From the Transistor to the Web Browser, a rough outline for a 12 week course

They are both excellent and work on Mac via Steam

I'm not sure if Shenzen I/O is a good recommendation - as with all Zachtronics games sooner or later it gets very puzzle like and gets difficult very fast.

Turing Complete on the other hand is focused on the exploration/learning experience and - for example - doesn't show leaderboards until very late in the game.

Playing both - Shenzen I/O is great, but Turing Complete has a spot in my "best games ever" list.

Okay I didn't know about Turing Complete, that looks amazing.

Also https://www.charlespetzold.com/code/

Also: https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b...

Also http://nandgame.com Inspired by Nand2tetris, but web-based.

My whole undergrad curriculum was essentially about this, so I would say 3.5 years would be a sufficient amount to study it in depth.

Geohot has a bit of an elitest mindset, despite not really being able to follow through himself. I'd say to anyone starting their interest in the field, don't get put off by this time frame, just keep at it and you will win.

People need 4 years of sleep for that kind of dense material to sink in.

You go study Computer Engineering and then to get hired for some CRUD work on a legacy system you have to solve a LeetCode Medium and a Hard.

I was going to say just that. I think we have this debate for a long time ( at least 25+ years ) unfortunately CS won and CE lost. If only could Computer Engineering course just offer an additional one year materials for all the additional CS stuff.

Big Tech also have a preference on CS as well since a lot of them also came from CS background.

They look like they could be lines of code to me.

If it were posted anonymously it would have been ridiculed or ignored.

Agreed, I'm really lost on what this even is.

I think the point of it is to let everyone decide their own learning journey instead of providing a set of books or any resource links

> all signaling of how clever the guy who wrote it is

This has unfortunately been my experience with a lot of geohot’s work.

I agree with the "no substance" part. However, I think such a course is not for beginners, instead it would be for experienced programmers who already have an idea about how computers work and want to fill up some gaps so that they have the whole picture.

These 12 weeks can be part of that "10 years" progression. It addresses the "computer" part, and adds a language that isn't mentioned to the list: Verilog, a hardware definition language.

As for the "guy", he is George Hotz, a controversial figure, who likes to think of himself as very clever indeed, but going up and down the abstraction ladder is, I think, one of his strengths. So I won't dismiss his article too quickly.

A positive spin is people are so excited to learn this stuff that a syllabus got thousands of github stars. I think a lot of his work is great from a pedagogical form. I often learn more about ML by reading tinygrad, even if i've never used it in production. We should be celebrating this guy's efforts

When I, an educator who has a understanding of the topics, read the outline I immediately felt sorry for the people who would be part of that curriculum.

This outlines looks smart to people who already dealt with all or most topics involved, but it would be soul-crushing to most students. That being said, this is mostly an issue of how the material is organized and which parts are emphasized in which way.

In a way it is weird to pinpoint what is wrong with it. It is at the same time too niche and to broad at the same time in weird way.

Section 3 Building a ARM7 CPU is in my view the best example of this - building a pipelined processor is exactly the sort of thing that sounds impressive, but in truth teaches you exceedingly little for the effort it requires. * Architecture wise, implementing a core in verilog versus simulating it in a higher level language are nearly the same from a learning perspective, there really aren't any special. insights from hardware when just starting out. And doing this in verilog just makes the entire process more obtuse because its hardware. * Microarchitecture wise, a simple pipelined processor teaches you basically nothing about how a modern processor (i.e. superscalar, out-of-order) functions from the perspective of a person higher on the stack. If you were to be using it to springboard to writing an OoO superscalar processor, it would be far better to be given a well-designed multistage core and the assignment be to add pipelining - this avoids the student implementating the multistage core of the processor, which is really mostly straightforward implementation of simple but large state machines, and instead focuses purely on the pitfalls of pipelining while also giving a model of good verilog/processor writing practices.

Another thing which is sortof weird is worrying about the type of RAM - that's getting just way into the weeds of processor design and teaches you nothing except stuff like "how to interface with dual port versus single port RAM blocks". And given the time constraints it makes more sense to just simulate memory anyways.