Thomas H. Ptacek

Don't look at me sideways. Don't even look me straight on. bsky:@sockpuppet.org

[Thomas H. Ptacek @tqbf]

DOWNVOTES
IMPRISONING ME
ALL THAT I SEE
ABSOLUTE HORROR
I CANNOT LIVE
I CANNOT DIE
TRAPPED IN THIS THREAD
COMMENTS MY HOLDING CELL

[Thomas H. Ptacek @tqbf]

@macroorganism42 I don't hate the Decemberists (I've seen them live a bunch of times). But, sort of like TMBG, you gotta be in the right headspace for them, and that headspace clocks that they are pretty silly.

[Thomas H. Ptacek @tqbf]

Oof totally forgot about the Mad Men episode that opens with the Decemberists song. Nothing in the universe has aged worse than Decemberists songs in TV shows.

[Thomas H. Ptacek @tqbf]

@itsleemorris https://t.co/eAzX6KBdSS

:)

(I need to write a real review.)

[Thomas H. Ptacek @tqbf]

@JamesTimmins MathAcademy is the single highest ROI I've ever gotten for any learning resource, including any course I've ever taken, and probably every book I've bought put together. I had zero calc going in; in fact, I barely had any trig.

[Thomas H. Ptacek @tqbf]

So, I just knocked out matrix gradients, the last lesson in MathAcademy's Machine Learning course (abbreviated stat+linear+multivariable), after doing MFI + II + III over the last year. My reward:

[Thomas H. Ptacek @tqbf]

Whoah, new Kurt Vile.

[Thomas H. Ptacek @tqbf]

@agraybee The case drastically raised her profile locally and is almost certainly the reason she overperformed.

[Thomas H. Ptacek @tqbf]

@ChainSurgele I agree, I'm not dispirited by it, though it'd be funny if I bombed out.

[Thomas H. Ptacek @tqbf]

Like breaking these kinds of bugs/affordances is most of what the AD in AEAD is for.

[Thomas H. Ptacek @tqbf]

Exactly what I'm going to say the day I set up an OpenClaw.

[Thomas H. Ptacek @tqbf]

This re Matthew Green's most recent thingy. I'm surprised he's able to get as much play out of COT blobs as he did, not because I know what to do with them but because I feel like not making them replayable is kind of table stakes?

https://t.co/XbXIU4VAnO

[Thomas H. Ptacek @tqbf]

Oh, nice. When you switch out of Machine Learning into full MVC, the MVC stuff you did in ML is credited to the new course (but for some reason I still have to take a placement exam? feh!)

[Thomas H. Ptacek @tqbf]

Welp, it has more for me. NGL, this is what STARTING MathAcademy was like like year. This time, though, I'm ready.

[Thomas H. Ptacek @tqbf]

@BarryPCotter 30 minutes each weekday, maybe 2-3 hours Saturday and Sunday, so yeah thereabouts.

[Thomas H. Ptacek @tqbf]

@SanjayNadaraja No, I was only somewhat aiming at ML, my bigger issue was my total lack of calc, and M4ML at MA was a way to get multivariable and stat at the same time.

[Thomas H. Ptacek @tqbf]

@JamesTimmins Just remember we're not really MA's customer; I think parents of high schoolers and undergrads are. If you go in understanding that the web app/"gamification" itself isn't optimized for us, you'll be fine.

[Thomas H. Ptacek @tqbf]

@JamesTimmins MathAcademy is the single highest ROI I've ever gotten for any learning resource, including any course I've ever taken, and probably every book I've bought put together. I had zero calc going in; in fact, I barely had any trig.

[Thomas H. Ptacek @tqbf]

@SanjayNadaraja I'll probably take a month off and run through Strang's deep learning lecture series again, now that I'm primed for it, and then come back and knock out the full multivariable and then diffeq.

[Thomas H. Ptacek @tqbf]

@lachunas See I'd take that!

[Thomas H. Ptacek @tqbf]

So a Slack friend said to ask Claude or GPT "Given your experience talking to me, give me a character from a movie, book, or TV show that’s just like me. Return a single name."

I got fucking Toby Ziegler.