tangenter

It is hard to fathom anyone on the planet less qualified than Elon Musk to opine on the value of public service experience when lives are at stake.

This is the opening line of this piece. With a hyperbolic, charged statement like that, be mindful to avoid getting into a flurry of emotions. I’m not a fan of that kind of writing I would prefer to read something a bit more level headed. I don’t care who or what it’s about - I can make up my own mind if it really matters, just give me the information to work with.

Rest of the article isn’t much better.

Gentle reminder to folks to use Firefox or even LibreWolf. These sites and these articles are notorious for anti-user ads. I suspect this article is intentionally lengthy and filled with flowery backdrop descriptions to get the user to scroll through all the ads that pop up. It is very distracting and, to be honest, not worth the click.

It started with Lex Fridman planted interviews to make AI researchers appear human and ends with AI awarding AI prizes.

You should expand on this. Would be interesting to hear more about the propaganda apparatus at play.

Long shot - any hope of us getting an MSN Gaming Zone code release? The Lobby and Friends/Messages system? Would help us... counts on fingers 9 greybeards out.

Slow is fine, and I do.

My personal favorite is a former NASA employee who recorded a series of lessons for students to use to supplement their normal undergrad studies, prepare for exams, that kind of thing. He has a YouTube channel which has all sorts of topics (for free), but his site has paid videos on math, chemistry, electricity, some electronics, statistics, and a few other topics. You can find it on the high seas if you want a preview. Look up MathTutorDVD. It is not the end all, be all, but it is very helpful and I’ve learned in my own spare time lots. He covers high school math to Calculus 3 and probably beyond. I haven’t looked in a long time.

Khan Academy is also an option but I have not used it much so I can’t sufficiently comment on it. The things I’ve seen there have been decent and their main faculty are highly technical people who went into teaching. People have said great things about K.A., and likely they have a better way to track your progress and they might have better quizzes and tests.

One thing I remember specifically being called out is that majority of students who struggle with Calculus struggle almost exclusively due to linear algebra and formula manipulation. That the actual Calculus part is not the problem, it’s the lack of pre-requisite practice and learning more than anything.

The standard Calculus book by James Stewart will do. It covers most of the same. It is readable and quite affordable because it is so widespread.

A nice “1000 problems solved in Calculus” work book will also help. Practice is always good here, and it feels good when ideas learned from multiple sources work together.

Lastly, there are a couple of solid books that go into translating mathematical concepts so as to be usable in computer software, meaning how to take math formulas and turn them into usable algorithms. I want to bring to your attention their existence because eventually this is something that needs to be done, but trying to do everything at once will overwhelm you and distract you. It is however a “thing” when you get things down.

I recommend getting some notebooks - lined and square, a set of colored pens, and writing each and every exercise, lecture down. Color code notes, formulas, your own solutions and corrections. Grade yourself if need be. Keep your notebooks, labeled after each subject. I don’t know to what extent digital note taking is done today but I’ve always personally found it ineffective. So if you already self identify as a slow learner, writing things down in a meticulous way should help you greatly. Notebooks and pens are otherwise cheap, better to have an excess than not enough.

I hope this helps. I’m sure other people here have far better resources and I’ve forgotten all the stuff I used, but I’m not dead set on any one method.

I have a pile of my own so I know what you are talking about. I love how even today DVD and Blu Ray players look, long after they were released. They are compact and chic, looking a tad futuristic but not at all the sort of stuff that screams attention-seeking, gaudy design. The kind that you could put unassumingly on a shelf next to a pile of books and wouldn’t even know it’s there without a closer look, or take up to a cottage and leave with a pile of old movies to watch on a dark, gloomy day, like in the old days. One looks at, say, LLMs nowadays and is amazed but, to me personally, we haven’t stopped living in the future for a very long time now. This message was typed on a device with a touch screen no larger than my hand.

I don’t think they are simplified but they are an introduction course for sure. I think what’s usually missing is integrating (heh) linear algebra with calculus for solving more interesting problems but I think the audience for that needs to have a big appetite first. And those are hard to come by unless it’s pushed on you to finish your degree. And even then, people barely scrape by in those classes.

Chill Winston.

Personally, I haven’t stopped buying CDs or in certain cases DVDs and Blu-Rays - not of movies but of music. I find it interesting these “went away” but I can see why: nobody I know has a cd player to begin with. A lot of laptops nowadays don’t come with disc trays, and nobody buys a dvd bluray player. Yes, the PS or Xbox can play it but everyone just streams movies or music. So somewhere along the way it disappeared and I doubt it will genuinely come back. It’s a needless headache.

As I read this article I lament that the childlike naïveté angle is the dominant one used to distill the spirit of creation in most written literature. There are other, more profound and perhaps more interesting ones, but the people who are deep into it and can speak credibly about it do not generally write on it. And to those that do, it does not appeal to package it a way that professes enlightenment of a theory of creation.

Flagged because not even Google reads their own blog posts. This is LLM slop.

It’s interesting to see how independent analyses reach more or less the same conclusion.

Aye, the world we live in.

We already have a name for this that’s widely used: concern trolling.

This is a load-bearing title.

Either that or they’ve been repeated by the audience so often as to lose all their appeal.

VW is a massive casualty, but the future of automotive is currently a cutthroat war between BYD and Tesla. Everyone else is, at best, a second tier competitor.

Auto industry/dealerships for trad cars is not looking good.

Upvoted. The secret origin story of Kord as he feels belittled by an anonymous online commenter, one of a handful who flagged his submission to HN. A Great War is about to waged on the internet. Absolute cinema is in our grasp, we must be alive to witness it.

For better or worse we are on Discord. A mixture of a throwback to IRC days combined with a platform that speaks “Internet” better than most places means a lot more interesting, unrestrained discussion happens. While most people will not go full tilt into 4chan-style right wing diatribes, it’s not like anyone will feign being offended to score “karma” points over what is being said. As a result, there is little incentive to game it. It’s just a chat with little else.

So much of this space has been collapsed into homogenized entertainment. Nowadays, by the time a child is ten years old they have seen every form of the hero’s journey in the cartoons they watch, to the degree where there are tropes and nods to source material or even sometimes derivatives of source. Sci fi, fantasy and other genres are blended in as hooks because cartoons have to keep viewership and eye balls, so they throw everything they can find at it.

As a result, unfortunately, there is very little “new” material. The old material that took centuries to develop and longer has been flattened and duplicated, over and over again. I sound like a curmudgeon (I probably am), but I stopped watching movies entirely not too long ago because it became a farce of seeing cliche writing. Shows are even worse so as to not even warrant discussing.

Fuck it. I’m exclusively running the book version of minix from now on, neovim be damned. The exploit surface of these kernels is wild.

It drives engagement. That’s the metric for why this gets posted.

I used to be one of these people. I read Yudkowsky and was like, OMG recursive self improvement hard takeoff AI is coming.

What you’re seeing are people who live in their heads. We all do it from time to time, but we snap out of it when we need to actually get shit done. These people are tenured in bullshitting and they sound as if they know what they are talking about, but are in reality inept and incapable. They’ve practiced rhetoric and prose here and there, but they profoundly lack experience in things outside of their immediate field.

LLMs are heavily trained on Python.

Meh. Consider that you had no choice and no say that your data out there, both present and historic as mined, aggregated and analyzed by data collectors, was used as a training set for the LLMs. I think you’re a tad too late with your warning. They’re already thieves and they know it. And they know you can’t and won’t do anything about it.

The fact that people have to resort to hacks and tricks to do basic coding tells me that the quality of code generated by these frontier models is mediocre at best. And I’ve had the same happen - the code, the comments, is at the level of a junior developer. AGI my ass.

I see a flamebait title, I click flag. Simple as.

You better find that video for us. Sounds juicy af.

People flexing on HN not knowing who geohot is. Sad.

Because it’s a numbers game and nothing wrong with playing to win.