I've been naively assuming that most senior+ engineers were doing this too?

Here in Australia, magpies do something similar but in a bad way. During nesting season they'll swoop you, remember your face, and keep targeting you. My daughter got attacked two weeks ago.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-30/magpie-swooping-seaso...

Agreed. An always-on agent focused solely on improving your knowledge/skills could ask you questions daily, build a picture of the gaps in your understanding and learn where to push you next.

I'm experimenting with this at https://miletus.app

I'm also curious about training models with that singular goal. If anyone is exploring similar ideas, I'd love to chat.

How can you source or generate a curriculum graph (similar to what math academy does)?

It seems to me that it would be cool if that could be solved automatically for any learning goal/target

I started with a curated backbone across several fields, drafted with frontier models and reviewed by hand. The automatic (and fun) part happens when you pick a goal and a quest gets generated with its own prerequisites, mapped onto that backbone.

It's def not as robust as Math Academy's graph yet, they spent years hand-building and testing it on real students. But I bet a few more iterations of frontier models get there, especially once there's learner data to correct it.

How do you handle the 'people often learn through repetition' problem?

That's a good point, but if you have an always-on agent focused solely on helping you improve your knowledge/skills, it can ask you questions every day and gradually identify gaps in your knowledge and it gets really good at knowing where to push you.

I'm experimenting with exactly that: https://miletus.app

I've been tracking the same for a few months. All open source and available here: https://preseason.ai/

nice!

Related and a great read: "The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity" by Steven Strogatz:

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/13356649-the-joy-of-x

The Joy of X and I think now renamed to “The Joy of y” is a great podcast for general knowledge building!

I love that they won as a remote team and no constant hype about revenue.

Optionality. This positions Stripe well to compete in AI compute, model development, apps... This is not a simple 1+1=2 merger.

Two open-source initiatives:

1. https://preseason.ai Basically a benchmarking platform that measures how the top LLMs recommend devtools when prompted to build different types of web apps.

2. https://widen.dev A native Mac desktop Postgres GUI with text-to-SQL. You can even use the LLM that already comes installed in your MacOS.

Except that gold-rush-like booms tend to attract individuals who are more risk-taking and entrepreneurial. So of course there will still be losses in a downturn, but this is a self-selected group with greater adaptability, more likely to mix and match skills and still end up better off than if they had not participated at all...

The problem with a gold rush is by the time you hear about it, so has everyone else and all the gold is gone once you get there.

That's assuming it takes longer for you to hear about it than for everyone else to extract all the gold. Now suppose there is a data center boom and a massive housing shortage and a transition from fossil fuels to electric cars and heating systems and at least two of those things are likely to continue for a good while.