I was also writing a SANE-to-Paperless bridge to run on an RPi recently, but ran into issues getting it to detect my ix500. Would love to see the code!
I'll tell you my experience as someone who's been using Math Academy for past 6 months.
Math Academy does what every good application or service does. Make things convenient. That's it. No juggling heavy books or multiple tabs of PDFs. Each problem comes with detailed solution so getting them wrong doesn't mean looking around on the internet for a hint about your mistake (this is pre ChatGPT era of course, where not getting something correct meant putting down MathJax on stackexchange).
> better than just prompting ChatGPT/Claude/etc
The convenience means you are doing the most important part of learning maths with most ease: problem solving and practice. That is something an LLM will not be able to help you with. For me, solving problems is pretty much the only way to mostly wrap my head around the topic.
I say mostly because LLMs are amazing at complementing Math Academy. Any time I hit a conceptual snag, I run off to ChatGPT to get more clarity. And it works great.
So in my opinion, Math Academy alone is pretty good. Even great for school level maths I'd say. Coupled with ChatGPT the package becomes a pretty solid teaching medium.
Yes, much better. ChatGPT/Claude/etc. are useful the times I want extra explanation to help connect the dots, but Math Academy incorporates spaced repetition, interleaving, etc. the way a dedicated tutor would, but in a better structured environment/UI.
Their marketing website leaves a lot to be desired (a perk since they are all math nerds focused on the product), but here are two references on their site that explain their approach:
They also did a really good interview last week that goes in depth about their process with Dr. Alex Smith (Director of Curriculum) and Justin Skycak (Director of Analytics) from Math Academy: https://chalkandtalkpodcast.podbean.com/e/math-academy-optim...
I used an early e-learning platform not because I wanted to but because I was one of its developers. I didn't develop the course-content just the technical implementation.
What I didn't like about the content is I often had questions about it but there was no-one to ask the questions from. Whoever wrote that material was no longer around. It's a frustrating feeling when you can't really trust what you're studying is factually correct, or is misleading.
I assume AI will have a huge improvement in this respect.
The second link really impressed me, I'm tentatively sold on (and excited for) their approach. Does anyone know of any other accredited programs similar to Math Academy, but for other subjects?
Anything in the soft sciences, or biology/organic chemistry, or comp sci. I know there are a lot of courses for the latter especially, but I'm looking for accredited ones.
Not OP, but I have found MathAcademy to be infinitely better. I really liked the assessment portion which levels you and gives you an idea of where you are are at the present. As someone who graduated with an engineering degree a while ago, there were things I realized I didn’t know as well as I thought I did and I probably would not have prompted an LLM to review.
Math is something that should be taught in an opinionated way with an eye toward pedagogy. Self study with GPT is an excellent tool in math, but only for those who have enough perspective to know which directions to set out on. I don’t think anybody who doesn’t know linear algebra should be guiding their studies themselves.
Given my ChatGPT and friends experience has been one of overwhelming frustration due to incorrect information, I would say Math Academy is in an entirely different galaxy. ChatGPT is great if you want to learn that pi is equal to 4.
b-b-b-but the next supercalifragilistic ChatGPT version will be able to tell you that pi is between 3.1 and 3.2. that will be a Quantum improvement, asymptotically close to AGI.
at least, i think i heard alt samman say so.
you plebs and proles better shell out the $50 a month, increasing by $10 per day, to keep dis honest billionaires able to keep on buying deir multi-million dollar yachts and personal jets.
be grateful for the valuable crumbs we toss to you, serfs.
> U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), experts show that humans can single-handedly and effectively manage a heterogenous swarm of more than 100 autonomous ground and aerial vehicles, while feeling overwhelmed only for brief periods of time
This will surprise nobody who has watched professional Starcraft players.
> feeling overwhelmed only for brief periods of time
There is something deeply, darkly comedic (depressing?) about the qualitative language here. Primarily the way it simultaneously intersects with modern discourse around wellness, anxiety, and mental health in such a banal manner at the same time as the latent/implicit violence of action (given that the obvious subtext is operating semi-autonomous killing machines).
>A good system would have people feeling overwhelmed 0% of the time.
There are benefits to being pushed past your limits from time to time. Also, there's just no such thing as 0. When you're designing limits you don't say "this never happens", you're saying "this event happens less than this rate for this cohort".
I'd agree that it is worth pushing your limits during training, but the best-case scenario during actual conflict is to be as close to 0% overwhelmed as you can be.
Overwhelming an enemy involves getting inside their OODA loop. I can't see a real life-or-death scenario, outside of training, where you'd want your enemy to successfully get inside your OODA loop and disrupt your flow and rhythm, even for 0.1% of the time.
You of course don't want to become comfortable and complacent, risking losing focus, but there must be better ways of avoiding that other than being occasionally overwhelmed.
You’re suggesting there are real deadly combat scenarios where it is beneficial to have your OODA loop compromised. Ok maybe you’re right, given the infinite possibilities.
But until you can present at least one such example scenario, no individual would be willing to take such a risk when their own life is at stake. Real combatants might value the motivating threat of being overwhelmed, but do not actually wish to be overwhelmed (i.e. have their OODA loop compromised).
In deadly combat, no one is looking to theorize. No one quibbles about their inability to prove the negative. They just want to live to see the next day.
My belief doesn’t matter. Without proof that it is advantageous in a given scenario, I would never prefer to be overwhelmed in deadly combat. And I doubt you would either. If you believe you would, please present an example scenario.
> they write as if being overwhelmed 3% of the time is a victory
We’re talking about a soldier. Commanding a company’s worth of firepower single-handedly from relative safety. 3% would be an exceptional improvement over the status quo.
The real question is what happens in that 3%. If they are still able to control the drones that is very different from they set the drones to kill your own people. (This is DARPA so we can assume killing people is a goal in some form). There is a lot in between too.
This is a common error, if not outright fallacy. The correct amount of <negative event> is rarely zero due to diminishing returns -- it is where the cost curves intersect.
E.g. to decrease 3pct to 0.3pct might require operating only half the drones -- not a good trade.
Yeah I really don't like that phrasing. Take off and landing is the most dangerous part of flying but only makes up a tiny percentage of the total flight. If that 3% of the time referenced is the most dangerous or most critical 3% of time then it hardly matters how easy the rest of it is.
This is about the army. Depending on the case, it's acceptable that 30% of people die if it serves strategic goals. That's how "a good system" is defined by those who have the power to enact it .
It's DARPA, you're really past the moralizing about war stage here, that's just out of context. I don't see UX experts hand-wringing about the effects of advertising when they're designing their products.
>discourse around wellness, anxiety, and mental health in such a banal manner
It's not about "feelings" and that might disturb you, but really very many things should be much less about feelings. A whole lot of "wellness, anxiety, and mental health" isn't about feelings but instead being inside or outside the limits of what a person is capable of handling. Facts-based analysis of work and life and people being too far outside their comfort zone could do a lot for many people dealing with mental health issues.
DARPA does and obviously _needs to_ study these things. One of the most important areas for this are pilots especially during emergencies. It comes from both directions, designing the machine to be manageable and training the human to manage in exceptional circumstances and _knowing the limits_ of both.
> It's DARPA, you're really past the moralizing about war stage here, that's just out of context.
I don’t really think I was moralizing… just commenting on the funny juxtaposition of the language and the context - or on the comedy of the language specifically when not considering the whole context. I was not saying DARPA should or should not be doing this - though I’ll grant that what I wrote could be read as an implicit criticism, even though it was not my intention.
> I don't see UX experts hand-wringing about the effects of advertising when they're designing their products.
Plenty do. Plenty don’t. Similarly, plenty of machine learning engineers might choose not to work on, say, a predictive algorithm for facial recognition or a product recommender system because they don’t feel like being a part of that system. Some people don’t have that luxury, or don’t care. It’s fine either way, though I of course encourage anyone to do some reflection on the social implications of their engineering projects from time to time. Hamming, who worked on everything from the ABomb to telephones to the foundations of computer programming (and everything in between) strongly recommends this, and I agree. Working on weapons might be necessary, but you still need to reflect and make a conscious decision about it.
> It's not about "feelings" […] It comes from both directions, designing the machine to be manageable and training the human to manage in exceptional circumstances and _knowing the limits_ of both.
Of course, totally understand that. That doesn’t mean we can’t find humor in decontextualizing the language! Or in thinking about how science always must struggle with euphemism for the purposes of concision.
Watching professional starcraft players makes you question if they are human. Their control of vast quantities of units and platoons is unreal at moments.
But not everyone is a Professional Starcraft player, even with training.
Besides, I'd prefer a Supreme Commander interface where patrol points can be added/deleted/moved on the fly while factories produce more into that loop including ferry points along the way. Supreme Commander made me feel it was more about strategy than action count.
> The most common reason for a human commander to reach an overload state is when they had to generate multiple new tactics or inspect which vehicles in the launch zone were available for deployment
This seems misleading- what they said is that when everything is on cruise control the commander does not feel overwhelmed. But if they have to do some high cognitive load task (like reading statuses) or react to a complex situation the commander will feel overwhelmed, which is bad. We want to be able to react quickly and appropriately to all situations, which we can't do when overwhelmed. Being able to handle dozens of bots in a calm situation is meaningless. We need to staff our bot controllers/monitors/commanders at a level that they can handle those top 3% complex wartime scenarios.
>> to generate multiple new tactics or inspect which vehicles in the launch zone were available for deployment
Following up on GP's analogy, I read this as "human overwhelmed by micro" and "human overwhelmed by macro", which... tracks.
From my own StarCraft experience, the two most taxing parts of the game - the ones where I could easily get confused and lose track of the battle, or even forget what I was doing and why, were:
1) Micro, i.e. "generating new multiple new tactics" on the fly, manually controlling a bunch of units, whose survival depended entirely on me being able to do it faster than my opponent.
2) Macro, i.e. "inspecting which vehicles in the launch zone were available for deployment" and deploying them, while queuing production of new ones - while trying to keep track of the front line(s) and spot potential sneak attacks and overall pay attention to the whole map. "Macro management" is easy when it's the only thing you do - but when there's a battle going on, you end up looking at a different part of the map for a second, every second; it basically becomes a form of "micro", except you're micromanaging your attention.
In both cases, the source of the overwhelm is the pressure of battle - things are changing so fast that few seconds can decide the fate of the battle, possibly of the overall game - but the battles between peers can drag on for minutes, requiring you to sustain that level of focus for extended time, and keep it split between the fighting and the base management; as there too, few seconds of error can put you at a large disadvantage down the line.
All this to say - I'm not a soldier, so I might be wrong, but I feel that real-life warfare, at least now, isn't this fast-paced. That may change in drone vs. drone scenarios, but with humans on the ground, I imagine taking it slow and methodical will remain the dominant approach.
>For example, sensors collected data on their heart-rate variability, posture, and even their speech rate. The data were input into an established algorithm that estimates workload levels and was used to determine when the controller was reaching a workload level that exceeded a normal range, called an “overload state.”
Based on this, I also think "overwhelmed" might be editorialized language added by the reporter.
It makes me wonder if there could be some sort of lower-cost real-life strategy game with cheap(er) homemade drones eventually, kind of like FPV racing now. I'm not a big RTS person but that sounds really fun.
If the drones were not destroyed as part of normal gameplay it could make sense. So rather than a battle Royale maybe something like drone laser tag mechanics
Exactly, laser tag was exactly what I had in mind. Over a long enough space I could definitely see it being fun, and just have them turn off when they've been tagged. Plus, at the end they could probably clean themselves up and drive away.
Came here to say this - or a more distant comparison - air traffic controllers. Also control is a tricky term - are they directly controlling or tasking a semi-autonomous robot.
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