[choxi]

I've been trying to read more primary source information, sort of as my own way of combatting "fake news" but before that term was coined. There's a learning curve to it, but I've found that reading S1 filings and Quarterly Earnings Reports can be more enlightening than reading a news article on any given company. Likewise, reading research papers on biology and deep learning is significantly more valuable than reading articles or educational content on those topics.

As you'd imagine though, it's really hard. Reading a two page research paper is a very different experience from reading a NYTimes or WSJ article. The information density is enormous, the vocabulary is very domain specific, and it can take days or weeks of re-reading and looking up terms to finally understand a paper.

I'm really excited about Distill, there's a lot of value in making research papers more accessible and interesting. I've noticed that the ML/AI field has been very pioneering about research publication process, some papers are now published with source code on GitHub and the authors answering questions on r/machinelearning. This seems like a really great next step, I hope other fields of science will break away from traditional journals and do the same.