By the prinx — 19 Jan 2026

The YAGUI Program [2]

Why Study?

In the previous post, I discuss internal conflicts in my desire to return to University. I talk about how I care little for the experience of University, the marketability of degree programs, and how we're all feeling a bit empty in the waking of AI.

Irritatingly, I have that stupid divine calling that seems to break your metaphorical nose when you approach thirty - the same one that causes people to start running half-marathons or visit Japan. Like the marathon runners wish to do with their bodies - I want to test my brain; even if it's beyond its youthful prime. I want to develop my knowledge even if no employer will see it worthwhile, even if I'm competing with a chatbot that encapsulates of all of our digitalized humanity.

In this post, I will discuss the philosophy and nature of how I will study outside of this system.

Billionaires and AI

Billionaires are weird. They seem to think studying isn't worthwhile whilst also dreaming of a reality where they had professed in physics. They also seem to think that though university courses aren't valuable, the rather expensive courses they're distributing on how to use their cloud platforms are.

Then, with their big physics genius brains, they are leading us into the AI era with a similar lacking of qualifications under their belts. They're telling us that AI is probably going to remove the need for us in the workforce without taking much thought into wondering what that entails. Another point to add to the stack of reasons they think you shouldn't study.

I don't buy it, and don't I think you should either. Education should support the next generation in not just improving our system and all the junk these CEOs have made, but to navigate us through this brave new world. We need thinkers more than ever. We need people to critically see through the code, and decide what it means to be human in the next epoch.

The above may read like a cringe motivational speech before everyone dies in a comedy sci-fi movie, so here's a couple tangible avenues to why we should still study in the age of AI:

If you can't beat them, join them! They'll want more training data, and a lot of the training data is in old records. They're going to need workers in the humanities, art, and sciences to transfer that knowledge into a digital, tagged format if they're ever going to succeed in total world domination.
Become an android! AI is horizontal - it can fill in the gaps, I think it does that well. However, as AI exists at this moment it cannot create something novel. Notice that choice in wording - it can create something new, so long as that new point exists between two other points in its training set; it cannot be novel. You're not going to create a great novel painting from an AI, you're not going to create great novel literature (novel novel lol) from AI, you're not going to create a great novel theorem from AI. In tandem, perhaps; not originating from. This will always require great thinkers.

Am I going to be one of these great thinkers? Probably not. Just let me indulge in the theatrics of pretending to be one for now.

Open Credibility

I mentioned that going to an institution to follow a formal education isn't a path I'm willing to take. I won't impart a bashing to anyone who chooses to do so, I know I would jump at the opportunity to study at Oxbridge - I simply haven't the resources.

Unfortunately for me, all of modern undergraduate education systems seem to take the linear approach of pass course A, go onto course B, onwards until you get a glossy embossed piece of paper that says you're really intelligent! Reliability outside of this system is unpopular. Your mate Bob on Linkedin may think you're "proper smart", but Bob also makes posts about how stubbing his toe got him thinking about B2B sales strategies and that makes Bob a questionable reference.

Fortunately for me, there have been attempts to make open source education credible. Open Source Society University, or OSSU, have a path for computer science education that you can take completely online. With courses from various academic vendors presenting you with materials, lectures, and even certificates to prove you did the work - fab! There's an emphasis on the portfolio in-place of the degree certificate too, presenting the world with a ledger of your academic practice. This solves a lot of the validation process, without having the billionaire ego-based approach of "I'm really good at physics I promise, I think Richard Feynman is really cool!"

So is it sorted? I'm going to study the OSSU program? Not quite.

OSSU is a great effort of many contributors to collect different sources to sculpt a degree level course, but it relies heavily on sites like Coursera, of which I am not a fan. The OSSU can be completed for free, but it has a "vendor lock-in"-feel to the material. It is also, obviously, restricted to Computer Science, which limits the scope to education paths. I will, however, be using it's format as inspiration. I aim to compile as much material that is readily available online:

Notes: From previous students and lecturers.
Lectures: Youtube and other websites (that don't require a login) have ample!
Learning Objectives / Reading Lists: from course descriptions from online courses or university websites.

To emphasise the "academic ledger", I will keep a versioned record of what materials I use, what materials I produce, essays I write, projects I create, and the final capstones. Then, if I'm an fool, at least the proof that I'm a fool is open source information available to all.

The Cultural Experience of Study

One thing that's going to be hard to replicate is the meta-experience of study. The purest form of learning doesn't require a community, but put in practice it does require a village. When you attend university, who you go to class with, who you live with, who you attend clubs with; whomever your circle is, matters. Note sharing, group projects, academic chatter, communal meals, yoga classes, and campus gossip do add something to your academic experience, and sometimes can even impact your academic outcome. Dr. David McClelland, a Harvard social psychologist, studied this extensively and is quoted saying: “[the people you habitually associate with] determine as much as 95 percent of your success or failure in life". Who we associate with determines who we become, and if you associate yourself with no one, well, in my case, you become depressed.

This program isn't my life's work so I'm not going to take it that seriously on the community aspect, but I do think there are community elements of a degree I should do my best to emulate - mostly on study: reading clubs, problem discussions, essay feedback, and onwards.

Examples of these scenarios, and potential solutions, include:

Office hours? Ask a question on stackexchange and probably get absolutely railed in pursuit of the answer.
Book review? Hope a "r/maturestudy" exists on Reddit already and that is mature students studying and not something else.
Study group? Discord has a room for everything, always, disappointingly...
Pilates class? I guess I'll just join the hot parents in my local gym.

As mentioned prior, I can add my time in these activities to the ledgar for public verification (perhaps not with the pilates classes).

There are some elements that I haven't ironed out yet: group projects, language learning, presentations, international experience, internships - all very much require other people to directly collaborate with. This is an iterative experience, and I'm sure I'll get there. If we don't, lessons will be learned!

The Arts vs STEM

So what am I planning to study? Since my previous education stint, I feel my interests have diversified. I'm not sure if it's the turn of the new year and everyone is aimlessly spraying their resolutions into the algorithm, but I'm getting a lot of content along the lines of "How to become a Renaissance person in 2026". Though I can't say I have any ambition to narcissistically compare myself to da Vinci, I do think a varied education is attractive for the development of myself.

We've made a strange divide between STEM and the Arts, based purely on perceived capitalistic value. Is the pursuit of a great theorem, theory, or technology not in someway isomorphic to the fashioning of a beautiful symphony, painting, or novel? The output may be different, and they may live in different realms, but the human devotion to conceive something larger than oneself is of the same kind. Paraphrasing Tim Minchin in his "9 Lessons": "don't make the mistake of thinking the Arts and Sciences are at odds with one another. That is a recent, stupid, and damaging idea".

Therefore, I will add Science, Visual Art, and Liberal Art components to my curricular.

Anti-Marketability

Recently it was announced that you can now formally study Neon Genesis Evangelion at a University in Mexico, and I think this perfectly encapsulates the last philosophical design point my studies: anti-marketability.

A focus point of my last post was that study needs to be seen as marketable. Marketability doesn't mean inherent usefulness in the eyes of the workforce - my Pure Maths speciality has no easy transferability without bringing in second-order corporate buzzwords, and really most of the numerical skills are just a slight strengthening of what you would be expected to know as your prerequisites. Think of the successful Neon Genesis Evangelion students - they'll still exhibit critical analysis, philosophical reasoning, and have tangible essays / presentations to their names. Sure, they might not be much fun at the dinner table but, from a pure employability standpoint (assuming the career choice is not working at a Shakespeare museum), is that person really less useful than someone studying Shakespeare's sonnets, for example?

The philosophy of anti-marketability is to purposely transform materials, study directions, and outputs to make it difficult for an employer to hire you whilst keeping all of the hireable traits embedded in the practice. This can take many different forms, of varying levels of perceived distruption:

Absurdly niche: the above Neon Genesis Evangelion course should suffice as example.
Purposely obtuse: Algorithms and Data Structures in Python is way too employable. Try COBOL.
Too competitive: Art, fashion, academia - all of these are untouchable, you'll never make it without being broke and miserable! All the more reason to study them intensely.
Upsetting at Thanksgiving: Modules in gender studies, feminist film, Islamic faith - incredibly rich and informative topics that will develop you as an academic and make you a better human, whilst pissing off a conservative in the process.

To be candid, I'm not going to study something I don't enjoy to fit with this philosophy - there is no chance I'm going to build a database in brainf*ck. Also, I'm not going to make a mockery of any of these subjects - I genuinely see them as valuable, I'm emphasising the problem is that others don't see this value. Simply, I'm going to study things I enjoy with a middle-finger up to corporate capitalism, simultaneously. If my CV doesn't make a recruiter go "What the hell is this" at the end of it all, then I would've failed.

YAGUI

So what's the pledge? I, the Prinx, am going to make an online, open, undergraduate-level, documented, self-study program.

In the last post I referred to YAGNI - "You Ain't Gonna Need It". I am going to name my program "the YAGUI Program", where YAGUI stands for "You Ain't Gonna Use It". Will it be prestigious? Maybe! A clusterfuck? Probably. Entertaining? Hopefully.

In the coming posts, I'll start to discuss what I plan to study, my format, and where you can find all the information.