I feel overwhelmed & utterly outpaced just scrolling this subreddit, or the ML related videos constantly flowing on my YouTube feed - But don't get me wrong, I AM NOT *discouraged* by that. Rationally, I realize (at least I assume) that ML is so broad, that I assume you either read papers *constantly* to keep up with the general state of the realm, but would have little or no time to *do* anything.

So pretending I'm an experienced person here, I'll pretend to give myself advice: Do spend some time keeping up with tools and innovations that apply to the field fundamentally (learn PyTorch, contrive a fun reason to actually use fundamentals to ensure I actually grok things like curriculum learning, RNNs, adversarial training approaches, and have actual experience even just putting into action a meager diorama of the concepts, model elements, development of stuff that really excites me (right now I'm SUPER jonesing to figure out where to begin translating some papers i read recently about how to create agents that can learn skills to accomplish sub-tasks, and sub-tasks required to do THOSE, ending up able to take a natural language instruction, generalizing from few-shot examples where say picking up a socccer ball in training has to be matched up with picking up a shoe to carry it to xyz spot - and the awesome stuff involved in dealing with interruptions, temporariy changing its plan, then adapting the plan back to the end goal, all without the very immediate simple reward function I would write for little robot characters running around in Unity when I was learning how to use ML Agents there.

I have obsessively bought every robotic sensor, MCU, component, accessory, hat, I mean.. I seriously amassed an on hand inventory of parts, tools, (even a Jetson Nano and RTX 3090 specifically so I could have at least meager ML processing power), tools, 3D printers souped up to industrial filament capability with enormous chamber volumes, a giant rack of every material I have ever learned about...

So I have it all at my fingertips when it comes to robotics input (sensory) and output (manipulation / actuation / mobility).

NVIDIA Isaac is practically screaming at me that I just need to commit to the long YT tutorial journey starting there....

But is there a (or several) ways you guys have greased the wheels for yourselves to come back from 2 weeks of vacation, see some cool new thing, and quickly grok it / run it / basically get the effect of reading one of those "Learn xyz in 24 hours" books?
You remember the ones. When you had to take an exam for some certification in a couple of days on something you only knew enough about to avoid throwing red flags in the job interview a few months ago, and never had to use it, but now you find out performance ratings and bonuses at this silly dilbert company require you to stop kicking ass on actual relevant tasks, so you can tick some cert boxes, ...
AND YET, by lobbing digestibly small chunks of info at you, and having you do some reasoably short hands on exercise to apply that info, the knowledge magically sparkled bright blue as it swirled up your hands, arms, and brain, suddenly part of your very nervous system, transforming what was just an intellectual concept into *knowing*.... *winning*

So... are Jupyter notebooks the typical "check out this cool new thing that might bring " means of efficiently sharing and absorbing cool new ideas hopefully bringing our collective dream of indestructible flying cylon cars constantly improving themselves and their own successor to what was once human brain tissue, not quite free to explore the cosmos as we ideally wished for, but free to roam up to 250ft vertically using carbon neutral skin wings?

(Hoping for a variety of diverse opinions here, I'll take every scrap of unique wisdom I can find so if you're about to move on assuming it wouldn't be worth typing a response, I am listening with the ear of a 20+ year software dev who's boiled down my own insights for the many people over the years who wanted to get into programming for various reasons. Gimme your best nuggets)