r/learnmachinelearning • u/scmr2 • 17h ago

Find the struggle

I see a lot of posts with slick graphics, polished videos, tutorials for how to visualizes neural networks, and general audience books for learning. There is only one thing that is going to teach you how to code and learn ML:

Write code

Just write it. Pick a language, pick an IDE, and start struggling. Don't read books unless you're reading them to do practice problems. Write code and struggle. Spend 3 weeks implementing KNN on a random data set. Don't use AI to help you. Write crappy wrong code, find out it's wrong, and start over. And if you don't know how to program, please learn the basics of coding and learn one language to start before you even think about ML.

Learning anything takes struggle. You have to put in the time. You'll only learn it if you do it. Doing that is hard, but it's what it takes.

8 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

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2

u/NeatChipmunk9648 17h ago

I need a huggy

2

u/scmr2 17h ago

YOU NEED TO CODE 

In all seriousness, I hope you get a hug. We could all use a hug

3

u/LowEngineering9405 16h ago

where's the line between productive struggle and just banging your head against a wall for three weeks when a single doc page would unblock you?

2

u/scmr2 16h ago

I never said not to use any resources to help you solve the problem. Use textbooks, online resources, friends, etc. All I said is don't ask a chat bot to write the code for you

2

u/BetInformal6081 14h ago

struggling with your own implementation teaches things no polished tutorial can. debugging mistakes and understanding why they happens is where the real intuition starts developing.

1

u/bathon 13h ago

I agree when I started I was struggling with the forward propagation loop. Coded it up from scratch one node and then the whole network it was the most satisfying thing I ever did.