantly started to fizzle out and I'd feel like going in circles in my writing.For a while, I wouldn't write and I'd feel guilt and would attribute negative aspects of my life to my lack of writing, which led me back to daily writing. This was a recurring thing in my life.
After a while I just concluded that the valuable thing journaling teaches you is the importance of exploring your ideas and thoughts. Doing it religiously or with harsh constraints is no good. There must be time to explore and to just do things for a bit - that until some sort of critical mass is reached or some idea shows up that you want to discuss.
I think what confuses a lot of people is what one means with "journaling". If it's just writing about your day, I don't see that much utility in it. Effective journaling ends up being an alternative name for writing and reflecting without objective in my experience.
I find it very interesting that you mention looking at the history of ISA's first in order to understand the current iteration of the technology.
I was reading the RISC-V privileged ISA recently and the amount of seemingly arbitrary registers and behaviours that must be implemented to support a UNIX-like OS is crazy, and that got me thinking about the history behind all of these things that the hardware must support in order to support the OS.
But thank you for the pointers, I'll definitely use this.
The "ISA" mentioned above is the "Industry Standard Architecture", the 8/16bit bus used by PCs and PC clones back in the day, not "Instruction Set Architecture (x86, ARM, RISC-V, etc):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture
It doesn't really answer my question, but from what I've seen in the TOC I'd say it's equivalent to an introductory course on computer architecture + computer systems and some cryptography as well. Kind of an introduction (don't get me wrong with the word 'introduction', it covers a decent amount of material) to the most important concepts and technologies that guide computers and the internet.
Yeah, as I've read other responses to my post I've been able to better define my difficulties in understanding CPU-GPU communication. I was having a hard time separating the MMIO concept from the communications protocol that ties together all of these devices (based on what you've explained that'd be PCIe). I actually haven't learned about PCIe as of yet, so the way you've introduced the concept has set me up to further look into it, thanks.
It’s making money to spend quality time with loved ones and pay the bills. For some people that’s enough (no judgement).