Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

Title could also be “How to train biological neural networks” - Andrej Karpathy

I don't miss university at all. In hindsight most of it was a scam and I learnt most things on my own either by opening a book, starting my own project or through research.

You don't need a 50 point list to learn anything even to a proficient level. Exams are bullshit.

Some more advice:

Tests are all bullshit. They are just some arbitrary questions, trying to figure out whether you understood the material, which were made up by some guy who has much more important things to do.

If you want to spend your time well, either do networking or try to understand the material. If you are there trying to game the system (which hilariously Karpathy is suggesting you do, in a very mild way) then you should seriously consider why you are there in the first place.

Also consider that when you are tested outside of school you will always be tested to face to face.

Ah, the thin font inspired by Apple's iOS 7 Helvetica font that ruined the readability of web content for a decade...

Is there a way to enforce non-thin fonts on web pages in the browser?

I have a tip for following lectures (or any technical talk, really) that I've been meaning to write about for a while.

As you follow along with the speaker, try to predict what they will say next. These can be either local or global predictions. Guess what they will write next, or what will be on the next slide. With some practice (and exposure to the subject area) you can usually get it right. Also try to keep track of how things fit into the big picture. For example in a math class, there may be a big theorem that they're working towards using lots of smaller lemmas. How will it all come together?

When you get it right, it will feel like you are figuring out the material on your own, rather than having it explained to you. This is the most important part.

If you can manage to stay one step ahead of the lecturer, it will keep you way more engaged than trying to write everything down. Writing puts you one step behind what the speaker is saying. Because of this, I usually don't take any notes at all. It obviously works better when lecture notes are made available, but you can always look at the textbook.

People often assume that I have read the material or otherwise prepared for lectures, seminars, etc., because of how closely I follow what the speaker is saying. But really most talks are quite logical, and if you stay engaged it's easy to follow along. The key is to not zone out or break your concentration, and I find this method helps me immensely.