mtts

Ah, didn't know about that one. Twice as expensive as the ones I mentioned, though.

If a lever machine is too finicky for you, consider an espresso machine that is actually made for home use. Now I don't mean things like Rancilio Silva and other mini machines that are actually fairly crippled because they don't allow you to adjust the pressure, but a proper one.

AFAIK (but it's been a few years since I researched this) there are exactly two: the Profitec Go and the Lelit Victoria. Both are small(ish) and warm up quickly, unlike machines intended for professional use like the La Mazocco. The difference between the two is that the Profitec has the pressure adjustment on the outside while the Lelit requires you to open the machine up. However, adjusting the pressure is mostly a one-time affair, so that's not much of a problem.

Like all machines intended for home use neither will let you (easily) pull a shot and steam milk simultaneously, because they have only one reservoir and the temperature for pulling a shot is different from the temperature for steaming. You can get simple, cheap, milk frothing devices, however, which work pretty well.

(all of this is assuming you already have a good grinder and decent coffee, which is, as everyone else said, much more important).

> they were terrible musicians

Not only are the songs they wrote really good and catchy, Ramones are one of those bands where it sounds so easy anyone can do it but if you give it a try, you quickly find out it’s difficult to get the nuances right and your results, unlike theirs, sound crude and obviously amateurish.

They’re like AC/DC in that respect. Or Melvins.

I'm as bearish as anyone on the current AI hype, but this particular ship has sailed. Research is revealing these humongous neural networks of weights for next token prediction to exhibit underlying structures that seem to map in some way to a form of knowledge about the world that is, however imperfectly, extracted from all the text they're trained on.

Arguing that this is meaningfully different from what happens in our own brains is not something I would personally be comfortable with.

I stand corrected. Can’t edit my original post, though.

Khan hides it well, though - it’s listed smack in the middle of sixth grade math and high school math courses. I skimmed through the list (again) and found some college math but not all. Maybe this is a new offering?

Yeah, that’s my thinking now as well. It’s going to take an incredibly long time but truly understanding each problem is probably the only way to go.

Which is where this beats self study using books, I think. With a book, I can sort of wing it and think I understand something when I only do so very superficially whereas when you do the problems you truly learn what you understand and what you do not. And MathAcademy is only problems, so …

Khan Academy last I checked went up to High School. MathAcademy goes up to undergrad math.

Not sure I’d want to use it as my only resource, but as supplementary material it’s excellent. He really explains concepts well (some better than others though, though this is likely a ymmv issue).

Right, and then you’re expending mental energy on figuring out how to teach math (to yourself) instead of on the math itself. This is not wrong, and will likely even teach you a thing or two (and in fact it was how self-teaching math worked before this came along) but, to me at least, MathAcademy seems to be more efficient in getting you to do just the math and nothing else.

I’m currently doing the Calculus I course and while there are explanations interspersed throughout the problems, these mostly seem to be the bare minimum you need to work the problems. When I compare it to the calculus textbook I keep alongside it (Stewart’s “Calculus Early Transcendentals”) it barely seems enough.

FWIW my experiences with MathAcademy roughly overlap OP’s: it’s really hard work and adult life seriously interferes with making speedy progress (notice their own success stories are with teenagers who can devote hours upon hours on racing through the - very good - curriculum).

They say 1 point is equivalent to 1 minute of work and that you should earn at least 45 points a day. Well, for me 1 point is nowhere near 1 minute of work: I’m sloppy and sometimes downright stupid so it’s 1,5 minutes at best and often much, much more.

Banging your head against a wall every day for more than an hour (sometimes much more) just to get to what they consider to be the minimum of 45 points is no fun, and probably even counterproductive. I managed to keep it up for four months and made reasonable progress during that time (on getting back to where I was at the end of High School, 30 years ago) but it also burnt me out. I’ve now scaled it back to 30 minutes (not points!) a day. As a result my progress is now glacial.

Also, they’re very much of the “just do lots of problems and you’ll learn mathematic concepts and principles by osmosis” school of math instruction. For me I had to buy a textbook to get some extra explanation.

The good thing is that the problems seem well thought out and the spaced repetition system definitely works (for me, anyway).

I’m going to keep it up, because I have enough disposable income to afford it (though it is much too expensive for what it is) and I really want to bring my math skills up to a level where I can follow along the math in ML papers (and also because math, it turns out, is kind of elegant and interesting). I could go the self-study route, but then I’d have to spend time and effort guiding myself and figuring out what it is I needed to work on. If nothing else, MathAcademy is good at taking care of this for you so you can focus on the math itself.

But if you self study using the OU books, you yourself will not be accredited.

They’re not a private tutor, though. They don’t explain very much and there certainly isn’t a way to ask questions. As I said elsewhere, to me they’re about twice as expensive as they should be.