When in doubt, choose the course that has the most experimental work Updated +Created
You can always learn pure theory later on for free or very cheap from books.
And above all, you can always learn software engineering later on for free, because the programming community is so much more open than any other so far, notably e.g. with Stack Overflow and GitHub, see also: Section "Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment". Ciro Santilli is trying to change that with OurBigBook.com, but don't hold your breath. But it is increasingly hard to understand why there isn't an university that forces teachers to publish all their notes and lecture videos (which should be mandatorily recorded) with a Creative Commons License, and then let anyone take whichever exams they want for a small fee or for free.
Actually, there is a good chance you will learn to program, like it or not, because chances are that you won't be able to find as decent a job doing anything else.
But there is one thing you cannot learn for free: laboratory work. Laboratory work is just too expensive to carry out outside of an institution.
Basically, if you don't do laboratory work in undergrad, you will very likely never be able to do so in your entire life.
Because laboratories are so rare and expensive, it is laboratories that put you in the best most unfair position at creating world changing deep tech startups, which is why when in doubt, choose the course that has the most experimental work. Yes, you won't be able to achieve those insanely concentrated equities of the early-Internet, as you will need more venture capital to run your company, but those days are over now, deal with it.
Xah Lee Updated +Created
Figure 1.
Xah Lee with some weird statuettes of himself
. Source. 2019.
Let's see:
YouTube Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli publishes videos of this not-so-common visual programming experiments on his YouTube channel occasionally: www.youtube.com/c/CiroSantilli. Ciro should however not be lazy and also upload each video produced to Wikimedia Commons, since YouTube does not offer a download option even for videos marked with a Creative Commons license: www.quora.com/Can-I-download-Creative-Commons-licensed-YouTube-videos-to-edit-them-and-use-them/answer/Tarmo-Toikkanen!
This is also where Ciro's downtime converged to in his early 30's, since he long lost patience for stupid video games and television series.
Ciro developed one interesting technique: while scrolling through YouTube's useless recommendations, when he understands what a channel is about, he either immediately:
  • subscribes if it is amazing and then "Don't recommend channel"
  • otherwise just "Don't recommend channel" immediately
This helps to keep this feed clean of boring stuff he already knows about. There is unfortunately an infinite amount of useless videos out there however on the topics of:
  • sports
  • music, mostly idiotic top of the charts
  • news and political commentary
  • food
  • programming tutorials. Meh, got Stack Overflow.
  • stuff that is not in English, and notably languages that Ciro does not even speak!
  • motorcycles
  • ASMR
  • cute animals
  • gaming and movie commentary. Ciro is interested only in a very specific number of video games
  • nature life, e.g. hiking, cycling, or living in isolation, this Ciro enjoys
  • science for kids (popular science)
and no matter how much you say you don't want to hear about them, YouTube juts keeps on sending more.
Things Ciro hates about YouTube:
  • you can't follow or ignore a subject, only indirectly tell the algorithm about that. Once you click a popular cat video, you will be forced to watch cat videos for all eternity.
Bought by Google in 2006.
Video 1.
YouTube: From Concept to Hypergrowth Jawed Karim (2006)
Source. YouTube co-founder explains that the key enabling technology for YouTube was the addition of video capabilities to Macromedia Flash 7.

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