The Goal of Content :rocket:

Dovetailing off of the last post The New Direction, this year I want to create content.

  1. I am going to do things I want to do
  2. Share that with the world - the things I want
  3. Hopefully, survey and welcome interest from the world in the things I want

The Medium of Content :lips:

The best forum I think I could use for doing this is via streaming or recording.

Alternatives

Previously, in the legacy iteration of this blog The Daily Distribution, I studied Applied Mathematics daily, drafted notes and published them alongside blog posts about my progress and goals.

I even went as far as writing some integration code which automated the synchronization and categorization of the PDF notes from Notability (which is already automatically exported to Google Drive) to my github.io website repo (thereby injecting into my blog and publishing it externally).

This was an efficient workflow and took around ~5 minutes after every morning or lunchtime study session. But ultimately, while I found it efficient, the math wasn’t very consumable and I was using the blog additionaly as a Planning (e.g Jira/Rally/Asana) and Documentation (e.g Confluence) tool and found a blog to be inefficient and ineffective backend to those purposes.

I spent a bunch of time thinking about what would be the best setup using tools that are already available and even contemplated and prototyped some possible alternatives:

Alternative 1: Notability, an IPad and Apple Pencil :writing_hand:

Continue to use an IPad + Apple Pencil and continue to create Notability PDFs Backpropogation Notes Example

Alternative 2: Confluence, Jira and Notability :woman_juggling:

Create Confluence Projects per math subject and centralize progress across all math projects using Advanced Roadmaps in Jira. Embed Notability PDFs on the Confluence Pages. Instead of an IOS and Adroid Teams in the image below, there would instead be Linear Algebra and Category Theory, etc.Advanced Roadmap Example.

Alternative 3: Jupyter Notebooks :computer:

Alternatively I could move to doing all math in Jupyter Notebooks. There is something very attractive about math being computable and even having the sharing the source code with others! A major functional gap in this approach was that there wasn’t an easy way to draw. Sure you could write some code to generate plots but that’s too much of a time sink. Building libraries to make sucessive notebooks easier also a time sink - I want to do math! Not code. Also the idea of having to manage and maintain technology details like notebook pip package versions etc and code just being way more verbose than math notation was unnatractive. Proof languages like Coq weren’t very readable to the average person - so proof-by-compiliation didn’t seem like a win either. Doing math in Jupyter Notebooks

Preferred Medium :movie_camera:

However, I’ve come to realize that there are other alternatives that allow me to do math an share it - that are almost as efficient and much more comprehensible to the average person. These alternatives also look like a lot of fun.

I’m talking streaming and recording/producing videos :camera_flash:!

Streaming is appealing because it seems like there is a relatively smaller research step prior to the stream, it’s easy to interact and walk through ideas, and vastly engaging. On this front, I’m very taken with the engineering related stream George Hotz’s does.

I also like the idea of using streams as an exploratory or survey method a la Lex Fridman.

Publishing by this means seems to be pretty conventional writ-large for a variety of purposes:

In particular 3Blue1Brown is a great example of the power of something more structured and prerecorded and produced.

I am also very fascinated with Technically-strong Innovative Teams like Neuralink, Tesla, SpaceX, Comma AI as they have similar goals as mentioned previously in this blog piece: do cool things, be innovative and share.

So here is my streaming/recording setup:

Stream Recording Gear

The next step is for me to configure the recording software and start to formalize what things and how I want to stream them.

A few gists of what I want to do:

  • learn new maths via solving the problem sets in textbooks and stream that
  • publish primers, useful short productions on useful math

I’m considering using Latex to document my work with github:

Math Problems

If you’re curious what notes some of my old blog had - here is a portion of the notes I had posted:

Blog Notes