5 Comments
Nov 13Liked by Oz Nova

Good stuff. Yes, LLMs as a complete replacement for existing programming languages seems challenging because human language is necessarily ambiguous. We don't always know exactly what we mean. Computer languages have unintentional ambiguity (C++ undefined behavior, anyone?) but more limited in scope. Defining the problem and iterating on it seems to be an essential component that humans will continue to be useful for.

+1 for Andy Pavlo's database course (CS 15-445). I'm working through it now. So awesome with the publicly available Autograder, GitHub repo, and Discord channel.

+1 for the Kurose networking lectures. I watched all of those. Kurose has a gift for making the complex simple. His book doesn't have a lot of projects, however, so there's an opportunity for adding value.

I also enjoy Apollo history. I've got Failure Is Not An Option on my shelf, but haven't made time to dig into it. If you haven't played with https://apolloinrealtime.org/ check it out. Amazing. I'll check out your podcast episode.

Yes, I'm looking for a good AI math tutor as well. We, too, were a bit disappointed by Khanmigo. It sometimes gave wrong answers and the anti-cheating mechanism was more friction than help. I'll check out Synthesis Tutor.

Keep up the amazing work!

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For Codemonkey are you doing things sequentially starting from Codemonkey Jr?

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Generally yes, although we also just drift around a bit based on mood/interest, e.g. the challenges might feel like a drag for a bit so we switch to a more creative block-based project

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Thanks for sharing all this. Please keep it up!

Oz, what kind of device your kids use for Codemonkey and such? What software do you have there to prevents kids from wandering on the internet?

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We use laptops for most, sometimes iPads if there's a lot of drag/drop activity. Regarding "wandering off on the internet" it's just never been a problem, there's usually an adult sitting next to or near them anyway

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