I keep thinking of a science fiction scenario of being abducted by aliens and then being rescued by alien cops.

“Where are you from?”

“What’s the chemistry of your required sustenance?”

“How long is your sleep cycle as measured with physical time constants?”

And similar basic questions could not be answered by 99.9% of the human population.

Fundamentally, almost none of us can give an accurate answer to what were made of, where we’re from, or what we need to survive.

Which is like saying that if you read enough textbooks you'll become an engineer/physicist/ballerina/whatever.

This could be up for debate -

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/you-dont-need-wor...

Yeah but language sucks at encoding the locality relations that represent a 2D picture such as a circuit diagram. Language is a fundamentally 1D concept.

And I'm baffled that HN is not picking up on that and ACTUALLY BELIEVES that you can achieve AGI with a simple language model scaled to billions of parameters.

It's as futile as trying to explain vision to a blind man using "only" a few billion words. There's simply no string of words that can create a meaningful representation in the mind of the blind man.

Most entry level engineering classes (first 3/4 semesters) in most of Europe (all kinds) are designed to gate keep.

I graduated in chemistry, and Chemistry 1 in engineering had tests much more difficult than any other Chemistry 1 in any other faculty. After noticing that the same pattern applied to Physics 1 or Calculus I started realizing it was an engineering thing, which was later confirmed to me by an associate professor that was the design.

I asked him why, and he told me that it's a long established thing that you don't want people that struggle with science fundamentals to build bridges, ships or electrical circuits so the first semesters are very focused on this weeding.

While I didn’t switch majors, I had a similar experience with my intro EE class. My theory was that it was intentionally a weeder class to push students towards the other engineering concentrations.

Intro EE is kinda brutal in that there’s a lot of theory to cover, and you need to build the intuition on how it applies to real world circuit design on the fly.

I had a bit of an epiphany when I was in a set theory/number theory class and some classmates were breezing through proofs that I struggled with. I was having to do algebraic manipulations in a way that was novel to me, but was intuitive to math nerds. I felt like that guy who didn’t “get” the intuition in an intro programming or circuits class.

But yeah, students often get some context for math or programming in high school, but rarely for circuit design. E&M in physics at best. EE programs have solved this by weeding out anyone who can’t bash their way through the foundational theory… which isn’t great.

If you’re still interested, I would recommend the Student Manual to the Art of Electronics. It’s a very practical, lab-based book that throws out a lot of the math in favor of rules of thumb and gaining intuition for circuit design.

I had a similar experience, except Mechanical Engineering being my weakest area. Computer Science felt like a children's game compared to fluid dynamics...

EEs actually had a head start on ML, especially those who took signal processing.

I remember vectors in 3D graphics but I don’t recall them in EE 101. maybe I blotted it out.

From my experience, complex exponentials were a much more important fundamental than matrices.