On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 12:09 PM, Edward K. Ream <[email protected]> wrote:
> When done this way, all the math study will be properly motivated. Yes, > we have to know about gradients, partial derivatives (of various kinds), > probability distributions, matrix algebra, etc. But we don't necessarily > have to *start* with that knowledge. Instead, we should start with the *need > to know* that knowledge. > I've never heard my personal learning style, so well described. Once I was fluent with enough English to understand what I wanted to know as a very young child, my desire to figure out the world drove me to learn it. I then used the need to learn something new to make a goal happen to teach myself Linux and basically everything about computers. I broke my second computer given to me by my uncle. Deleted the OS off of the hard disks somehow. lol. Tried taking it apart; putting it back together; figured out I just didn't have the knowledge to make it boot off the hard disk again. After a couple of years trying to do random stuff with floppies I got a new computer and finally got to play around with DOS 5, Windows 3.1, and just kept going from there. I found Linux by dialing into a new ISP's number to test my password with their PPP server (expecting a MAX-TNT or something of that effect) - nope, it was a serial card hooked into a Linux box running RedHat 4.2, mgetty, and pppd. This was mid 1997 or so. I then proceeded to learn about Linux, the shell, and played with my own install of it on a 486 starting in early 1998. 200MB + 80MB = you have a -very- fun time making it work, even with /usr/ on the 200MB, without breaking the install mid-way through due to putting too much junk in and the disks filling up totally in the process. Took me about a week to get a working install with PPP! But, I -wanted- to learn how, and due to overwriting Windows 95 with Linux, i -needed- it to work, so I learned how to make it work. As I learn coding, I figure out I want to make a program do something, then learn how to make that happen in code if I don't already know how.. I started in C reading "teach yourself C in 21 days" and after the first 3 or 4 chapters of looping and if/else, I decided I wanted to write '99 bottles of beer on the wall' which I now think is a great 'second program' (after Hello World!) to teach those basic concepts. I started in PHP by knowing I wanted to write a web-outputting script that scanned the (mostly binary) datafiles of Synchronet BBS per the structures given in C, and I somehow came up with a way to seek the file per the structure size and read what I needed. That script got lost to the reiser3 'null data' bug that happened if your system had either a bad block, or lost power randomly when it was trying to write to the disk... In my case it was a quickly failing 6.4GB drive. (circa 2001 or so). I needed to make Linux work on HyperV automatically provisioned with Websitepanel.. So I read more about how sysprep worked, empirically tested exactly what Websitepanel did to the disk images to make it work, and then wrote a rather complex script that parsed the 5 or so XML variables i truly needed at provisioning time in Linux, and wrote the proper files, and in the process, also performed a 'sysprep-like' step of clearing unique variables created in system processes like the ssh keys, etc. All the BASH knowledge gained from that never would have been had unless that need had not existed. Thanks for the great intro on this Deep Learning stuff too, its really interesting! Mike -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
