The struggle with being self-taught is that you don’t know what you don’t know. This is probably even worse in areas like Unity, where the coding part is sort of a sideshow to the main event. Nowadays the problem is you lack the discernment to evaluate AI output.

I wrote The Conputer Science Book (https://a.co/d/01e62STx) to act as that basic building block and help orient self-taught developers.

What did come out from the blog post though:

- OP writes really well

- OP has learned to be very honest with themselves (and I hope not too self-critical now)

- OP seems really good at delivering things people like, even if they’re a bit cobbled together

All of which are very valuable and harder to learn than programming fundamentals tbh.

- OP takes rectifying what they deem to be deficiencies seriously, and actively work to fill those gaps.

At first I was reading the article thinking "wtf, that can't be real" and by the end felt I had respect for OP, both for their self-reflection and their willingness to put in the effort to learn. Admirable, really.

I suggest an edit to fix the typo.

yes, but he knew. i mean he should have known that he used stuff without knowing why.

i am mostly self taught too, and i agree with your statement, but i don't see an excuse for using stuff and not trying to understand why. i mean sure, when i follow a tutorial , at first i'll copy things i don't understand, but do that a few times, understanding should eventually come. that's how i learned how OO programming works. i followed the motions for a while, and one morning i woke up and it clicked. if you keep using something without understanding it, then it is time to ask questions. what is this thing that i keep using? how does it actually work, and what are other ways to solve the same problem?

things that i don't know are things that i never came across. i just recently had an interview that asked me questions where i honestly had to respond: i never touched this issue in my programming career so i can't give you an answer, just my best guess. but i never had a situation where i kept using something without eventually understanding why.

We all use stuff without knowing why. Many of the folks on here are deeply curious people who love learning about the world around them, especially for the tools we use in our daily careers and hobbies, but even then there's a huge number of things in our lives that we just do because it's what we do and it works. If you went to a "being a person" interview, and they asked you why you used a bow knot to tie your shoes and what the pros and cons of it were versus other knots, would you really have an answer?

actually, yes i would.

ok, to be fair, i have been sailing, so i learned a thing or two about knots, but i am also the inquisitive type that questions why things are the way they are. (your typical HN reader, as you say, i suppose). furthermore i have been moving around in the world a lot, which has naturally challenged many preconceived ideas.

i guess maybe my point is that being inquisitive is a natural part of learning and we should all be inquisitive when learning something.

i am unable to come up with an example of doing something without thinking about it, but i guess that is another case of not knowing what i don't know, or rather i can't think about it because i am not thinking about it.

Super interesting company and I like the ambition. Sheffield does have a growing number of “deep tech” startups and university spin outs but not so many HN-style startups. This is probably a good thing long term but it does mean companies fly under the radar somewhat. Sadly salaries still lag too.

Do you just go for the market salary and treat the equity as a minor plus?

I stopped reading his Substack because he was always trying to find a negative. Meanwhile I use LLMs most days and find them very useful.

It’s a bit much, isn’t it? I think he’s just trying to counter the fairly dominant AI is the future of everything and in less than a year’s time it’ll be omniscient and we’ll all be living under it as our new God view though.

It can be nice to see some scepticism for once.

Philosophy has always appealed to me but disappointed because it never seems to settle on answers. There’s a bit in the book where Kleene (I think?) is advising young academic philosophers to go into logic instead as at least there they’ll get answers.

Someone in the book describes philosophy’s truth value as less like scientific inquiry and more like poetry done in logical argument. That seemed like a potentially valuable way of looking at it.

Science "has no answers" either if you deny its premises.

So all systems of "answers" are just systems where we find some set of propositions so nearly certain that we take them as axioms and hence believe what follows.

You can, and indeed should, do this with philosophy too. If you find that science has answers, then just take its premises as axiomatic -- and throw away all philosophy which denies them.

That arguments can be advanced against those premises has no epistemic status. Arguments can be advanced against any arguments. And move to "deny the premieses" is always available.

Sceptics regard this as interesting and important. It isnt. Knowledge, truth, belief, reality etc. are not set by what has arguments. The hidden premise to this scepticism is that "cognition & arugmentation are the foundation of knowledge & reality" -- deny this, and the whole manic schizophrenic enterprise disappears in a puff.

Philosophy, then, has tones and tones of answers.

There is a significant amount of question-answering going on.

That these answers come to be fundamental to other disciplines is the success of philosophy, and obvious. Those other disciplines are where philosophical premeses are taken as certain.

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”»

Does it not leave inaccessible vast swathes of philosophy where, almost by definition, science cannot contribute answers? Such as the nature of numbers and other metaphysical things.

I haven’t heard of the areas you mention in a sibling comment, so I’ll look them up. Do you find that you need to refocus attention to areas where scientific premises are useful as axioms so that progress can be made?

“From its earliest origins in ancient Greece, Western philosophy has gained its identity through a contrast with sophistry. If sophistry is non-rational, cynical, manipulative, then philosophy represents a rejection of it, by committing itself to rational, disinterested persuasion.”

I have UK A level math but not Further Math, so up to basic calculus. But I forgot most of it and so Math Academy has me going through a lot of the Math Foundation units along the way.

I was initially put off by the monthly price, as it is quite steep. The clincher is that about a year before starting Math Academy I had gone through the Open University’s MST124/125 textbooks (covering the same stuff as Foundations). Except even after a year I’d already forgotten most of it.

Math Academy learning feels much more robust, since it includes spaced reviews and regular tests. I record things in Anki but it’s useful to have regular practice questions too. I also use ChatGPT to spell out things and find it works well at this level.

Some things I’d like Math Academy to have:

- ability to skip lessons (I don’t want to spend ages going over symbolic integration again)

- a reference page to track unlocked material, maybe with Anki integration

- fewer multiple choice questions and more in depth problems

- proof-based math. I’m told this is coming but the degree-level courses have missed their estimated due dates.

I will definitely finish Math for ML and then do linear algebra and multivariate calculus. You’d still need a good textbook to do them rigorously, but I think Math Academy sets you up well.

Thanks for your comments. In response to the things you'd like us to have:

"ability to skip lessons" - we plan on introducing "mini-diagnostics" sometime soon, hopefully within the next few months. This will allow students to "place out" of certain content they know. The primary diagnostic assessment will have done most of the grunt work here, but mini-diagnostics can be used for fine-tuning the knowledge frontier.

"a reference page to track unlocked material" - This is an interesting idea that we can discuss.

"fewer multiple choice questions" - We're actively introducing "Free Response" across the entire curriculum. Complete coverage across all courses will likely take several months, maybe over one year. Many of our lower-grade students should be seeing lots of free-response questions already.

"more in-depth problems" - we have multipart problems in most courses. We plan to add many more. Introducing "challenge problems" into the curriculum is also something we have planned for the near future.

"proof-based math" - We plan on launching our "Methods of Proof" course within the next 6-8 weeks. This course is designed to introduce students to all fundamental concepts related to proof building: sets, logic, functions, relations, cardinality, proof by induction, direct proofs, counterexample, contrapositive, contradiction, and trivial and vacuous proofs, to name a few. Most of the content is already ready. We have a few technical challenges to overcome before it can be launched due to our new "proof" question format, but we have a clear idea of how these challenges are to be resolved, so 6-8 weeks is certainly realistic.

If this is implemented to resemble an "upgrade tree" found in games, I bet it could work as an extra motivator for the kid audiences.

Where do you find this shared view of what is considered the least valuable part of the curriculum?

“Oh what we mean by that is actually the opposite where we want to redistribute funding in different ways blah blah blah”.

And all a critic has to do is “left wing radicals say they want to defund the police”.

I suspect they're rather hard to coin.

But there's a good reason why defund/abolish the police is sticking around - because a significant part of the activists do mean it [1] (ACAB didn't come from nowhere), and the moderate faction that doesn't mean it literally is unwilling to part from the radical faction that does.

Anyone supporting the moderate faction is in a thorny position - do they think the moderates will grow a spine and stand up to the radicals once they've achieved their goals, or will they continue to meekly let the radicals set the agenda?

[1] Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police [..] There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo. - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...