This might be as simple as the fact that you're spacing your learning out less. In college you learned things over a span of 15 weeks, giving you many opportunities for spaced repetition, which is one of the most effective methods to make material stick. Now I'm assuming you learn material in much less time than a semester, so there's less repetition and therefore less long term retention.
Interesting, so it's the ability to generalize attributes selectively? That sounds like it would make for the difference between the specialized deep learning we have and a more general intelligence.
Could that be accomplished if NN problems are broken into features, and those features are individually tested against new information? Though you'd need a layer for feature selection, and it still lacks the ability to pick features without training.
This is really tricky when major products succeed because of their addictive capacity. So long as we measure engagement, getting users addicted is the holy grail.
I keep an ebook on my phone, so in little gaps I can read a book instead of ending up on social media. This doesn't lend itself to many books, but I end up reading around one a week this way.
I also keep Reddit and Facebook blocked on my computer, and don't have the apps on my phone. It keeps me from habitually typing in the URL or tapping the app and derailing myself from anything productive I was doing.
A problem I have is finding good long form content. Usually I find things through HN and Reddit, but that lends itself to mindless browsing. How do you usually find long form content?
Mark here, thanks for the comments! I think my best bet on that front is to switch gears if I get stuck on a problem. So long as I'm able to make headway on some of the material at a given moment, then I should be able to keep pace. I suspect the basics electronics and statistics courses will save me on that front.
When it comes to grokking difficult concepts, I can often grasp an idea at a basic level rather quickly, but it can take me up to months before I'm able to realize all the implications of it. Also, I've noticed the rate at which I grasp things is very dependent on how well it's taught. If a concept is taught well I can leverage it very quickly, but if I have to spend hours disentangling a concept I often don't end up able to leverage it until months later when my subconscious has had time to make sense of the idea.
Which may well be a consequence of lazy developers taking advantage of faster internet. I'd bet if internet speed were to stop increasing today it would be more likely to solve the bloat problem, since developers would eventually realize they were ruining their UX with load times. It's the same with processor improvements in that they allow developers to write more inefficient code since their time is prioritized over CPU time.
If you discuss and regulate the privacy issues in times of peace it limits, or at least hinders, their ability to cause harm when they can take advantage of fear or rage.
You need to make sure the people in charge won't do that indefinitely. Even one particularly bad politician can cause some serious harm. If you limit their ability to monitor everyone, it limits their ability to round up dissenters. Given that surveillance doesn't seem to have much other use, it's reasonable to oppose it.