Research Papers are hard To read and I don't like MATLAB

🌷I'm too dumb for school.

There's just so many awesome and interesting things to learn, but studying can be really difficult.

Research Papers are Hard To Read and I don't like MATLAB

Most sample codes I've seen about robotics are in MatLab, which is expected of course, because that's what academics use for decades. It is not surprising yest, but also unfortunate. Unfortunate because, well, it's not open source and I've never really liked it. I can't run it online in a CodeSandbox or on Google Collab as a Jupyter notebook or something.

And I've always found academic literature... difficult to read, to put it nicely. There is just well, with all due respect, so many things not to like.

  • I don't like the font they use
  • I don't like it's usually just black and white.
  • The graphs and figures are not pretty.
  • It's in PDF
  • The layout is two columns.
  • I don't like latex and for one reason or another, I left my "mathematical symbol reading skills" back in college, and a quick glance at greek letters make my brain hurt. Yes, I know I'm not trying hard enough and maybe I'm not smart enough.

Luckily, there are people like Christopher Olah and the Distill Pub team that are trying to change this.

Machine Learning Research Should Be Clear, Dynamic and Vivid. Distill Is Here to Help. Devoted to clear explanations, native to the web. Distill encourages you to go beyond traditional academic forms. The goal is to best communicate science and serve the reader.

And also Arxiv Vanity

ArXiv Vanity renders academic papers from arXiv as responsive web pages so you don’t have to squint at a PDF.

I'm not bashing academics or the academe, I have very high regard for them and their brilliant minds, but I don't think I'm alone in saying that saying that research papers are very difficult to read. It isn't their fault, they didn't write it for the average person in mind, which is again, understandable and expected, but again, is also unfortunate, for me at least.

I'm rambling again. Anyway.

What should I do about it?

Before anything else, I'd like to say that I'm very luck and fortunate that I'm living in an era with internet. So many people are sharing their knowledge and It's so much easier to find people to care to spend time to explain things well than ever before.

  • Try to read through academic papers anyway.
  • Try to read the same topic from different sources and hopefully they click.
  • Try to find related blog posts and youtube videos that explain those topics.
  • Write about the things I've learned in my own words and try to explain them well.
  • Maybe draw some pictures, and sample interactive visualizations?
  • Try to read through Matlab code anyway.
  • Implement my own version first in pseudocode, then in Python and maybe port it in javascript for the web.

I'm sorry I don't have a more clever solution and I'm not saying any life changing advice. But yeah, I guess that's my resolve.