Hello friends,
Happy (belated) Thanksgiving.
Thank you for subscribing to Thoughts, a newsletter on technology, philosophy, the future, and everything in between. In other words, this is my way of sharing what I personally have found interesting over the past week. I hope you enjoy it.
Before we get into it, I'd like to let you know that that all replies go straight into my personal inbox. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts as well! :)
Thinking for yourself
When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?"
How To Think For Yourself by Paul Graham
It's a little ironic that I'm recommending a PG article to learn more about thinking for oneself, but it's worth a read. As students, we're told to memorize facts, but we’re never told to think for ourselves. This results in conventional-thinking. In other words, a lack of originality and conviction.
Far too often I find myself blindly agreeing with the ideas shared by someone of higher authority. Writing, to me, is a way of working against this habit and developing the skill of independent-thinking, even if my ideas currently originate from a few niche sources.
Turning expenses into revenue
Amazon has standard expenses for an e-commerce business: cost of goods, shipping & fulfillment, marketing, technology, payments, and more. I was blown away when I saw this tweet on how Amazon, over the course of a decade, converted almost every expense into a source of revenue.
Product costs → AmazonBasics, Kindle, Echo, Fire
Shipping & fulfillment → Amazon Logistics, Amazon Fulfillment
Technology → Amazon Web Services
Marketing → Amazon Prime, Amazon Ads
Payment Processing → Amazon Payments
This is something that’s only possible at scale and I’m not sure if it was intentional, but interesting nevertheless.
Cohort-based learning
Cohort-based courses typically have completion rates 10x that of traditional online courses and foster a sense of community through shared milestones and achievements. It’s also a fundamentally better way to learn online — with others. Through working on Enlight Cohorts, I’m able witness the benefits of the cohort-based structure of learning and get a glimpse into the future of online education.
The cofounder of Udemy recently raised $4M+ to create a platform for cohort-based learning. I’m interested to see what it would look like, especially since current solutions just don’t cut it. I’m also curious about the scalability of cohort-based courses. Is it possible to replace MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) with a large cohort of individuals split into smaller sub-communities? I’d like to believe so, but I don’t think it’s been done before.
Question: Have you taken an online course (non-university) before? What was it like? Was it an enjoyable experience?
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Personal update:
Wrapping up first-semester classes at Michigan
Getting ready for Cohort #5
Playing around with GPT-3
Reading Atomic Habits
Till next time,
Samay
To answer your question, I took Daniel Bourke’s machine learning online course https://www.mrdbourke.com/mlcourse/. It’s a Udemy course with nearly 45 hours of video content. In the beginning, it’s mainly live coding examples and at the end of each topic there’s some practice. It also contains two projects. Long story short, I never finished it.
The parts I completed I enjoyed because Bourke encouraged me to explore and play; as a result, I went off the course topic and focused on refining what I was really interested in and tried to design a project for myself. Interesting how that worked out.