TIL they somewhat resurrected Google Music and raised the limit (I think it was 20k on that). I used Google Music for years because it seemed like only Spotify and them figured out reliable caching on mobile, other services when I'd lose signal they'd give up trying to stream... even noticing recently apple music is not super reliable with that.
https://www.mathacademy.com/ is a great combination of structured learning across an incremental skill tree with practise problems to prove to yourself that you understand. It’s a big commitment but helped me go from “hasn’t done any math for a while and probably missed some basics” to much more comfortable. You can do the self-test to pick a starting level and work up from there.
As with many things you basically have to sit down and do the work, though, you’re not going to get better just by inhaling books and videos. MA isn’t a fun/gamified learning platform like Duolingo, the ‘fun’ comes from putting the work in and seeing yourself improve. For me it went from a grind initially to something I enjoyed doing.
https://www.geogebra.org/ is also worth exploring for its novel visual approach, but is much more rudimentary, less challenging, and less deep than MA.
I second this. Mathacademy is great and there is no way OP would be able to just jump into university-level math courser without re-learning prerequisites, considering they said that they forgot most of the school-level math.
I third MathAcademy. I graduated high school >25 years ago with almost no math skills and had a major struggle with the math prerequisites for my CS degree ~15 years ago. I've been wanting to get into higher math recently, so a few months back I started hitting MathAcademy heavily. Its structure and modularity is exactly what I needed.
> Its structure and modularity is exactly what I needed.
Through great effort, I completed Mathematical Foundations I & II. I talked about it a bit here [1][2]. If you read through MathAcademy's methodology and reasoning, it's incredibly strong [3], but in practice I never felt confident in my understanding or execution, everything felt quite discrete and I didn't understand the relationships or purposes of what I was doing. I kept going because I was getting better, and because people online who were quite good at math said not to try too hard to understand things fully at first, since the abstraction level of math is so high.
The weeks before finishing MFII, my motivation was higher than ever. The day I finished, I felt nothing, and in the following weeks I decided that it was time to let it go for now.
I think MA is good. I've never done so many exercises in my life, and although I wasn't super confident, I was far better at math than I'd ever been. But I think MA probably needs a lot more multi-part exercises so you understand what you're doing and where to use things. I feel like I learned "Discrete Math", but in the sense that all the lessons were discrete and I couldn't draw connections between them.
(I'm actually set to complete Mathematical Foundations II next week, after completing Mathematical Foundations I recently.)
Thank you for your comment. I had a very nontraditional path to engineering, even in an era of self-taught programmers, and I feel a lot of pain and despair and bitterness and, uh, a vicarious feeling of disappointment, I guess... so discussing this sort of journey does me some good.
> I feel like I learned "Discrete Math", but in the sense that all the lessons were discrete and I couldn't draw connections between them.
Very reasonable takes. I think you're spot on. I do have a lot of trouble with the abstractness and disjointedness of it. I'm hoping that repetition will improve it. So far I'm still struggling with the same things I struggled with in college - combinatorics, for whatever reason, just seems to slide right out of my brain.
By "modularity" I meant that I could squeeze in 10-15 minutes here or there without having to commit multiple hours to a single concept, and that I could take a day off without destroying anything, but that's probably connected to the "discreteness" you mention, without a holistic, oceanic kind of cohesion or connectedness.
I'm actually working on a project now, an educational site that's kind of along these lines but focused on areas of CS I've always struggled with - Lambda Calculus, Type Theory, Lisp, that sort of thing. I think I have some good ideas. I hope I come up with more, because I definitely want to build a rich mesh of knowledge rather than a catalog of disconnected facts and tools without any underlying meaning.
…at least if you let these things autopilot your machine.
I haven’t seen a great solution to this from the new wave of agentic IDEs, at least to protect users who won’t read every command, understand and approve it manually.
Education could help, both in encouraging people to understand what they’re doing, but also to be much clearer to people that turning on “Turbo” or “YOLO” modes risks things like full disk deletion (and worse when access to prod systems is involved).
Even the name, “Turbo” feels irresponsible because it focusses on the benefits rather than the risks. “Risky” or “Danger” mode would be more accurate even if it’s a hard sell to the average Google PM.
“I toggled Danger mode and clicked ‘yes I understand that this could destroy everything I know and love’ and clicked ‘yes, I’m sure I’m sure’ and now my drive is empty, how could I possibly have known it was dangerous” seems less likely to appear on Reddit.
I don’t think there is a solution. It’s the way LLMs work at a fundamental level.
It’s a similar reason why they can never be trusted to handle user input.
They are probabilistic generators and have no real delineation between system instructions and user input.
It’s like I wrote a JavaScript function where I concatenated the function parameters together with the function body, passed it to eval() and said YOLO.
Sandboxing. LLM shouldn't be able to run actions affecting anything outside of your project. And ideally the results should autocommit outside of that directory. Then you can yolo as much as you want.
The danger is that the people most likely to try to use it, are the people most likely to misunderstand/anthropomorphize it, and not have a requisite technical background.
I.e. this is just not safe, period.
"I stuck it outside the sandbox because it told me how, and it murdered my dog!"
Seems somewhat inevitable result of trying to misapply this particular control to it...
I've been using bubblewrap for sandboxing my command line executables. But I admit I haven't recently researched if there's a newer way people are handling this. Seems Firejail is popular for GUI apps? How do you recommend, say, sandboxing Zed or Cursor apps?
If they're that unsafe... why use them? It's insane to me that we are all just packaging up these token generators and selling them as highly advanced products when they are demonstrably not suited to the tasks. Tech has entered it's quackery phase.
If chainsaws, plasma cutters, industrial lathes, hydraulic presses, angle grinders, acetylene torches, high-voltage switchgear, forklifts, tower cranes, liquid nitrogen dewars, industrial centrifuges, laser cutting systems, pneumatic nail guns, wood chippers, arc furnaces, motorcycles, wall outlets, natural gas stoves, pressure cookers, ladders, automobiles, table saws, propane tanks, swimming pools, garbage disposals, mandoline slicers, deep fryers, space heaters, extension cords, bleach/cleaning chemicals, prescription medications, kitchen knives, power drills, roof access, bathtubs, staircases, bicycles, and trampolines are that unsafe… why use them?
If all those things suddenly appeared for the first time on a Tuesday afternoon, like to many people how LLMs did, then there will be a lot of missing fingers before we figure out what kind of protections we need in place. Don’t get me wrong, the industry is overhyping it to the masses and using the wrong words while doing so, like calling an arc welder “warmth at the push of a button”, but it’s still useful for the right situation and with the right protective gear.
The solution I go for is, don't ever run a coding agent on a general purpose machine.
Use a container or VM, place the code you're working on in the container or VM and run the agent there.
Between the risk of the agent doing things like what happened here, and the risk of working on a malicious repository causing your device to be compromised, it seems like a bad plan to give them access to any more than necessary.
Of course this still risks losing things like the code you're working on, but decent git practices help to mitigate that risk.
I really wish these agentic systems had built in support for spinning up containers with a work tree of the repo. Then you could have multiple environments and a lot more safety.
I'm also surprised at the move to just using shell commands. I'd think an equally general purpose tool with a more explicit API could make checking permissions on calls a lot more sensible.
Superficially, these look the same, but at least to me they feel fundamental different. Maybe it’s because if I have the ability to read the script and take the time to do so, I can be sure that it won’t cause a catastrophic outcome before running it. If I choose to run an agent in YOLO mode, this can just happen if I’m very unlucky. No way to proactively protect against it other than not use AI in this way.
I've seen many smart people make bone headed mistakes. The more I work with AI, the more I think the issue is that it acts too much like a person. We're used to computers acting like computers, not people with all their faults heh.
Plus a lot of experience, creativity, and artistry to solve other challenges (e.g. shaders, shadows) and wire everything together into this pretty performant piece of art.
The studio also has a case study here of another project they made, with other hints about their tooling and process:
Just for anyone like me who played this and spent the whole time thinking, "this is beautiful, who are you and how did you make this?" The author names are only revealed in the credits at the end:
On that subject, and since the Summer Afternoon direct link was not provided, can anybody actually get the project to work? Apparently made it on to HN 2.5 years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34461808 Not sure if its just my system, yet I always start stuck in the ground unable to move.
Ok, thanks. Firefox, Windows was what was tried. Seems to have issues. Try Chrome and see if it works better. EDIT: Yep, works on Chrome, Windows. Must be a Firefox specific issue / feature not supported.
This is impressive but I don't get it. All that work and you have a game written in JS of all things. Why not write it in a desktop language und port it to JS. Now this will always need a browser to run, feels like a waste of time to me.
- This will _only_ need a browser to run. No console. No PC rig. No Steam account. No account at all. You just need a link to play it.
- Why use a heavy game engine and all the baggage that can bring when you can make a lightweight prototype in JS, prove value in the browser, then port to desktop if you choose to.
Electron and native do not belong in the same sentence AFAIK unless you mean 'native to the browser (which happens to be included in the package)'. Tauri is the same, just bring your own 'browser' (webview, really).
We all build on top of something. Today’s browser will look like a native platform in another 20 years. Just like assembly does to our point of view today.
> react better for job and also some type application, but also you become alcolyte of complexity demon whether you like or no, sorry such is front end life
I have a blog post draft called, “5 principals of interactive animation” aping the “12 principles of animation” from the 80's that I thought every would-be UX designer might learn from. It mirrors a lot from this post!
> Age verification: If we incorrectly estimate a user to be under 18, the user has the option to correct their age, including by uploading a photo of their government ID or a selfie.
Hopefully false positives won't be set high and this abused as an excuse to obtain sensitive personal information on their users.
"I saw that. What do you farm?"
"It's a protein farm. Wallace design."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jCjB-hFhWk
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