A Few Quick Notes

No math November, transcripts, annual subscriptions, etc.

Hello everyone! A few bookkeeping notes for subscribers:

What happened to Math November? Honestly, your guess is as good as mine. I was looking forward to doing a bunch of math streams with Demetri, but, for whatever reason, he did not end up doing the streams or the Kickstarter. I have not received any actual information as to why, so, I’m afraid I can’t give you any more detail than that.

Now, you may be asking, “Casey, why didn’t you just do the math streams by yourself?” Well, if you’re actually asking that question, you clearly have never seen me do math. The very last thing this world needs is a math explanation by me! I’ve never really “gotten” math myself, so the only times I can speak effectively on a math topic is if I have spent months or sometimes years working with that particular topic. My math knowledge is myopic to an extreme.

So, I apologize, but, absent a math expert, there was simply no way to do the streams and maintain any reasonable quality level. Believe me, I am as disappointed as you are! I was looking forward to learning some math this month, but alas, it was not to be.

Hand-written transcripts are being phased out. As we get into more detailed CPU topics, transcripts are becoming prohibitively time-consuming to produce. They now take significantly longer to produce than the videos, and limit the length the videos can be. Rather than try to keep videos in the 20-minute range, I will be phasing out hand-written transcripts.

I have long asked Substack to add the ability to upload captions alongside video posts, since they can be automatically generated and are basically free to include. But, despite the fact that web browsers already implement this feature natively, Substack has unfortunately still not added any ability to upload caption files alongside videos.

My hope is that Substack will eventually add this feature, so I can upload captions for all the videos. Until then, if it would be useful to people, I can include the captions as the “article” that accompanies each video. I don’t know how useful this would be, since if the words are synced with the video, it would be hard to understand what was going on. But, we can certainly try it if people think its better than nothing.

Monthly subscriptions are recommended for 2024. It is very likely that the Performance-Aware Programming series will wind down in 2024, potentially early in the year. If it were up to me, we would turn off the option to subscribe annually, just to avoid people signing up for long subscriptions without realizing that there may be very few (or no) new posts later in the year.

However, in keeping with the general theme, for some unknown reason, Substack does not provide any option for disabling annual subscriptions. You either have monthly and annual subscriptions, or you have no subscriptions at all. That’s it.

The one option I do have is changing the price of the annual subscription to be prohibitively expensive. I could, for example, make monthly subscriptions $9 but annual subscriptions $9000. However, I’m afraid to do this in case somebody actually selects that, perhaps even by mistake. I don’t really want to be involved in the eventual $9000 credit card dispute that would no doubt ensue.

So, the best I can do for now is recommend to everyone that, if you are on an annual subscription to Computer Enhance, consider changing to monthly when it expires. If you are considering signing up for a subscription, sign up for a monthly one. Avoid the annual subscription. It doesn’t save any money (the prices are the same), and it might make it more cumbersome for you to wind down your subscription when the course ends.