Made me think of Sayyid Qutb's "The America I have seen":
Qutb argues that the American way of life, with its focus on hedonism and consumerism, corrupts the moral self and reduces human relationships to short-lived pursuits of pleasure. Qutb sees the American focus on individual pleasure as primitive and animalistic, erasing the gravity of death and the sanctity of life
He's the intellectual behind the modern jihad, distance 2 to a young Bin Landen.
This textbook, an introduction to the principles and abstractions used in the design of computer systems, is an outgrowth of notes written for 6.033 Computer System Engineering over a period of 40-plus years. Individual chapters are also used in other EECS subjects. There is also a web site for the current 6.033 class with a lecture schedule that includes daily assignments, lecture notes, and lecture slides. The 6.033 class Web site also contains a thirteen-year archive of class assignments, design projects, and quizzes.
You are very articulate but you don't have a clue of what you are talking about, no matter how many books you have read. The southern vietnamese have a very distinct identity, and they haven't moved on at all, if they had a chance they would declare independence from the north in a split second.
Source: I have lived in Saigon for a decade, which beats hands down the many books I had read about the subject before that
I could say the same as an American southerner! The existence of distinct regional identity preexists the state and continues after reunification. The North dominates in their politics just as in ours and there’s resentment about it in both countries, but it does not follow that there is no national identity or that a regional dictatorship created and funded foreign powers which could not survive without their indefinite aid is true expression of regional identity.
First of all, apologies, the way I started my reply was too brusque.
Yes, at the end of the day it's all about who has the power. I just wanted to point out that present Vietnam is far from united and that you can't imagine how much resentment there is in Saigon towards the communist government in the north.
Saigon had a "good" war, barely saw any fighting, but the post-war was horrible, scarring southerners to this day, many people repeatedly tried to flee on dingies out of desperation from human (northern) caused starvation and scarcity, this in a land that had never experienced hunger (the Mekong Delta is extremely fertile and milked by the north). They haven't forgotten.
The world is full of hopeful irredentists, and whether they will ever succeed or not is not a matter of right, but might (maybe in the shape of a foreign power). It is just that in southern Vietnam most people are irredentists, which I suspect is not the case in the US south, isn't that right?
No apology needed, and I can believe it! I happen to have some personal contacts in Hue who are in middle but in the divide between northern and southern communists they were treated as part of the south. I know there's some real bitterness even among just the communists, in part because the Hanoi-driven war strategy led to the formations in the south taking incredibly heavy casualties which then further cemented their political subordination in the postwar era.
From what little I know, both the center of the country and the south, party and non-party alike, generally feel that the northern elite is clannish and doesn't allocate jobs and investment fairly, which is kind of a big deal for a country with such a large state sector.
I can well understand some feeling persisting a mere 65 years later.
That said, for American southern irredentists of past, present and future, they're stuck with the confederacy alone, which is inextricably connected to slavery even for people like Robert E. Lee who was personally but not politically opposed to slavery. That's simply a much harder thing to identify with morally and practically, especially when 30-40% of the population of the south are descended from freed slaves.
The Republic of Vietnam flag stands for the hundreds of thousands of ARVN soldiers and administration and their families, but it also stands for things like a catholic dictatorship attacking temples in a 90% buddhist country, rigged elections, coups, and being the junior partner of a foreign power that carried out a brutal and dehumanizing counter-insurgency.
Unlike the American south, the southern Vietnamese have a much older identity and much richer history to draw upon. So, I wonder if in time a prior symbol/flag/something from their distinct history will become more resonant for them in the future, which conveys the identity without the baggage.
That was my journey as a self-taught programmer who at one point realized had to learn the timeless foundations.
And then MIT's 6.005 [1], where you will apply all this with a realistic language (Java, although the concepts carry to any language), and learn how to design, code and test programs that "have no bugs, are easy to understand and ready for change".
And also learn a bit about algorithms, I don't think that one can design and understand properly without. And what is O(2^n) today will still be that in 100 years. MIT's 6.006 is amazing, both professor and TA [2].
I've seen Knuth's TAOCP recommended around here. Don't even consider that, do a course like 6.006 first, the Everest shouldn't be the first mountain you climb. Likewise favour HtDP over SICP at first, I've been there.
If after all this you are still interested in LLMs, I recommend EdX's "Large Language Models: Application through Production" [3]
Another good (and entertaining) resource is James Powell's talk "So you want to be a Python expert" [1], the best explanation I've seen of decorators, generators and context managers. Good intro to the Python data (object) model too.
OP here. I learned about this while reading Stanford's LLM course's "Data" lecture [1]. Very interesting how it assesses the datasets used for GPT 2 and 3, etc, and how The Pile addresses their issues. A very interesting course!
Qutb argues that the American way of life, with its focus on hedonism and consumerism, corrupts the moral self and reduces human relationships to short-lived pursuits of pleasure. Qutb sees the American focus on individual pleasure as primitive and animalistic, erasing the gravity of death and the sanctity of life
He's the intellectual behind the modern jihad, distance 2 to a young Bin Landen.