julianh65

I've been using Math Academy for a couple of months now seriously (~3.5k XP). Initially I was reviewing topics / concepts that I already had an intuitive understanding of from college courses, and I believe for those it has helped take me to the next level in that I now can, 99% of the time, solve problems in those topics. As I start to approach topics that I haven't fully covered in college or have some intuitive understanding for I do find that I can mechanically carry out the operations, but I lack an understanding of "why" I'm doing this.

I think the author of this makes some good points to this effect. I believe that the best approach is a bit inverse of what the author is saying however. I think that Math Academy should be the base, where 80-90% of your time is spent. The remaining 10-20% should be used to supplement this. Either with lectures, textbook / edutainment reading or other ways to develop more of that intuition.

Can this open multiple tabs / navigate to different domains? When booking a restaurant I might want to confirm what the prices are on the menu or check google maps for the reviews / location.

I would assume the opposite, that most iPad users also own a Mac.

Appreciate you following up! I plan to sign up over the weekend which is normally when I do my longer blocks of studying and have more questions. I think that what I mean is that sometimes if I ask for an explanation about a topic or question, I don't get the magical answer that answers my question after my initial prompt. That is to say, I typically need to ask 5-6 clarifying questions to an LLM to get the explanation that makes it click for me. This can be by asking for more examples, asking it to clarify certain points, fitting an example to another topic I know, etc... I think that while I was talking about it in the context of LLM tutors, the same logic also applies for human tutors as well. It's very hard for me to precisely formulate a question in one-shot that will get the right answer as you don't know what you don't know. And the reason I'm asking LLMs or a human in general is because I can't find a good explanation on the internet as it's typically something very niche or precise. Which is why I think it's good to have a back and forth.

I'm going to give this a go, I've been self studying linear algebra, and there are certain questions that I can't seem to find good answers or explanations to online that ChatGPT or Claude cannot answer sufficiently. The one concern I have with this, is the async nature of it. One of the reasons I like using ChatGPT or Claude (or a real human if I can find one) to learn is because I can ask clarifying questions and try to relate what they're saying in real time to another concept I'm familiar with. Curious to try it out but I think that an important part of making the videos good is that the student / learning needs to provide a good prompt so that the response can be customized to directly address their area of confusion.

There's an interesting stat that I like to look at in Football called xG. It's essentially a metric of expected goals based on all the shots that have been taken, and factors in things like where the shot was taken etc... Yet I've always thought that it was an imperfect metric as it didn't take into account things like opportunity cost of shooting when you could have passed to someone with a higher xG, or even the position of all the defenders / keeper when you're shooting. It would be cool if we could use a system like this to better understand the xG based on all of those factors and more. Basically, for any given position where we take the entire field and players even, into account, what is the actual xG.

So which compute providers have folks had a good experience with?

I wonder what implications this has on distributing open source models and then letting people fine tune it. Could you theoretically slip in a "backdoor" that lets you then get certain outputs back?

I wonder how easy / hard and fast it will be to port over quest applications to the Vision Pro. Also wonder how hackable it will be. I'm guessing if it's anything like the iPhone / iPad it won't really be.

If you set temperature to 0 can you verify it by sending the same prompt and inspecting the response?

I really like this idea. Reading other peoples code is one of the best ways to learn to code in my opinion.

Yet at the same time, a part of learning / understanding from reading other peoples code (given it's of good quality) is that you have to manually recreate what they're doing in your head without the comments.

I think for educational purposes the "educational comments" that you add have to hit a balance of explaining what the code does, without just explaining away an entire function. To that end, it might be better to add more comments in regards to specific lines, while letting the learner put the pieces of the different lines together themselves.

An extension that I'd like to see of this is many different types of codebases commented like this (OS, React, DBMS, etc etc) with additional information and diagrams about the overall design of the program and its different parts. Looking at and understanding a single file is all well and good, but without the context of how it fits into the bigger picture a lot of the potential learning is lost.

I wonder how one would apply this to programming, I'd like to continuously improve my programming but not sure how to apply the ideas from this to it. I could see it being a thing for something very measurable like competitive programming, yet if I wanted to deliberately practice different aspects of software engineering is there anything specific to do besides building larger and more ambitious projects?

Perhaps purposefully creating small toy projects with "harder" aspects like concurrency, graphics, compilers etc... would help?

3500$ is pricey but I'm a bit more disappointed at the timeline, was really eager to try it out

I got an internship a few years ago off a Hacker News who's hiring post. It was pretty cool because I was a sophomore international student so I wasn't having much luck anywhere else. I now recommend it to anyone else I see looking for a job.

I've used it a lot for making tweaks to react components and one change that I've noticed is that when I used to paste in entire component files and ask for modifications it would reply back to me with the entire file with tweaks and edits. Now it seems to only reply with the tweaked parts and comments in this form

// Your previous code here

foo(bar) // added foo() call here to do xyz

If I were to speculate I would say that this would reduce the amount of work it has to do in that it needs to generate less content and the replies are shorter but I feel like this has a slightly performance loss. I'm not sure exactly why there's a performance loss but I could see it being the case where generating the entire file with specific line edits could allow for better predictions on the code / file versus trying to only reply with the changes needed. I wonder if this is a tweak in the prompt or if the model itself is different.

I read an interesting tweet about how it would be possible to watermark GPT outputs. Essentially before each token is generated the previous token is used to seed an RNG. Using the RNG the possible next tokens are split into a whitelist and a blacklist and the model can only select words from the whitelist. Later on it's possible to "check" for the watermark by counting the whitelist tokens and doing statistical analysis.

Apparently they can preserve performance by not doing this for very low entropy tokens where there is only one token that is extremely likely.

Saw it here: https://twitter.com/tomgoldsteincs/status/161828766500640358...

Hi! I wrote this article, thanks for sharing it! Apologies about the change of the URL, I initially uploaded it as a draft to test what it looked like when uploaded, and then when I was ready to publish it for real I shortened the URL. This is my first time writing something like this and it's really cool seeing it being shared :D

I initially wrote it because I saw many of my friends who are not in tech being fascinated by how computers work and asking me questions. It inspired me to try to write an article that could explain the internet and computers in a way that was very beginner friendly, while also being comprehensive! I'm super open to suggestions and feedback, so please feel free to contact me!

I always wanted some kind of game that was kind of like minecraft tekkit (modpack that allows you to use technology to make futuristic things) meets FPS and also MMORPG. I imagine it would be a game where you would have to find resources to build things, but also have to defend yourself from other players and build bases. In the game there would be multiple nations / teams who would be at war with each other, and there would be a map of the game that would be divided into sections. Each section would have different resources, and players would have to travel to different sections to find the resources they need. The game would be extremely open world and there would be no set objectives, so players could do whatever they wanted. There would be diplomacy between the different nations, base building and resource collection, first person shooters and strategic missions as well as an in game economy.