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There is no spoon – A software engineers primer for demystified ML

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Re: There is no spoon – A software engineers primer for demystified ML

#11

Post by jmatthews »

bonoboTP wrote: post #9

Just read a good textbook instead of this LLM-written stuff. For example those by Murphy or Prince or Bishop. Or one of many YouTube lecture series from MIT or Stanford. There are many primer 101 tutorials and Medium posts. But if you actually want to learn instead of procrastinating, pick up a real textbook or work through a course.

I've bounced off of many good textbooks. Even Karpathy's YouTube series was too dense for me. I'm trying to come in at a more palatable level.

This was a two day exploration where I provided the syllabus and ran through it with Claude Code, asking questions, trying to anchor it to stuff I understand well. I feel like the artifact has value.

Re: There is no spoon – A software engineers primer for demystified ML

#12

Post by zar1048576 »

Nice weekend project! Even though there are copious resources out there (textbooks, videos, etc.), those may not appeal to everyone. People have different preferred modalities for consuming information and there is always value in (correctly) reframing concepts in a way that can be better understood by people who don’t resonate with traditional textbooks and YouTube videos. I’m glad you found a formulation that works for you, and judging by the number of upvotes, it resonated with others as well. At the very least, I’m sure that working on this improved your understanding as well!

Re: There is no spoon – A software engineers primer for demystified ML

#13

Post by bonoboTP »

jmatthews wrote: post #11
bonoboTP wrote: post #9

Just read a good textbook instead of this LLM-written stuff. For example those by Murphy or Prince or Bishop. Or one of many YouTube lecture series from MIT or Stanford. There are many primer 101 tutorials and Medium posts. But if you actually want to learn instead of procrastinating, pick up a real textbook or work through a course.

I've bounced off of many good textbooks. Even Karpathy's YouTube series was too dense for me. I'm trying to come in at a more palatable level. This was a two day exploration where I provided the syllabus and ran through it with Claude Code, asking questions, trying to anchor it to stuff I understand well. I feel like the artifact has value.

I think chatting with an llm alongside a textbook can be helpful but producing learning material when you yourself are a novice is not really that valuable.

Re: There is no spoon – A software engineers primer for demystified ML

#14

Post by antonvs »

jmatthews wrote: post #11
bonoboTP wrote: post #9

Just read a good textbook instead of this LLM-written stuff. For example those by Murphy or Prince or Bishop. Or one of many YouTube lecture series from MIT or Stanford. There are many primer 101 tutorials and Medium posts. But if you actually want to learn instead of procrastinating, pick up a real textbook or work through a course.

I've bounced off of many good textbooks. Even Karpathy's YouTube series was too dense for me. I'm trying to come in at a more palatable level. This was a two day exploration where I provided the syllabus and ran through it with Claude Code, asking questions, trying to anchor it to stuff I understand well. I feel like the artifact has value.

It's AI slop. You're letting a machine gaslight you.

Re: There is no spoon – A software engineers primer for demystified ML

#16

Post by NewsaHackO »

bonoboTP wrote: post #13
jmatthews wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've bounced off of many good textbooks. Even Karpathy's YouTube series was too dense for me. I'm trying to come in at a more palatable level. This was a two day exploration where I provided the syllabus and ran through it with Claude Code, asking questions, trying to anchor it to stuff I understand well. I feel like the artifact has value.

I think chatting with an llm alongside a textbook can be helpful but producing learning material when you yourself are a novice is not really that valuable.

Yes, and it is borderline irresponsible to even make this.

Re: There is no spoon – A software engineers primer for demystified ML

#17

Post by mememememememo »

bonoboTP wrote: post #9

Just read a good textbook instead of this LLM-written stuff. For example those by Murphy or Prince or Bishop. Or one of many YouTube lecture series from MIT or Stanford. There are many primer 101 tutorials and Medium posts. But if you actually want to learn instead of procrastinating, pick up a real textbook or work through a course.

Or just train some NNs. If more time write the code and understand the tensor operations.

Re: There is no spoon – A software engineers primer for demystified ML

#18

Post by TheTaytay »

jmatthews wrote: post #2

This is my weekend project. I am building up my pattern recognition in machine learning. By that I mean see X problem, instantly think of Y solution. The primer markdown file is the artifact of that exploration. read it from top to bottom or better have your favorite language model read it and then explore the space with a strong guided syllabus.

I quite liked this. It feels approachable and to-the-point.

Re: There is no spoon – A software engineers primer for demystified ML

#20

Post by ggambetta »

whoamii wrote: post #10

Feature request for HN, Adblocker, etc: please block pages with the text “it isn’t X, it is Y”.

Can we also ban anything where the second line is "let that sink in"? And anything claiming that "X is a masterclass in Y" (especially for (tweet, empathy))?
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