-"Education"

How BASIC Shaped a Generation of Programmers When you powered on a Commodore 64 in 1983, the first thing you saw was: READY. Blinking cursor. No graphical interface. No visual metaphors. Just BASIC - a programming language that wasn’t supposed to be the foundation of computing education, but became exactly that. BASIC shaped how an entire generation thought about programming. Not because it was the best language, but because it was the only language available on personal computers. If you wanted to write anything on your C64, your Spectrum, your BBC Micro, or your Apple II, you were writing BASIC. And when constraints force a population into a single tool, that tool becomes the culture. ...

In 2023, Claude passed the bar exam. In 2024, it passed the CPA exam and medical licensing exams. By 2026, there’s barely an exam left that AI can’t pass, often on the first try. This has broken something we relied on without thinking too hard about it: the equivalence between “passed the exam” and “has expertise.” For a century, we used exams as a proxy for skill. You pass the bar, you’re qualified to practice law. You pass medical licensing, you’re qualified to practice medicine. You get a degree in computer science, you’re qualified to be a programmer. The exam was the evidence that you had the knowledge and could apply it. ...

A curated collection of clear, technical explanations of foundational AI concepts. These resources help build intuition about how modern AI systems actually work. Fundamentals Yes you should understand backprop - Andrej Karpathy’s definitive explanation of backpropagation, the fundamental algorithm behind neural network training Deep Learning in a Nutshell: Core Concepts - NVIDIA’s accessible overview of deep learning architectures and their applications Transformers & Language Models What is ChatGPT doing & why does it work? - Stephen Wolfram’s phenomenal breakdown of transformer architecture and the surprising effectiveness of next-token prediction Word2Vec Explained - Foundation for understanding how words become numerical representations that models can process Generative Models How Stable Diffusion Works - Detailed technical walkthrough of diffusion models for image generation, with clear diagrams and intuitive explanations Courses & Practical Learning Practical Deep Learning - Fast.ai’s top-down course that teaches you to build working deep learning systems before diving into theory