There are already several websites which publish a “roadmap” of how to teach yourself programming (University keve) using freely available courses and textbooks. Here is my 2 cents. First of all, SICP is an advanced textbook. It is by no means suited for teaching freshmans, unless you are a MIT student, who is math-lover and a “slow thinker”. Brian Harvey, the great, managed to teach the CS61A at Berkeley – a SICP-based course which goes at a slow pace....

Some hard problems will never be solved by “brainstorms” (more like bullshit-storms) or any about of babbling by Chuds. They require the trained minds like of C.A.R. Hoare or Leslie Lamport. or Philip Wadler or Martin Odersky – the outliers and top performers.. Ideally, they have to be mathematically mature, and preferably on the compiler side (so they also understand important implementation aspects). The “direction” is actually clear and well-understood (a small miracle), and it is in restricting too general concepts and formalisms with additional constraints (so they actually match the environmental constraints), or just typing....

Lets talk about some targets no one else sees. I am a prod student of Brian Harvey, the great. I used to watch his CS61A recordings like other people watch stupid TV serials. For me it was something like watching X-Files or Twin-Peaks, which are only non-stupid ones. The problem was, however, that even if I understand every word and almost every concept mentioned, I didn’t know which are the most fundamental ones and which are just accidental notions or just preserved in a shared culture social constructions....

Google deprecated external access to its IMAP due to “security reasons” Karpathy posted a classy coding video lecture in which programming has been done entirely from the default Mac OS browser (doing everything in a web-interface to a Jupiter notebook). Corporations want us to stay in their (and only their) browsers all the time (in many different tabs) and never leave, so they can collect all the data they want....

What could even be in common between Haskell and Rust? Well, they are the most advanced languages of its time, the most controversial and the most discussed. Most importantly - both languages are have a proper type-classes/traits based standard libraries, where the type-classes/traits define major modern mathematical notions, which can be traced to the modern set-theoretic math and related notions. This is what makes the actual difference with other crap like PHP....

This is sort of an answer to this question. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425475 So, what if you are late to the party? Unfortunately, nowadays it is even much harder to get through all the utter bullshit and hype, but there is a sort of a shortcut or “the Hard Way”. There are two and a half key figures: Geoffrey Hinton, who did most of the mathematical heavy lifting, Andrew Ng, who not just did all the derivations, but became the most famous practitioner, and Andrej Karpathy who us just a narcissistic asshole, similar to Lex Friedman....

Another day – another bullshit from some Chud. https://thewaltersfile.substack.com/p/bootstrapping-self-awareness-in-gpt Self-awareness and awareness is general is not at a language level (or information level). Animals, obviously, have awareness, but not a “language level awareness” due to the fact that their brains lack any language areas. The series of mutations and subsequent developments that lead to a human language is unique to humans. All other animals are using just “voices” - pitch, volume, distinct cries, etc....

This is a hugely controversal topic, with a lot of bullshit, both on the theoretical side and on the side of a popular culture (they just label everything as “autistic”). I, however, “learned it by doing”, so to speak, by using introspection as much as I could. Keep in mind that it is almost impossible to introspect (observe your own states of the mind and body) when one is grossly overwhelmed, swayed by emotions....

The only reasonable and even proven correct point of applying deep-learning is that the algorithm “learns” so-called “hidden patterns”, which escape (literally) from a biologically limited human intelligence. The causality is so complex that even to list correctly the major factors (not missing anything relevant) is nearly an impossible task. Social media creates whole waves of bullshit, including the idiotic memes about the US interest rates, and other poorly understood and dynamic macro-economic factors....

Social media make us stupid. To be precise - they encourage production and emission of a useless verbiage as a from of virtue signaling. The cultural change is that being “wrong” is ok for some talking heads, and nowadays it is even possible to argue that “there is no wrong”, just an “imperfect information”, you know. The older cultures were better. They had a common sense notion of “you have no idea what you are talking about”....