Military funding of terrorists is nothing new.

Pakistan as a proxy state of the US created the Taliban in Afghanistan.

US wanted religiously motivated fighters countering the USSR. Pakistan, armed with US weapon, and flush with US money, obliged.

Taliban was actually created at the behest of the US.

It is an open secret.

The US, to counter Al-Assad, armed and funded Al-Noosra front. Much, if not most of the money and weapons went to the ISIS.

In the case of Al-Noosra turned ISIS, the US has plausible deniability. It doesn't even have that much of it in case of the next generation of the Mujahids fighting the USSR being turned into the Taliban.

Exactly. When I find overlapping content in MOOCs, it becomes very annoying. I don't want to miss out a valuable insight I might gain listening to a different instructor speaking for a different point-of-view. The RoI is quite low. But it has happened in the past, so I don't want to skip overlapping content. So listening to it while tidying up or cleaning the desk makes sense.

And for new content, I never watch lectures with other things. I never did. And I still find 2-4 minutes videos annoying as hell.

1. Correct my posture while not outside. For the most parts of my life, I had really bad posture. I would study on bed, code ln bed, and watch movies on bed. Half lying, fully lying, straining my whole upper body. Since two years, I always sit on chairs. I only sleep on bed, and that's it.

2. I used to brush my teeth once a day. Now I brush my teeth after every meal.

3. Exercising everyday. I now spend anywhere between 10 minutes to 90 every day for exercising.

4. Social media. I was a victim of doomscroll. And I identified that it was more of a symptom than a cause, but it is also a cause in itself. If you want to avoid doing something, if you go for a walk, or read something, sooner or later you'd get back to it. Here's where peer-to-peer media is exceptional. There is no end of content. And procrastination takes up most of your day. I limited social media use to 30 inutes a day. The same time everyday. I don't pull up my phone even wjen standing in queue, or while cooking. Much better time management and concentration.

5. For five hours or so have been drinking water immediately after I wake up.

6. Made myself able to think objectively, see nuance and be empathetic. I was very jidgemental before.

Point 4 credit goes to Cal Newport. He is the only self-help writer I can marginally tolerate. I did not read Atomic Habits or Power of Habits.

I realized that one of the best ways to form new habits ws was to hook new habits to already existing habits. This is nowadays called "habit association".

Make no mistake that I am only partially successful. I have failed in forming a lot of habits. I sm only sharing the good parts.

I don't understand why this comment was flagged and so heavily downvoted (edit: vouch seems to unflag it). Can someone explain? The advice seems reasonable to me.

I regularly take part in programming groups, paper reading groups, and book reading groups with Discord. It works flawlessly without any problem. Screen-sharing, video chat, voice all work properly as expected.

I also admin several servers, some of which are completely unrelated to tech and non-tech people find it seamless to use.

And their noise suppression just works. I have only seen better video quality in Google Duo, and better voice quality in 4G VoLTE calls.

Only three issues I have with Discord-

1. It requires high speed internet connection. How high? People with 3 MBPS reported seamless use.

2. The clients are resource hogs. The mobile clients drop the battery too quick, and takes too much RAM in PCs. Although the latter has improved with updates.

3. I am concerned about privacy. Discord is as close-sourced as it gets.

1. Having to share the phone number is the biggest issue for me. This shouldn't be the case in 2021. I can only use Signal with my close friends. OTOH, I can confidently share my Telegram handle with anyone I have known for a some months, even online (not in anonymus forums, of course).

2. Notifications in one platform is weird for me.

3. Video quality is extremely bad to the extent of unusable.

4. Completely agree with the lack of settings whether other users with my number can text/call me on Signal.

The whole point of signal is privacy, so the fact that it's tied to a number is insane to me. I have friends in china that can't use it because china blocks the verification SMS. It's otherwise great app IMO but this is nearly a fatal flaw.

Americans used to use unencrypted telephony every day because they expected the government to uphold constitutional guarantees. That day ended shortly after 9/11 and the passage of the Patriot Act, which I believe today is used against Patriots more than it is used on their behalf.

What nobody talks about is how beautiful and unique their illustrations are in every release notes and blog posts.

It's refreshing to see original thoughts in illustration.

Save some, I turn the notification off from all groups and channels. I just check them when I want. This has worked for me well.

What resources are you following? How are you learning this in general?

In most cases, it's just a big and elaborate grid search done manually.

Deep learning methods university course, along with several online tutorials and examples for using ray tune with pytorch.

I also started learning Elixir, really loved it.

But I have wanted to go through the whole of SICP for a while. I realized that that is a better thing to do (grow core, fundamental skills) during the pandemic where I can get uninterrupted time.

I can learn a language any time. But I was more focused towards learning the functional paradigm rather than the language itself. It's a fun language to code in, though.