Aluffi is really well-written. It assumes some degree of mathematical maturity (so it's well-positioned for a second pass of the material), but has a generally conversational tone without being imprecise. The exercises are excellent, too, if occasionally difficult using only the machinery introduced up to that point. (Again, well-suited to readers taking a second pass at algebra.)
Why am I doing this? Leonard Susskind puts it well in this video [1]. To put it in my own words: our senses evolved for the physical world around us, and some of the most technical activities we do today are wildly underserved by our natural senses. That's why we build things like microscopes and telescopes and whatnot -- to extend our senses into new domains. Mathematical intuition is almost another sense in its own right: you gain the ability to perceive abstractions and relationships in ways that are just not well-described by sight or touch. I both enjoy this sense and find it valuable, so of course I'm going to continue honing it :)
Building skills, I'm almost finished a chicken coop. I made a dry stone arch bridge but it failed because the frame sank, I will try again. I am learning carving to make wooden animal toys for my child, who will be born in July (I have made a bear and a fox, soon an elephant, but they still need to be sanded). I would like to learn timber framing and make a small cabin on the land but it may be too expensive, now.
I'm trying to make an animated village for my site background with HTML Canvas, and originally I was making it procedurally, but its too ugly, so I will have to learn some digital illustration until it's beautiful.
Overall I'm enjoying the craft of it all and will be soon moving towards learning the details that go into making sauces and carne asada.
I was introduced to them by a friend who was helping them build an open platform [2], open in the sense that all processes, donations, procurement and guides are public.
Although my core competency is building and managing Saas, I took up the task of setting up their operations. I find a striking similarity b/w managing Saas and not-for-profit distribution.
We are relying heavily on Airtable.
Despite of being jobless, I feel less worried. The situation on ground is much worse than mine.
--- [1] https://karuna2020.org [2] https://open-data.karuna2020.org
I've spent so much time studying skills more directly related to my work as a software engineer, or hobbies like photography, that this shift is both challenging and refreshing. I think it'll make a huge difference in the long run.
Alongside that, I am also watching Disney's Imagineering-in-a-Box, which describes how they develop lands and rides for their theme parks: https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2020/03/enjoy-a-one-o...
I recently finished Stanford's CS231N Computer Vision course from 2017 (watching YouTube + 3 Jupyter Notebook assignments). Also highly recommended. http://cs231n.stanford.edu/syllabus.html
I've always been interested in making things that make other things, and compilers definitely fall into that category.
In the middle of the second assignment, the parser. It's a lot to consume, but I feel like the theory isn't particularly difficult, about half my learning has been getting to know the tools (so far: flex, bison). I've also spent an annoying amount of time on updating and configuring the VM, I guess that's a bonus lesson in Linux sysadmin-ing. It's also my first experience with C++, which seems useful to know.
I also started this course on web security: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs253/. The first assignment was a lot of fun, the material is fresh, and it definitely seems like very useful information for anyone in the web stack.
I'm also learning a bunch of new cooking recipes, but who isn't nowadays.
I feel comfortable enough with my technical skills where I feel like I can pick up a new language or framework with relative ease, so I want to switch gears and improve my drawing and visual communication skills. I believe that any project can benefit from a compelling visual component.
For now, I've been trying to start slow and just have fun; for example, telling myself to do three quick sketches of my dog every day and keep up a habit. Eventually I'd like to follow some more structured exercises and resources, like https://drawabox.com/.
I'm currently working through the Algorithms chapter, which builds up from Deutsch's Algorithm [2] all the way to Shor's Factoring Algorithm [3], but I will definitely end up going through most of the chapters.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computing-Computer-Scientists...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsch%E2%80%93Jozsa_algorith...
Now I have GBoard w/ morse as my default keyboard on the mobile. Works well enough for short messages (and typing in URLs with autocomplete).
Edit: And I've been learning Spanish for months already so that's still active.
[0] https://morse.withgoogle.com/learn/
I've been a volunteer leading health assessments and triage (via volunteer Telehealth nurses) at our local men's shelter. The shelter has even experienced a complete move in the last week.
A few huge points, however:
* Homelessness isn't always a choice - and especially in this situation it's causing panic.
* Our shelter system needs much greater support, and many organizations need better communication and integration.
* Paper is alive and well some places, others are quite a bit better technologically. There is much room for process improvement.
* While I am selfishly getting out of my own house and interacting with people, none of them are in anywhere near an ideal situation - and it's affected my mental health somewhat. I'm grateful for personal protective equipment, but reuse does concern me.
So much more I could go on about, but I can say during this period I've learned a ton more about homelessness, the process, and have kept people from entering the shelter thanks to our fantastic volunteer nurses who need to practice in a limited capacity for COVID-19 screening.
Volunteering is also something that has turned into quite a calling for me right now as well.
They've been so kind to issue a temporary free license to help with the isolation. Their license model is very liberal anyway, but the gesture was well appreciated.
I own a Yamaha E363 keyboard and a Stratocaster, now I've bought a Behringer U-Phoria UMC204HD soundcard and an Audio-Technica AT2020 mic to complete the budget home studio. Amazon.es is working faster actually. However I wish they kept orders bundled, instead of delivering them apiece.
There are many videos linked from Reaper website, but as a Spanish speaker I prefer this guy, that's absolutely great:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEkUr7EAx4LwIv2gp2pwvPQ
I'm also going to learn to airbrush. I've had the gear for some time, but now I'm seriously putting the time.
Relationships take a lot of commitment and effort. It took me a while to learn how to communicate effectively with my wife so we’re fighting problems and not each other.
Babies really test your patience. They are hard to reason with so I have to keep my emotions in check and always be calm even if she is throwing a massive fit. But sometimes they really get your nerves when they cry non-stop for half an hour.
I'm also doing some OSINT (open-source intelligence) by simply giving myself assignments. The assignments on hackthebox.eu were not all that great and OSINT is one of the few disciplines that you can do in the real world without permission, since it's all about accessing public data.
I flip back and forth between the 2 disciplines. I don't know why it attracts me. It just does. I also notice that learning this stuff is completely different from programming. And to an extent it's one of the few ways that gives me the feeling that I'm "living and moving around" in cyberspace as opposed to "constructing" (i.e. programming) in cyberspace. I guess typing cd and ls on a lot of Linux and Windows practice boxes give that effect. And the cool thing is, you learn a lot quicker about all kinds of services. For example, I never knew about rsyslog, logger or the mqtt protocol (Linux boxes). I never knew about Kerberos, Active Directory and smb (Windows boxes).
I'm happy I did some master courses in cyber security beforehand. While I'm really new to a lot of things, I've gained a lot of what psychologist call crystalized intelligence in this area. So it's all quite easy(ish) to understand. Things get harder when I have to reverse engineer binaries or debug in x64 assembly. It's still doable though.
After reading about storytelling, I realized that I'm as fascinated to a well-crafted world as good plots and characters.
There's not much to read about, as a fiction world can contain as much detail as the real world. I'm spending time looking at the fiction worlds that I like and taking them apart.
As an exercise, imagining places and races is also interesting. You'll be amazed by the amount of details required to fill the gaps in order to "see" something in your head.
(I'm pretty sure it's uncommon to put the whole thing together before finishing, and then take it all apart again, including the electronics... but I wanted to know nothing would be terribly wrong before I spend hours more on finishing!)
TDPRI's Tele Home Depot is a great source of info- https://www.tdpri.com/forums/tele-home-depot.46/
My own build thread: https://www.tdpri.com/threads/first-build.1011061/
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/
I collect examples of advanced C++. Noticed the lack of educational content at this subject, and planning a short course, something like "Exceptional C++" style, but on video.
In our distributed team we have a practice to make video presentations for colleagues, so I have experience of delivering visual content to tech audience. However, I see that particular course like a high-quality content, with diagrams, animations etc.
That's how I found Davinci Resolve, and you know, it's fun to learn it (even it crashes more than production-ready application supposed to). The only thing that buzz me, is not to forget about the initial goal:)
I learnt programming mainly through various scripting languages, some of which had some relatively simple visual output available, which I personally found invaluable for learning and visualizing.
I realized that better visual output was the main thing holding me back from doing more in C since there are so many options, often complex, involving much boilerplate. So my mini project is essentially exploring the simplest, most minimal possible ways of drawing pixels on the screen in Linux.
So far tried fbdev (but doesn't work well with X), now playing with XCB.
All 3 are a mind expansion coming from other tech. Cannot recommend them enough :-)
https://clojure.org/ https://fulcro.fulcrologic.com/ https://kafka.apache.org/documentation/streams/
The kit I got for those curious: https://www.guitarcenter.com/Alesis/Nitro-Mesh-8-Piece-Elect...
Throne: https://www.guitarcenter.com/ROC-N-SOC/Nitro-Throne-Tan-1500...
Each of the 24 characters follow very logical rules and build onto each other to build "blocks" of syllables. Each block must start with a consonant in the top-left, always followed by a vowel, and sometimes ends with a consonant. So the block always reads left-right, top-bottom and must always contain at least one consonant and vowel.
In addition, each syllable block has a phonetic sound. This means that it's really easy to read and pronounce, since there are no silent letters, with the one exception of single vowel syllable blocks. Which must start with a silent ㅇ(ng), for example the character ㅣ(i). So following the rule of a syllable block needing to start with a consonant you can't have a single ㅣ since it's a vowel, so you need to use ㅇ as a placeholder, thus creating ㅇㅣ(i).
Now if you want to create a word, like "child". You can put together the character ㅏ(a) and ㅣ(i). Since you can't have two vowels in the same block, we must use two blocks to create the word. This gives us ㅇㅏㅇㅣ (a-i).
The vowels consist entirely of horizontal and vertical lines, with a dash or double dash off to the left, right, top, or bottom. It's a very simple alphabet and an extremely interesting language. If anyone want's to learn more, feel free to checkout the Wiki page on Hangul for the full set of vowels, consonants, and double consonants. It's often said you can learn the Hangul alphabet in 90 minutes. If you want a solid intro course to Hangul, checkout this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5aobqyEaMQ
I made it as a side project : https://github.com/cassandre-tech/cassandre-trading-bot
And i am writing a guide about what i learned : https://trading-bot.cassandre.tech/
But if I had time on my hand I would learn about:
* Adobe after effect not to only to edit videos but to animate!
* Illustrator, because it's the basis of any graphics
* Blender, because I want to learn about 3D graphics and this seems to be the reference
* Unity, a gaming engine, because I've always wanted to make a FPS game
* Phaser, an HTML5 gaming engine, because I want to make a multiplayer game with websockets. I'm thinking of starting with an online board game though.
[1]: https://www.manning.com/books/real-world-cryptography?a_aid=...
Fitness, I cannot hit the gym anymore so at home I'm doing body weight training goals. Current goal is 1k squats a day(done), 1k burpees day(70/day right now, It's 1 week in so progress is very fast right now), and a bodyweight program my gym is offering.
For tech, I'm learning machine learning applied to a environmental program I'm trying to build which I'm passionate about.
Wisdom, this is subjective but I'm going back into old philosophy books. Just finished some work by Stoics and will read the plague by Albert Camus.
food, Every other day I'm trying to learn how to cook something new. I tried baking which is awesome, today I will try to make a chilli on a pot(never did that before).
Love, this is the hardest but also the easiest in theory. I'm trying to connect to the things that I love but because life got busy, I didn't connect to as much. This included just having conversations with friends, training my dog, loving how my body can do complex movements(squats/burpees), the beauty of technology, or just observing nature.
I'm also doing baking; baked my first loaf of bread yesterday. Really interested to learn (and eat!) more.
I'm tempted to pick up a cheap instrument and learn one as well, or delve back into Python some more. Or drawing. My main issue is focusing now, sadly. Any tips there would be appreciated.
I've put that a temporary hold for the last couple of weeks to brush up on algorithms; I'm working through some select chapters of Concrete Mathematics, Programming in the 1990s, How to Solve It, and Algorithms. I find I'm not satisfactory at solving leetcode-style problems in what industry considers a sufficient amount of time so I'm working on improving my skills there.
And I'm making progress on my own side projects as well. I'm testing the waters with trying to record my work on video to see if streaming might be a thing I could do.
It's a horror movie about a guy who renovates foreclosed houses for banks. But one of the houses he goes into has a ghost in it. He has to solve the mystery of why the ghost is there before he can leave.
I call it: "Repossessed"
Working tagline: "This is for closure."
Sneak peek of the code: https://twitter.com/daniel_c0deb0t/status/124224838155819008...
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-065-matrix-method...
Aside from that, I'm also participating in Leetcode 30 days of code challenge [2]
[1] https://www.edx.org/course/masterpieces-of-world-literature [2] https://leetcode.com/explore/featured/card/30-day-leetcoding...
It's quite interesting. Two of the things that fascinated me most so far are emergent properties (such as in cellular automata models), and what he calls the models' "fertility".
As an example, with a few adjustments (ie the "recovery rate" becomes a "churn rate", etc) the SIS model could be adapted in marketing, viral or not, to measure an existing campaign's efficiency, or try to predict the means a future one might require based on different assumptions and goals.
Also acted as a nice statistics 101 refresher / intro
Wonderful into to the topic and easy to understand. It's my first foray into the field so I really appreciate the Author's writing style.
For me it looks like this, I'm working on a bootstrapped simple SaaS tool for devops (docker container monitoring):
- Clojure so I'm learning FP and Lisp
- Clojurescript/Reagent so I'm learning SPA/react
- MongoDB so I'm learning NoSQL
- Vim so I'm learning editing like a boss
- SaaS so I'm learning marketing (SEO/Blogging to start with)
There's a project I want to work on but I feel a bit overwhelmed and don't know where I should start, I'd appreciate some advice here.
I want to create shogi(Japanese chess) server, similar to lichess, the thing is that I've never done anything similar to this, I've been reading about web sockets, this seems like a good place to start. I plan to use elixir for the backend, is this a good choice? Lichess uses scala, should I use this instead?
I've recently been furloughed, and I think that redundancies aren't too far away. There aren't many companies hiring in my area at the moment, and if I'm going to move it's going to be for a big company, so I'm dusting off the CV and am applying to some Big N companies.
A recruiter recently reached out to me, and I've got an interview with one Big N company coming up soon, so am using my new-found free time to study and, at the very least, be a bit more employable at the end of this pandemic.
It's been a long time coming, but finally doing it now.
After coming to grips with functional programming concepts (introductory in Ruby, more advanced in JavaScript) I decided to explore Elixir and what I found really surprised me in the right way.
So I've decided to dedicate myself to become very fluent in it.
I've also been reading and learning a lot about dirivities and the overall US financial system. It's pretty wild how things _actually_ work behind the scenes. So much "wealth" has been created coming up with such schemes. The more I learn, the more I worry about us being in some serious uncharted waters, and I think maybe it's all too complicated.
I am implementing these algorithms, so I need to understand a lot of the details. Here are some notes, which are work in progress: https://notabug.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/machine-learning-notes/... I try to write it in a way, that does not leave open questions and will be accessible to me and hopefully others years later.
Right now I got my hands on Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" as per some HNer recommendation (thank you!).
Yeah, I lose interest quickly, eh. There's so much cool things to learn that in the end I learn nothing well. Bummer.
edit: grammar, spelling
I built a basic tool to help my wife track how much time she spends on Telehealth calls, you can see it here:
https://telehealth-tracker.onrender.com
She is a family medicine doctor and now virtually 100% of her time now doing phone calls instead of clinic visits. She wants to do a QI project and needed to be able to track the amount of time her and her colleagues spend on various parts of the Telehealth visit.
Studying: The Molecular Biology of the Cell by Alberts et al and Advanced Macroeconomics by Romer.
I’d classify my style as synth wave meets 80s arena rock for the current track I’ve been working on :)
My learning path is here [0] and I’ve also been uploading works in progress to my soundcloud [1]
[0] https://learnmonthly.com/u/dave-mosher-e2bc26/andrew-huang-m...
The same newsletter made me read a book about motivational psychology (The Righteous Mind). A very interesting topic, that I would love to learn more about, if I had more time.
Last year I've (re-)read Category Theory for Programmers. I had tried it once before, but gave up after a third, as the notation didn't make much sense to me anymore. I would like to read it again, creating flash cards for the most important concepts along the way.
For Adobe AE I'm learning on these Youtube channels:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQyoKfULtJaHqSxB80Efw4w https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC64eec0UYHxflyEWgyZOvLA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP3AIk974-PeB9bg1Mc7wug
For 3D: https://www.3dfordesigners.com/blog?tag=learn+cinema+4d+lite
I've always thought the work was an absolute masterpiece, but utterly inaccessible and the holotype for the word jargon. So, I'm trying to write vignettes of the work, with characters that personify the 'great ideas' in the Syntopicon. Something like Godel, Escher, Bach. Hopefully, this personification will be more accessible and readable than a gigantic listing of page numbers and linking information.
Thus far, yeah, just wrapping my head about the linking documents is tough, but there is a lot of 'meat' on the bones and turning ideas into people is surprisingly fun.
I doubt I'll ever finish the project, but it's a great deep dive into the Western Cannon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor...
I'm (re)learning OpenCV and OpenGL since I haven't used them since college. Working on this is also forcing me to learn the FFI corners of Rust I was unfamiliar with.
I'm combining Kinect (k4a) depth sensor data to build real time 360 degree point clouds.
[0] The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson, Sussman and Sussman
[1] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...
I'm a native English speaker and Russian would be my fourth language. Perhaps I'm simply approaching the limits of my language ability, but the grammar rules with cases that I've learnt so far are doing my head in. It's very discouraging. I don't intend on becoming completely fluent, and so I'm trying to find shortcuts to be fuzzy about the volume of grammar rules to keep in mind.
I am also going to soon start marketing my project [0] so I am reading a lot about launching products, pricing and how to attract attention.
At work I'm working on anomaly detection using ML at the edge and want to move beyond bog-standard stochastic gradient descent to fit the model(s) in favor of methods that exploit the use of analytical Jacobians / Hessians. So I'm comparing and contrasting the various nonlinear (gradient-based) optimization methods for my use cases and trying to see how fast I can make them run.
- https://15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2019/schedule.html - https://15721.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2020/schedule.html - https://umbra-db.com/ - https://hyper-db.de/
Tech-wise I'm digging into machine learning, particularly around natural language processing and sentiment analysis.
[1] https://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/cryptobook/BonehShoup_0_4....
* understand the hardware components required in a phone?
* understand the software components required? postmarketos and plasma mobile maybe?
* How do I even start to build a prototype? What components would I use? Maybe start with using a raspberry pi to make a DIY phone?
I know this is an open ended question, so any pointers would be appreciated.
I trade options on equities regularly and recently a friend has been looking for help on figuring out how to handle a large amount of money they came into, so I figured brushing up on bond investing would be helpful since their risk tolerance is substantially lower than mine.
It's a balance I know, and we shouldn't be super focused especially early on in our careers. But at my current job we have a huge tech stack and a tiny team, I am constantly learning, but never in any depth, just enough to solve the last bug and then change to something different. It feels very like a very unproductive way of working. Very little of the new tech feels like it actually helps. Kubernetes while we don't actually need to scale for the foreseeable future. NoSQl when we don't actually need to scale. Asynch web servers when synchronous would be fine. A React monstrosity on our frontend, when server side rendering would be perfectly functional for the problems we are trying to solve. Google cloud - fair enough we actually do need that one or something equivalent.
Edit: On looking through the other answers I see that a significant number are not tech related which is refreshing to see.
Doing this has been one of the best experiences in my life and it was a very cheap bike to buy and I only needed a pretty basic set of tools on top of it. I don't own other vehicles but I bet that, down the line, it will save me a lot of money that I may otherwise have given to mechanics. I would recommend doing this to anyone that has an interest in it, it doesn't take expert knowledge, just a healthy level of gumption :)
I think there's untapped potential for techies and scientists to infiltrate the political landscape.
I don't think I'll ever be famous but I'm arguing everyday and pushing hard for people to fight for themselves, and to push the ideas.
We had a gameboy as a kid, but the ZX Spectrum (also Z80 CPU-based) meant more to me so hope to take what I learn from the great articles from imrannazar.com and apply to writing a ZX Speccy emulator (the gameboy had dedicated-hardware for sprites etc so not everything will be transferable).
Yes both gameboy & spectrum emulators in javascript have been done already, but this is just for personal learning/fun/itch-scratching. It has been quite instructive both from a remembering-fundamental-cs-classes/how-computers-really-work perspective, as well as modern javascript
I've also spent a bit of time watching youtube videos on a channel called "RÜNGE CARS". This guy hand forms aluminum bodies and builds his own chassis and they're pretty cool cars he making. The craftsmanship is impressive and so is the process. He pretty much takes you through it step by step. I still have quite a few of those to take in.
Aside from that CouchDB 3.0 was release just a couple weeks ago so I'm learning about what's new and how it applies to my work. They're doing some impressive work on that.
I started doing Leetcode several months ago because I wanted to change jobs soon, but it's really exposing what not having a traditional CS background is costing me. I feel guilty looking at the answers on there and in Cracking the Coding Interview but I genuinely don't know how to make things faster. Seeing some of the answers in CTCI after attempting some of the string related questions made me ask myself "well, why wasn't that talked about in the informational section preceding the questions?"
Also learning about Linux. I used macOS for about a year and thought that I knew “Linux” but now I’m seeing how far the rabbit hole goes. I installed arch linux and am currently just customizing it and immersing myself in the community. Eventually I’ll pick up a systems or operating systems book.
This is the first time i am studying based on the topics rather than following syllabus. I wanted to understand covariance for calculating similar interest b/w users to suggest the posts viewed by a user in the app i am developing. This took me down the rabbit hole and forced to learn everything required to define covariance. Its talking a lot of time but i feel it's worth it because now i have a strong foundation. Also its nice to follow more than one book because i have no attachment to any of the books. When in college i used to get attached to my notes or the first text book i follow, but studying a topic from many books have no attachment to either and its liberating.
I'm writing a compiler for SQL that parses DDL (CREATE TABLE, etc.) and queries and outputs type-safe Go. It currently supports PostgreSQL, but the plan is to support more engines and more output programming languages.
My paid work is currently (inherited projects in) c#, so I try to mix environments by experimenting (and studying the runtimes / compilers at the same time) with little tools/libs [0] (not for production, but I keep wondering if there are ways to bring things that help me from in language A to language B).
I'm learning it in a way where I actually understand how things work rather than just the way I was blindly taught in high-school.
Sounds boring but it's pretty interesting.
So far, I’m very impressed, very clear presentation style and he does a good job of explaining the fundamentals and maths (which is good as I’m pretty rusty at maths!) while still keeping it fairly concise - my main issue with learning from video is often that it “waffles” a lot and I could get the same knowledge from text much quicker, but it doesn’t feel like that here.
I may switch to the deep learning specialisation or try to get my hands dirty with a more hands-on course after I understand the basic concepts but we will see, I’m actually enjoying relearning some maths more than I expected to!
I'm also starting a Coursera course in audio signal processing. Lets me scratch the technical itch a bit while not distracting from music. My goal for later this year is to build a guitar pedal or 2 from scratch.
Hopefully that changes soon
For school, I'm learning networking. Finding it a bit dry, especially learning about packet structures and such. The book we're using, "Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach" by Kurose & Ross[1] is great and the authors' personalities really shine through!
For work I'm learning about databases and how to gain access to it from a web app. The world of databases (specifically PostgreSQL) and SQL is entirely new to me. Currently trying to figure out how to best connect my Flask app with my Postgres DB.
Currently learning Rust whenever I have the time/motivation. It's a great language with some really clever design choices, but it's a pain in the ass to learn, especially without experience with lower-level languages. The incredible amount of other cool languages, such as Clojure and Elixir, can make it hard to stay focused!
Also been meaning to get into vector graphics (Affinity Designer[2] is on sale right now) and philosophy, but you know...the usual excuses. Honestly, the incredible amount of CS-related topics I know nothing about, including some really basic ones, makes it hard to study anything else out of sheer guilt.
As for philosophy, if anyone are curious, a book that was recommended to me by a philosophy major buddy is "The Problems of Philosophy" by Bertrand Russell[3].
[1] https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/computer-networking-a-top-down... [2] https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/designer/ [3] https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-problems-of-philosophy_ber...
* Exploring and playing with new capsule routing algorithms in deep learning models for vision and language tasks. Particularly intrigued by routing algorithms in which output capsules seek to "explain" (generate/predict) their input data (e.g., EM matrix routing, Heinsen routing).
Also just started trying to learn Svelte today. And I'm about to jump on the breadmaking bandwagon.
Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIhi4BuDSf4
I just applied to a course from Berkeley trough Corusera, and they are really great, but I'm not trying to rush trough, as this is my main way of trying to learn, making me lose interest because of the overflow of information.
If anyone has any good books, courses or tutorials on this, that would be a great help too :)
I have many hobby projects next to that and can never finish any of those, but they are also only motivated by 'oh that might a cool thing'. I have not yet found a side project which solves a problem big enough to motivate me to actually finish it.
Our voices are a beautiful, natural instrument we carry everywhere with us, from the shower to lonely business trips to walks in the park. I've always had the desire to put it to work. Singing is also an ancient tradition of bringing melody and lyrics to people. For me it's not about singing like a soul or blues singer (ie Joe Cocker) but more like Chet Baker: get the notes right (pitch) and building them into elegant phrasing, which needs control of tempo and great diaphragm training. Music is undeniably great for your brain, which can include learning and memorizing a ton of lyrics, tempo and pitch. As an art also very appreciated by most people, who really feel grateful by a (good) vocal performance, sometimes more than by any other instrument. Hearing yourself improve and sing well gives a high dose of happiness and confidence builder.
It's also an excellent breathing and speaking exercise, which increases your ability to communicate effectively, projecting and modulating your voice effortlessly and making it easier to jump in into a conversation. Also gives your voice the stability to fend off your nerves or anxiety. For an introvert like me it's definitely a very effective tool, it makes me feel like "in the matrix" as far as speaking goes, as my brain thinks ahead of time or just in time, so my mind feels snappier. In other words, I feel like a more spontaneous person since I've started to sing.
I figure it's gonna be a while before we get back to normal. People will continue to crave attention and video is a more scalable way to disseminate your knowledge vs traditional meetings or Zoom calls.
I'm specifically looking at doing more analytical video game streams and educational Machine Learning content for the advanced n00bs.
Who we view as charismatic will change quite a bit in the near future since we can endlessly edit and improve our message before we share it with others.
One quote about analysis that I read online somewhere is that you should study it until it starts to feel "natural." At the time, I guess it sounded true, but I didn't appreciate what it actually meant. Now, I'm starting to.
It takes a lot of effort to digest each new lecture, but I'm excited to see what the rest of the course holds, and to graduate to "real analysis" afterwards.
My project is a hosted blog platform where you can edit a Google doc & publish it as a blog post, which is useful for publishing rich blog posts with tables, while keeping features like review/collaboration, tracking changes etc.
I'm learning:
- Spanish with Duolingo
Visited Spain last year for a few weeks. Loved the people, the culture and the food. And really really wanted to pick up a new language.
- Music production/mixing with Ableton Live
This has been something I've wanted to play with for a very long time, and thankfully there are so many resources on the internet to get started. Music has always been a constant part of my life, and production is basically coding with notes and sounds! :)
- Just started getting my beak wet with investing in the stock market
I've always been skeptical of investing my $$$ in the stock market, more so being the first generation in my family earning enough to afford (what my parents would call) "luxuries". But I want to be more invested (literally and figuratively) in making my money work for me. Thankfully, have built up more savings than I need for years and given the stock market scene right now, it feels like the right time to dip my feet in for the long term.
I dunno how much of this will last over the next few months, especially once we start going back to office to work (I'm a person who LOVES going to office even though we have unlimited WFH), but one can hope! :)
I've enjoyed learning a programming language at the same time as learning an interesting subject so much that I plan on repeating it!
[1] http://raytracerchallenge.com/ [2] https://github.com/garfieldnate/ray_tracer_challenge
Bad technology that gets this part right almost always does phenomenally, astoundingly, inconceivably better than great technology that gets it wrong.
I'm tired of building things that only I and a few people really like, like some underground band only a few people know. It's nonsense, I gotta learn how to do the human part better.
One too many times have I though to myself that a just little bit of awk might go a long way to help with extracting information from a pile of data.
Now working my way through Effective awk programming. So far, no regrets.
https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/index.htm...
Surprisingly, logistics (and the Mandarin around it) is interesting! Going through some of the "Incoterms" now. It's fun to learn something new and a language at the same time.
Also learning about email parsing. Not something I had thought about before but there is a lot to learn and lots of edge cases.
On the code side I am building a logs database in Rust. I have previous experience building databases and in particular time series databases so most of the learning here is mostly about Rust which I have used before but not for this type of project. Also getting deeper into regular expressions, query languages (parsing/lexing/AST) and query optimisation than I have in the past.
Rust is growing on me more than it did in the past. I think a) because it's a much better language than it was when I used it previously and b) my experiences since I worked with it last have garnered me more respect for it's design decisions and type system.
Feeling like I am learning lots of stuff right now despite being trapped inside so that is good. :)
Also, related, found this in Coursera while looking for courses on Systems Thinking: Big History (https://www.coursera.org/learn/big-history)
I'm still awful at it, but I can now manipulate art from other sources fairly comfortably. And I'm at a point where I can make geometric types of shapes and patterns easily enough from scratch. It's already enough that I look at logos and things differently now, to see how I would go about building them in these tools.
Unfortunately, I still dislike this aspect of game design compared to the fun of lying in a hammock and run thought experiments on the actual gameplay systems!
I am learning Latin and Spanish on Duolingo but thats more at the hobby level, about 10 min a day.
Fun way to jump back into React while also learning new concepts!
- Started learning about building versioning into firmware. Found some great posts from the Memfault Interrupt blog on GNU build IDs, and another one from the Embedded Artistry blog on adding more generic versioning.
- Also learning about analog drivers and generic analog design techniques from designing the output stage of the next board revision.
- Learning the most from building prototypes and selling them to people. It's given me a crash course in writing good, useful docs, and getting people up to speed quickly.
If you want to get involved, there's definitely more boards, and plenty of stuff to be done. Feel free to email me at
So far I’m having success and fun with Pleroma and Matrix.
Originally, I was going to do a hiking and photography tour of Fennoscandia in the Fall. I'm not sure if that'll still come to pass with the ever-looming collapse of society, but at least it's pretty refreshing to learn a new (non-programming) language for the first time in over a decade, and for the first time in my adult life.
Our robot is not operational yet, so I will include a YouTube link below of the creator with a couple of his own completed “cats”.
Settled on pongo2, which has django-style multiple inheritance, which is IMO essential to keeping an html template hierarchy organized.
With it, I’m writing an ActivityPub spider (code is messy and not fully organized yet):
https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/feta
and also an HN transparency tool that highlights things for me to read that get nuked from the frontpage:
https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/orangesite (live at https://orangesite.sneak.cloud )
Next up: rust. I have about 4 go projects I want to finish first, and having a good templating system means they will be somewhat polished when I shelve them.
That and I’m learning condensed matter theory from Altland. Can’t recommend this text highly enough.
Rust for a side project I've just started.
Music production techniques and how modular synthesis works.
I also started skateboarding a couple of months ago after around a 8 year break so I'm getting my flat ground practice on my patio haha (although I'm taking it easy for obvious reasons)
Non-technical: I'm learning to create music to help satisfy my creative side. I'm starting with the piano, and when I can get to a basic proficiency, I'll slow down and jump to some voice lessons I bought a while back. Then, I'll put it together with reaper, using some of what I learned as a teenager.
Technical-Creative: I'm returning to my project to do a deeper dive on what makes programmers bad, mediocre, good, or great, and creating a track that others can follow. While I have the framework already, I am trying to learn a whole set of skills well enough to teach others.
Technical: I'm patching up holes in my EcmaScript ecosystem knowledge. I never really took the time to truly grok Shadow Dom, the Redux patterns, and the like, even though I was managing a team who was working in it.
I'm learning how to rebuild my 3d printer for the third(?) time. Each time something breaks it starts off as blind confusion, and over the weeks I figure it out and then I feel like a genius when it it works.
I have a business I want to build, and I'm working on estimating what the cost of the individual items / products are, how long they take, and how long it really "costs" me. I'm working on fixing up the website and improving it.
I have a wall of post-it notes in different colors I'm using to track all of this stuff. As a developer I hate time tracking and project management in general but I'm learning a lot by doing it myself. Progress is slow, but at least there is progress.
My problems - I feel like I fail to quickly assess the other person and fail to adjust my communication - so I am either way too technical in the lingo or way too much of a layman talk that makes it feel like I am being insincere!
I also fail to give up the 'problem solving' angle in communication - like I have to remind myself constantly that communication is rarely transactional or a means to an end.
I am realizing what I am missing is that I fail to take interest in other people and their viewpoints and with some concrete strategies and practice I could do better.
It's never been a problem as such - the few times it was a problem I managed to retry and resolve, but I want to bring joy and ease into my in-person communications.
We are a small IT consultancy, 20 years books and always had three months loot in the bank just in case. I could never have predicted this thing but I've always wanted to sleep at night so insisted on a war chest. Damn I'm boring but as it turns out boring is quite handy now. We have furloughed (UK) a few troops. We top up the extra 20%.
The calls on the helpdesk are decreasing but at some point I will need to find more work for the kids. I see a major programme of updates in the near future. BIOS, switches etc etc etc ad nauseam. If it fails to move it will be updated. We do rather a lot of that anyway but to ensure that contracts are fulfilled, we need to be seen to be doing something.
Any other employers here like to pitch in (be careful for obvious reasons)?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_drawing
[2] https://www.acm.org/articles/bulletins/2020/march/dl-access-...
I just started following OCW's Finance Theory class and I'm starting to read the text book on corporate finance and watching a lecture a day during lunch. I've always been interested in economics, so this is just learning for learning's sake. https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-40...
I'm just about done reading "A Look at Boulder: From Settlement to City," about the history of Boulder County, CO. Again, in this case I'm interested in local history, so I'm just reading it before bed for fun.
Two weeks ago I installed FreeBSD on a spare hard drive, and I've been reading through the handbook and learning how to do various tasks as they come up.
I'm writing a Spotify client in Common Lisp, so I'm learning about the Spotify API and architecture. The beginnings of the library are on Github, but right now it's really just a utility library for making API calls, and not much of a client. This started as the thought, "It'd be neat to have a library to control Spotify from the REPL," and is turning into a full client because spotify-tui is the only client I can find on FreeBSD. https://github.com/jl2/cl-spotify/
At work I've been helping the test team write functional tests for some Windows software, which I haven't used in years, so the past week I was re-learning "just enough" about Windows and Python's win32com library, and learning about AutoIt for the first time.
I've been learning to track stand on my bike - it's something to do during stoplights.
And I impulse bought a pot roast on Friday, so today or tomorrow I'm going to learn how to cook one.
Cool talk about the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNMBOj7JUPs
More specifically, trying to build a static site that has all the indexes of my programming books indexed and searchable using Bleve.
Edit: If anyone has tips on how to extract text from indexes of books that'd be great. Currently thinking of using OpenCV as I'm comfortable with it.
Some of the books on my list are: The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí Doctor Goebbels: His Life and Death I, Claudius by Robert Graves The Agony and the Ecstasy Lust for Life Carl Jung Memories, Dreams and Reflections. Stephen King - On Writing
Also experimenting with my 4th home-brewed beer.
"Soft skill"-wise I spend time helping people with good (so I hope) advice and recommendations and a bit of interview mentoring to enter the software development industry. Makes you learn a lot about yourself and how you can motivate and help people big time with only a tiny amount of your time and energy, just sharing stuff you know.
Web dev tooling really has come a long way in the past few years!
So far I can parse a configuration file, apply rules, handle (manually specified) dependencies, and configure triggers to run on rule-actions.
Not a bad state to be in for a few hours work. Of course the big decision is if I continue, and write modules for doing more than I have right now. I suspect the rational answer should be "no". But I kinda like the existing implementation, and being go it is trivial to install/deploy.
I have also been reading Modern Operating Systems by Tanenbaum- though a quite old edition from the early 200s- wondering if its worth putting on hold until I can get my hands on a newer edition.
Next up, I'd like to do Ben Eater's 8 bit computer as well as nand2tetris.
- Go & its entire ecosystem
- Packaging & deployment via RPM
- Layout & design a web ui (this was done by someone else in my previous jobs)
- Personal project management (I'm a one-man team atm)
- Code generation via Swagger
- Architecture & technology choices and documenting them as I go
- Working from home full-time (not by choice) and staying productive
- Warhammer 40K <_<https://github.com/fedden/pluribus-poker-AI
I've been learning about Counter Factural Regret (CFR) and have been using it to iteratively work towards writing a no limit texas hold'em poker playing AI agent. It's still in the early stages but seen success with simple forms of poker such as Kuhn, and have expanded to a form of short deck poker.
I have also been brushing up my web skills by creating a visualiser for the poker state via Flask and Vue.js
Learning about directory services is empowering, and stuff like keycloak let you build your own single-sign-on solution with very little investment (except for willpower to learn).
Also how to fix my car. I'm currently refreshing all the coolant pipes since once ruptured the other day. It's not that hard, but some of the pipes are difficult to get to, and I'm procrastinating about disassembling essentially the entire front end of the vehicle in order to be able to access the radiator and replace pipes attached to it. I've already replaced the ruptured pipe no problem but, since all the pipes are the same age, I figure it's only a matter of time before another splits.
Manufacturing is fascinating and I'd love to own a small factory at some point, profitable or not!
1. Finish my ml research project 2. Learn rust 3. Start a blog 4. Learn Lin alg and stats 5. Go through all of the deep learning book (goodfellow et al.) 6. Start working with GANs or RL
from: https://twitter.com/stormtroper1721/status/12421529408627220...
Other than that, I'm working on building my own Numpy-like array lib in Rust. I'd be glad to chat about it if anyone's interested
I'm about to order tools for leather work as well. I want to make a leather wallet and a sunglasses case.
I started learning Android but a lot of people shared their experience and it just doesn't seem worth it going all in on Android, especially considering that for most of my projects "native" experience is not a must (i.e. social app for sharing book opinions (i.e. a Goodreads which doesn't suck).
I am also impressed by the data, Flutter and Dart a growing incredibly, and I would like to be riding the early waves.
If anyone has any ideas, tips or experiences, please do share!
I am also making steady adjustments to my xmonad configuration so I suppose I'm also learning haskell and that particular library ecosystem.
I built a web based chat site for my family to keep in touch. I'm opening it up to everyone shortly... next few days I hope
I'm looking to add video calls too.
No libraries, just .NET, HTML and JS
Even though it's useless in the industry: https://www.reddit.com/r/computervision/comments/axvjfb/do_i...
I've sent the PCB off to a fab, who will do the SMD assembly part too for me :) Will be a couple of weeks before it arrives I think.
I need to work on an SPI interface next in VHDL which will need to interface with BRAM which will act as the 'framebuffer'.
German is just because it's fun and it's my best second language by far, so I'd like to get fully fluent.
Differential Geometry is a diversion from working through Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, et al. I found I needed more math. Now it has kind of become an end in itself, however. It's the hardest thing I've studied since college (which was a long time ago).
It's using scikit-learn, which I've been meaning to pick-up for awhile. Other than that, learning how to use the ELK stack (ElasticSearch, Kibana) for some network-traffic analysis stuff I've been meaning to implement.
I think we'll all come out of this period a lot smarter :)
It is challenging though as I am creating my music on a Synthstrom Deluge instead of a typical DAW. Most of the concepts so far (1 week in) are still applicable although it requires a bit of creativity to apply certain concepts.
The impetus has been a media monitoring side project[0] that I've been trying to get off the ground. I should probably spend more time learning about marketing, but I just keep coming back to RegEx optimization.
It's a lot of fun after spending years in the web to go back to systems work. It's still arbitrary and frustrating some times, but for some reason debugging kernel code seems like more honest work than messing around with webpack config yet again.
So started playing a lot more video games than usual. Got Dreams on PS4 which ignited my childhood dream of making video games.
Now I am playing with Unity, Unreal, Swift, Xamarin, and more.
* made it to orbit
* flew by the moon
* crash-landed on the moon
* landed on the moon and returned with the stranded astronauts
* landed on Mars (stuck there for now sending back science experiment data)
* flew by Venus + Mercury
* Took a sample of two different asteroids
* Shot a little refueling space station into orbit and successfully docked to it with other ships
On the other hand, trying to figure out what to learn after adaption...
I really really like the graphical style of Pokemon Black (3d environment with 2d sprites) so I want to replicate that.
I’ve had an idea for a comic series kicking around in my head; I figure if I really learn how to use a graphics tablet and Krita and some basic and intermediate art skills it won’t hurt a damn thing.
https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/28/category-theory-for-p...
As far as programming is concerned; learning how to build Netty servers and navigating large open source codebases quickly.
Also apart from that working on page speed optimization of website which are in wordpress.
Testing on this product page ( https://www.keka.com/hr-software/ ), earlier it was 7sec, now it's 4.
Hopefully can do a bit to bring it down to 2.
My current project also involves learning elm and postgraphile, which is shaping up to be a wonderful stack.
Old school but I haven't found a better ORM for my use case - though I keep thinking there's got to be something like an open-source LookML, which is what I want in the long term.
Also, lime plastering traditional (100+ year old) buildings, and trying to get a fruit orchard going without rabbits eating the trees.
I have been working on a course to teach kids how to learn programming with Scratch. I want to learn more of the Adobe CC suit to add more effects to my videos.
I want to learn how I can improve my remote skills to better work with my team.
Also, I've been toying with OBS Studio to learn how to make more professional video recordings to showcase applications at work, or bug reproductions, documentation, etc.
I am a UX person, but often dabbled in Ruby on Rails. Currently for the the first time working on a more serious app and now reading the book refactoring ruby, is very illuminating, going through my code again and rereading makes me see many mistakes and possible improvements.
I'm also learning that you can only do so much in post. Sometimes, you just need a different shot.
(New pilots are restricted to flying in "visual" conditions - clear weather. The instrument rating allows flying in reduced visibility conditions.)
By the end of the year I hope to have built a autonomous drone, with a custom flight controller (both motor control and sensing).
I also just bought a house and am looking into putting drywall in the garage.
I'm also following MITs online math courses to get back up to speed.
It it's a constructed language that has recently hit the front page of HN a couple of times. It's been fun. Helps reorganize your thoughts a little bit and it's good practice for learning a more complicated language.
Thinking of putting together a small app as an excuse to play around with websockets
I'm a JavaScript/Node.Js fanatic, figure it's time for me to up my game and go first principles.
Operating System Concepts by Silbeschatz, Galvin and Gagne to the rescue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX4H_ctggYo&feature=youtu.be
It's a modular construction kit for synths that takes advantage of the fact that it's software, rather than trying to ape physical synth modules.
Any one have a recommendation for a MOOC or a book that could help?
I am specifically looking to understand frameworks such as Dask or Ray and how to build a similar system from scratch.
Thanks!
Also I want to learn something ml-ish probably play with opencv or pytorch.
It's not as breezy as I was hoping...
The side project itself is essentially a platform to enable post-split parents co-parent effectively.
-HDR colour grading in Davinci Resolve
-playing cuban congas (that slap is hard)
-designing Flutter apps
-feeling gratitude every day
-how to motivate kids
-growing tomatoes from shop bought tomatoes
Good list?
Getting familiar with OpenMP - MPI (are those used in real life?)
Speaking with some friends, they encouraged me to give it a go, but start with the goal. Which eventually translated to writing a stock market sim first.
The concept itself is a multiplayer grand strategy style game set in a fantasy style universe. I've got it working on a calendar system like a paradox game, I'm aiming for it to be running continuously with a leaderboard and periodic resets. I very much want player actions to run within the sim context, IE: The player isn't special in any significant way, they control an entity, whether that's a peep or some other in-game entity.
I have a basic demand system for my simulated people working, who buy goods they need from shops local to them and purchasing activity is reported on the market, traders trade against market activity and at present all a player can do is be a trader, running on a Clojure server which uses websockets to update the client.
There's a lot of things I want to do, I've got a map generation prototype that I built after reading some of Amit's amazing articles [1], I've been scouring my old rpg source books GM sections to try and work out what a decent set of pieces plugged together would look like, after all I figure they're supposed to create the illusion of a vibrant world for players, so why not flip through them for ideas? However I'm limiting this a bit because I don't want to get bogged down not building stuff!
I'm presently doing some initial sanity checking, basically trying to work out what are the current performance characteristics of my sim, IE: Does every entity need to be updated on every tick, does that look "nice" from a player's perspective, or create odd artefacts? Also some simple refactoring to just clean stuff up.
The other two problems to solve is keeping everything nicely organised as I really want this to get big in it's interconnected complexity (though perhaps that's a terrible idea), putting together a simple way to monitor the system's running as the game designer.
Keeping scope small and focused is hard, enthusiasm gets you to want to add all sorts of wacky stuff.
All of the above is subject to change if I figure out a better way of doing it =)...
- [1] http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/...
Quantum Entanglement (lectures by Leonard Susskind at Stanford)
creative building in Minecraft :)
(I already knew how to make sourdough from before)
After a career of mostly embedded systems development, I'm building my first commercial webapp.
and am reading 50k word TOS (not sure 'learning' is the verb there but *)
Auth is super handy.
On the other hand I didn't anticipate how wired my brain is for SQL...
Anyone have any fav tutorials on Figma?
I can't tell yet which is harder. Both are pretty tough.
outside of that im trying to learn polish as well
Reality: armor locations in GTA IV
- World Civilization I:
At this point in time, the course is following the Cro-Magnon's during the Mesolithic age, specifically around the time that the Neanderthals/Denisovans go extinct and Cro-Magnons evolve into Homo Sapiens Sapiens. This is also around the time that Cro-Magnon-Neanderthal hybrids cross the Beringia Bridge into modern day Alaska. During this time, there's shifts in every single aspect of life on Earth. I've uploaded the most recent lecture notes for those that are interested.
https://textuploader.com/14j86
- Astronomy II:
This has been my favorite course this semester (aside from Computer Systems). My professor does an amazing job presenting the concepts and his passion is very apparent as he teaches. Unfortunately, that effect has been greatly reduced, with classes now being online. The other downer about online class is that I won't be able to use the telescopes for lab. Stemming from our previous sections, which covered the Sun, star formation, and star evolution, we're now covering the various models presented throughout time that tried to reason our position within the Milky Way through stargazing. Here's the lecture if you care to watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?=AUlr2hlAPcM&feature=youtu.be
- Technical Writing:
Project 2, that accounts for 30% of my grade, was due Friday. The objective was to create documentation for a program or application. I was having a hard time finding a program, application, package, framework, or language I used, that wasn't already documented to a high enough standard (coincidence? :P). I didn't want to replicate any documentation that already existed so I decided to write an Angular library for creating a vertical or horizontal timeline and documentation for it. I turned it in two hours late, so I most likely will not get credit. Publishing my own code for others to use brought me more joy than I would've imagined.
- Computer Systems I:
The lectures have been covering pipelining, control / data dependencies, forwarding paths, etc. It's extremely fun. In lab, we're programming the Y86-64 ISA using C++.
Besides that stuff and my dance class, where we've learned about the dance throughout the 1900s to present, I've been going through a Udemy course on Kubernetes in preparation for my summer internship and CKA.
This all seems a bit silly, but everything is closed. Also doing a lot of wood cutting and cleanup in the forest. We built a custom designed Z80 SBC ( single board computer), with its own Z80MON monitor, and the genius guy I am working with has managed to put the BASIC interpreter into the monitor. Just got MInipro installed and working on the MACbook, using HomeBrew. I'm trying to get one of those TL866II pROM programmers - first one ordered got bounced by customs. We've ordered second one, paid premium to have it couriered. All the flights are ground-stopped, so it may be a while. I really like the idea of building a whole computer from parts ordered from Mouser, having all the Monitor and interpreter code, and being able to download the code into A ROM chip, plug it in, and link to the thing with Kermit or Screen session from a Linux box, and have it process matrix data from our AI stuff.
We still have good internet access, and we are on-grid, but this whole virus-driven economic meltdown has absolutely confirmed our expectations. We are seriously looking at something that will look like the 1930's now. I worked in 8080 Assembler years ago, and I'd forgotten so much. But I've got two Z80 SBC's working now, one with it's own standalone VT-100 emulator board, and a little 40$ Chinese made VGA screen, which actually works pretty good. I can run that config off two lithium-ion batteries. The missing piece is to be able to use an SD-card. We have a prototype of a much more complex SBC that has a sound chip, and an SD card driver chip. It runs full CP/M, but I like the more simple design, since it does ot use surface mount - real old school.
And there is this ton of other stuff that must be done. We need to be able to reload, and I have all the dies and such for this. We are also doing a bunch of in-house food preparation, since the electricity is still working, and so we are making different types of food that can be easily frozen.
And the price action on the investment portfolios is requiring attention, since we have these predictive algorithms that are offering some insite into where to place trades. The markets are insane, but there are opportunites that do crop up. I realize that most traditional "fundamental" analysis is of little value in this kind of environment, as the automatic algos are running most of the action. We have no chance at all of accessing any "government money", so we are really working our existing systems just to try to bring in some liquidity by quick in and out action. So far this is working, but it is absolutely crazy.
We have non-trading long-term positions on the left side of a tradional barbell, and these are just getting slaughtered. It feels like stories I read about in wartime, those First World War stories. Your whole "picture of the world" falls apart, and suddenly, all that crazy, hacky stuff you thought you would never really need or use (like the gas-mask in the garage) - suddenly, it's the stuff that is keeping you alive, and your economic and technical process actually working.
So, I am going thru notes, and invoking stuff that we documented back in 1987 ( mkt crash), and in 1998 (Russian Default), and of course the 9/11 stuff, which was short and sharp, and followed by a big pop. But the data this time suggests no - too much has been badly damaged already. So we are mainly working on a plan to survive economically, for the next 12 months.
We should be OK, but only because we had these backup Plan B and Plan C's and such. We went to Costco two days ago, and a hundred people were lined up, out into the parking lot, as "social distancing" was being enforced. It's making us pull out the SHTF playbook plans. It could all be summed up as "We are reviewing our strategies for maximum independece, and actively working to enhance our capacity for fully independent action." And I am reviewing all my Linux notes - we have several flavours of Linux boxes, that run the analytic and data management stuff. Need to ensure we can keep on keeping on. So far, it's all ticking along ok, but it's all up to us now. We are learning to be 100% self-supporting, I guess would sum it up. So far, it's working. But it's a new world now. We are all going to need a lot of different skills.
Add me on epic: Rhett800cc
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/04/marxism.htm
As an ENFP I can't just sit and learn one thing at once, so I tend to cycle (with no particular pattern) through the following:
Graph Algorithms A combination of learning on edx.org, and also reading through Tim Roughgardens graph algorithms book. Both are quite technical and take me quite a long time to digest the info. Sometimes I digress to dig deeper into things like Big O notation and the mathematical reasoning behind things like why you can drop constants and lower order terms, but on the whole really enjoying the materials. https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:UCSanDiegoX+ALGS20... https://www.amazon.com.au/Algorithms-Illuminated-Part-Graph-...
Operating Systems Udacity's Intro to Operating Systems course (https://classroom.udacity.com/courses/ud923) Have also downloaded but not yet started reading "Operating Systems Concepts - 10th edition" which you can get from https://www.os-book.com/ I've only just started going through these, but essentially I feel like it's an area I'm lacking in terms of my understanding. When people talk about things like the Linux Kernel - before I really had no real idea of what that actually meant, and I feel like even with a few hours doing the course I am starting to have a much better idea of how things are put together.
Coding interviews I signed up to https://www.techseries.dev/ and have started going through the problems in CoderPro that came along with the expensive $500-$1000 course. The coderpro course is basically just them going through leetcode questions... they even show that that's what they're doing in some of the videos. The main course is OK, but a bit basic. I also have "Grokking the System Design Interview" course and I find that really good for showing how others actually think about and step through system design questions. I'd highly recommend this https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-system-design-.... I also have Cracking the Coding Interview - http://www.crackingthecodinginterview.com/ which I've been using from time to time as well. I highly recommend this book, I find her step by step approach really insightful, and the book covers a crazy amount of material (it's a big book - Gayle Laakmann Mcdowell is a friggin machine).
Go Programming I've been learning Go and using it to code up coding challenges. For Learning Go I've got a hard copy of "The Go Programming Language" which is really good and thorough - https://www.amazon.com.au/Programming-Language-Addison-Wesle...
I also did a course on Udemy https://www.udemy.com/course/go-golang-programming-course which I highly recommend for getting up to speed quickly. I also started going through Todd Mcleod's Go Clinic on Lynda - that was really good, but I didn't want to pay a monthly subscription so put that on pause for now. The GoClinic course is here https://www.lynda.com/Go-tutorials/Code-Clinic-Go/439416-2.h...
I initially was following along with Handmade Hero a series that I have been going back to frequently over the past few years.
The series is great but I wanted something more guided so I am eyeing purchasing Game Coding Complete. It teaches the internals of a game engine and uses DirectX for rendering.
https://www.amazon.com/Game-Coding-Complete-Fourth-McShaffry...
Because deliveries are on lock down in my country the book will have to wait.
So right now I have gone through SDL tutorials (there was a recent update to the LazyFoo SDL tutorial) and am currently finishing OpenGL.
http://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/SDL/index.php https://learnopengl.com/
Finally, I've been checking out repositories of open source game engines and poking around their codes. interesting ones are below:
Godot - Probably a lot of people already know about this one
https://github.com/godotengine/godot
Pyxel - A fantasy game engine similar to Pico8 written in Python, uses SDL
https://github.com/kitao/pyxel
Wicked Engine - Haven't poked around much with this yet but the screenshots looks gorgeous
https://github.com/turanszkij/WickedEngine/blob/master/READM...
Finally here's the video that got me interested in game engines. I saw this years ago but saw it again recently while researching. It's a 2.5d game engine that makes great use of lighting while combining 2d sprites and 3d models.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q6ISVaM5Ww
Here's a second video that shows off a winter weather which boggled my mind when I first saw it.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vtYvNEmmHXE#
Sorry for the dump, was excited to share these.
It looks like theres basically two suggestions:
A) Following the same sort of curriculum a university would teach. I'd have to manage to dredge through the math, but I suppose it's possible but would lead to probably the most competence. Unfortunately however, I was hoping for the big MOOC sites to have more content. EdX has some decent introductory stuff but not much beyond that.
B) The other recommended way is the hobbyist way and what I suspect most other software people wouldnauggest which is just building shit that interests you, ignoring first principles. Unfortunately I'm not sure how this would work out, since my projects in any domain seem to be a bit, er, grand and you supposedly need a strong math background to build anything more than basic circuits.
I'd dread the math a lot less if it were more cut and dry. I wish I could just jump right to calc, differential equations, linear algebra, etc. But more realistically, it would involve me hunt and picking parts of algebra and embarrassingly even simpler stuff. I was looking at some Khan academy stuff and while it turns out I remember more than I thought, theres still plenty I had forgot even existed.
Another alternative that seems good, but not realistic is that there are some community colleges that have professional certificates that teach electronic circuits pretty quickly. Unfortunately this is prohibited by the absolutely fucked "residency requirements" for this state whereby I wont be a resident of my current state for years (at least for tuition purposes, I'm a resident for just about everything in a few months). Also those courses are all in person which, for some unique reasons dont fit my life situation.