#033: Develop More Agency, Tumblr Meets Wikipedia, Google's Own Path to Become Machine Learning Engineer

Hi All!

We are pleased to welcome you to this week's edition of Undiscovered, a newsletter with exclusive resources and insights expanding from the material found on our main site - becketu.com.

This edition is helped in part by the support of Boot.dev. Be sure to check them out in the P.S. for a special signup offer and more information. Let's jump into this week's finds:

Google's Personal Machine Learning Recommendations...

Did you know that Google has a program to help you become a machine learning engineer? Thanks to this tweet from @svpino, I saw that this 'learning path' contains over 300 hours and 15 lessons to become fluent in AI programming.

The lessons range from beginner classes to advanced, and the best part of all? It's free. Be sure to check out the program here.

And if machine learning isn't your thing, they offer plenty of other programs to learn other various skills hat you can check out here.

...And Google's Latest AI Projects

This is another fun website that I found from Google, called labs.google. The design is unlike anything else I've seen from them, and it's a playful space described as the 'home for our latest AI tools and technology'.

It's a dynamic showcase covering various interests. You can learn American Sign Language with Popsign, analyze and improve creative writing with TextFX, and collaborate with your own virtual assistant in NotebookLM,

But our personal favorite project, is the recipe generator Food Mood. It combines two cuisines into one recipe with the help of Google AI and is perfect for those nights where you're stumped on what to make. Choose between starts, soups, main courses, and desserts, and let your imagination come to life.

Tumblr Meets Wikipedia

The header above perfectly describes the insane beauty that is Are.na. Here is the description from the site itself:

1. online software for saving and organizing the content that is important to you
2. a toolkit for assembling new worlds from the scraps of the old

It's a garden of ideas, and I deeply resonate with the long-term vision. It allows you to go down rabbit holes, save ideas that you want to revisit and build upon later, connect with others and see what discoveries they have found, and ultimately, 'engage more deeply with the World'.

As someone that is addicted to Apple Notes, I have been looking for a new platform that will help me organize my thoughts more cohesively.

What intrigues me the most about Arena is the ability to see others' ideas and how they have made cognitive connections across interests.

Interactive Machine Learning and Statistics Sites

Let's be real - it's always easier to understand AI and research in the field when there is a visual component to it. That's why I'm thankful to have found this database of interactive machine learning, deep learning, and statistics websites. It's open-source, collaborative, and beautifully designed.

On the site you can find projects like a convolutional neural network explainer, a neural network playground, and one of our favorites from Undiscovered past, the immersive linear algebra textbook.

Even if you have no idea what's going on in the sites, it helps to be able to interact visually with well-designed interfaces and explore your curiosity.

How to Have More Agency

If you look up how to define 'agency' on Perplexity, it might say "the capacity of individuals to act independently and make their own free choices in order to shape their lives and circumstances". Which is a longer way of saying, 'the belief that you have control over your life'.

The concept of 'agency' has always interested me, and I have been wanting to develop a plan to cultivate more of it when it comes to accomplishing my dreams. If you're reading this, I would guess that you believe you believe your mind and actions can dictate how you want life to go.

This is why I'm very grateful @JoshuaLelon shared his personal list of questions for teaching how to increase your agency in daily life.

From the final sentence of the list: "Free yourself from the requirement that your ideas must be good. All that matters is that they're possible. It could work."

P.S. Have you heard of Boot.dev? One of my friends showed me this recently and when I started to demo it, it blew me away! It's a site that teaches you back-end development in a fun, gamified way. It's helped over 70,000 students learn in-demand technologies like Python, SQL, Go, and a bunch of other advanced topics.

If you're interested in a membership, use the code BECKET at checkout for 25% off your first payment (either first month or yearly depending on the plan you like).

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Always wishing you the best,

J.B.