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Also, I recommend people who have space buy old issues of Unix Magazine and Unix Review, which were interesting for both historical and technical reasons (lots of pro scripts.)
Byte was a great general purpose magazine, but was also too thick (ads) for most people to archive.
For ML, you have to read papers and fill in the gaps. Learn the basics enough to be able to slog through the vocabulary and math, then try to turn theory into reality.
For crypto, everything cool that happens in public happens on Twitter. There are news aggregators for crypto news, but it all happens on Twitter first.
It seems it takes more personal effort to get to the cutting edge these days. That could be because this edge is always getting farther away from the starting point, the blank slate of ignorant childhood.
It felt amazing in the 1990s when you were a teenager staring at the same 184 lego bricks for 6 months
But now you're older and blind to interesting new things because you're looking for new things in a bucket of new things
It feels like very few new things come out.. (I'm ignoring anything "as a service" and anything that requires an Internet connection).
And yes I recognize that businesses need to make money I just despise the saaslife
Weird and wonderful tech is by definition something that threatens the status quo, and having a public presence could attract unwanted attention by hostile journalists or even law enforcement. This has been called the dark forest theory of the internet. Being unsearchable also raises the the barrier to entry and keeps newbies out - besides not having to deal with them, this also keeps more in the pot for you if you ever figure out a monetization path.
Unfortunately I never got on the cool Discords or whatever in time to know the details of or network myself into these communities. But I’m pretty sure there are people printing pharmaceuticals in their garage with bacteria right now. DIYbio is fascinating (like the guy who made his own vaccine) but there’s no primer or news site about it - you’re going to have to dig hard and actually talk to people to get informed. I know for a fact there are people printing and inventing new firearms and things like electrical primers.
There are cool things (for a certain definition of cool - not necessarily positive) going on with cryptocurrencies - check out rekt.news for a sample of what’s going on. They are covering heists, but the details tell you a lot: did you know you can take out a loan of $100M right now with zero credit or identity checks? You just have to pay it back in the same transaction.
So fining headlines isn't hard, I think the real value these days, which didn't exist prior to YouTube becoming huge, is that now you can actually really dive into these things in a way that was incredibly inaccessible before.
Take self-driving cars: You'll see the usual dismissive crap here, but then you can go on YouTube and you can watch Karpathy talk for hours about how they're building their system. Then you can go watch someone like Yannic Kilcher talk about Karpathy's presentation, explain pappers on which the work is based, etc. Then you can go watch AI DRIVR test the latest iteration in the real world. Because there's so much content, you can basically find content at every level, from basic pop-documentary explainers all the way to lectures and paper analysis, allowing you to gradually go deeper and deeper.
Rockets and Space? Scott Manley and EverydayAstronaut will explain missions, engines, everything. SmallStars has amazing visuals. EVs? Sandy Munro will tear down an entire car and show you every single little thing in there. Electric Flight? "Electric Aviation" will explain the engineering tradeoffs between Lillium's small ducted fans and Joby's large propeller design. Biology? iBiology let's you dive into any current reserach (Synthic Bio, Connectome scanning, using DNA as structural material). You can just keep going like that for anything, it's just plain amazing.
https://hackaday.com/ and the podcast that goes with it.
My theory is that it has basically gone underground (private groups on Slack, Signal, Discord, etc and maybe some public-yet-opaque activity on Twitter) along with much of the rest of the internet. Weird and wonderful tech is by definition something that threatens the status quo, and having a public presence could attract unwanted attention by hostile journalists or even law enforcement. This has been called the dark…