The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Notes -
I hit 15k in MathAcademy today. It feels nice, beyond that, not much. I am trying to stick to a schedule so that I can do my sabbatical well. Life's not ideal, I am still grateful to be where I am, as long as I get the work ethic I desire, I do not have much to complain about. I am nearly a quarter of the way through with object oriented python which is my first intermediate programming book. If I can do it by next week, I will be super happy!
I hit 15k this week, too. I finished up Math for Machine Learning, and it looks like it covered about 60% each of Linear Algebra and Stats, and 30% of Multivariable Calculus, so now I'm going back and finishing up the remainder of those courses while I wait for them to finish up Machine Learning I.
Congrats, I will do Math for ML after I finish Discrete Math, I am on Methods of Proof for now. The main bottleneck for being a good deep learning practitioner is programming, according to Howard. I am down to 45 XP daily, will do some more math via other sources in that time.
How did you start MathAcademy? Where did you learn about them?
From this thread on X (here if you don't have an account) back in April. People were dunking on him because he made it sound like he was struggling with basic algebra, though he later admitted that he was being disingenuous and just wasn't spending time on it because was busy with other things. I saw it when TracingWoodgrains linked to it here (no-account link and decided to give it a try. I've always kind of regretted not taking more math classes in college, so this seemed like a good way.
It turned out that I've already taken some version of every class they currently offer as part of my CS degree, but a lot of the material I either never learned or have completely forgotten, and the classes currently under development (other than CS I) are totally new to me. Weirdly, I took the equivalent of Methods of Proof my first year of college, and I have no recollection of it at all. It's not just that I'd forgotten the material, but that the only reason I know I took it is that I ordered a copy of my transcript last month.
Who's Howard?
Jeremy Howard runs fast.ai.
You got 15k xp in 4 months? Pretty sweet, I skipped literally everything in college, so getting a decent XP is slightly harder for me. I learnt nothing beyond the 9th grade, even though I got an undergrad degree 2 years ago. I was doing 180 XP daily at my peak but have always had consistency issues. I wish I were more consistent.
Trace knows a lot of cool, helpful people in the learning sphere, a lot of them are rationalist adjacent.
I got about 8k my first month, 4k the next, and have really slowed down the last two months as I hit stuff that's new/completely forgotten. A couple times in the past two months I've had to go back and spend a day or two just doing some uncredited reviews of things I'd forgotten. Reviews are undertuned and don't come often enough, IMO.
The first month was just a review of high school math, so I speed ran it.
How did your graduate without passing math classes?
I did pass them via cramming stuff instead of developing any real mastery which was stupid of me.
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