Why did you choose to have something else write the project if your goal was to learn as much as you can from first principles yourself?

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axus 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

When I'm starting from mostly ignorance, being an apprentice is better than trying , making little progress, and giving up. The problem will be if we never transition from being an apprentice, to independence.

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zamadatix 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

And that's a fine start, but my question was not why they avoided inventing everything from scratch themselves. Apprenticing to see how it can be done is only half the journey to understanding things from first principles, trying to then do it yourself is the other half. Usually you learn more in the second half than the first, you just need the first to make the second feasible.

Not that there is anything wrong with just wanting to make another visualizer and learn some things along the way, it's just a hollow way to try to learn first principles.

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leetrout 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is the answer. Sometimes you don't even know the word to use to find information.

	▲	doctorhandshake 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		This stage is called ‘keyword foraging’

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thegrim33 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Were people not able to accomplish that transition in the times before AI existed?

	▲	axus 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Novices apprenticed to humans, instead of AIs; if they could find one. Flight dynamics guys might be too busy for a 17-year old apprentice from Brazil.

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daviazpen 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Fair point, and one I've thought about a lot.

My analogy: AI is like a calculator. In the hands of someone who doesn't understand math, it produces answers they can't verify. In the hands of someone learning, it lets you tackle problems that would otherwise take years to reach.

But the real answer is what I can demonstrate: I understand why Newton-Raphson converges for Kepler's equation, why RK4 needs 4 evaluations per step, why adaptive timestep matters near perihelion, and why N-body perturbations from Jupiter dominate over Saturn for most NEOs. I wrote the physics isolation boundary myself because I understood why it mattered.

Could I implement all of this from scratch without AI? Not yet. But I understand what's there and that's where I'm starting from, not ending.