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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   3038 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 20, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Looking to educate myself about AI and the various concepts, possibilities and probabilities surrounding it. I know very little about it other than what I see here (which is often over my technical level) and what hits the news, which I assume to be alarmist and often technically-illiterate. My preferred way of deep-diving something is an audiobook or a podcast since I can listen while doing chores/working out/etc. Anyone got anyone recommendations. On a not-unrelated note, is anyone aware of any apps which convert pdfs or epubs into audio files?

Andrej Karpathy is a cofounder of Open-Ai and he has a course named Neural Networks: Zero to Hero. It requires some coding knowledge, but by the end you will understand what a neural net is and a very basic version of GPT and how a tokenizer works. That should give you at least a generalist understand of what is going on with LLMs. I went over it as a software developer and found it enlightening.

I think it's important to have a basic overview of how neural networks (and transformers in particular) work. I did my last deep dive on the subject before all of the videos in this 3Blue1Brown playlist were made, so I can't vouch for all of them in particular, but I think he does a good job of explaining things in general.

Depends on how deep in the technical weeds you want to go.

  • Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction by Barton and Sutton.
  • Deep Learning, by Goodfellow, Bengio and Courville.

Probably good starting spots. I'd advise to stay away from AI Safety literature, it's definitely going to be more digestible but without an understanding of how AI actually works, its will be pretty hard to separate "what is true" from "what is a cargo-cultist belief based on science-fiction literature".

I recommend Robert Miles' videos. Start with Intro to AI Safety and Why Would AI Want to do Bad Things? Instrumental Convergence. Most of his videos were created prior to the release of ChatGPT, but the concepts are all applicable to modern agentic AI. He also made a series of videos on the Computerphile channel that are a good watch (or listen).

For your second question, check out epub2tts or epub2tts-edge

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