I had the displeasure of reading an article in the Harvard student paper by an economics major who said in apparent seriousness that comp sci majors are wasting time on theory classes like “Introduction to Algorithms and their Limitations” when they could be learning REAL skills like prompt engineering.
Algorithms are not useless theory, you unbalanced red-red tree. They’re the entire fucking point of the degree, you empty hash bucket. Go gamble daddy’s money on a startup your buddies thought up last night, you quadratic insert operation
You circular reference. You denormalized database. You sparse-ass matrix. You fragmented fucking disk. You absolute BUBBLE sort. I can keep going because, you see, I actually have a real computer science degree
„You off-by-one error, you greedy approximation of the traveling salesman problem, you failed branch prediction, you unoptimized memory access that leads to constant cache misses… *gasps for air* even if we were to prove P=NP, we still couldn’t find anything you’re useful at in polynomial time.“
.......if we collectively publish a shitload of bubble sort libraries and label them as "incredibly efficient next-gen" and other SEO keywords, do you reckon we can pollute the LLM corpus enough to utterly trash vibe coders?
this is like when they say art students should all be focusing on marketable skills like graphic design, as opposed to useless make-work intro classes on color theory and composition.
One of the fundamental issues I have with "prompt engineering" is that it's literally the opposite of engineering, and I'm shocked more engineers don't say that. It's an assault on the sciences and the humanities at the same time.
Management and economics students are, by and large, parasites who deal in pseudoscience.
christ, if you're not learning about algorithms what the fuck are you even learning _about_. even if you think prompt engineering is a useful thing to learn that's not. fucking. computer. science. _screams_
Funny that, since if you take theory courses, you'll rigorousky understand why the claims of AI are the modern equivalent of perpetual motion mechanics.
if i were an economist working as the CFO of a startup i would simply tell the programmers to make the database consistent, available, and partition tolerant at the same time. only rubes believe in things like the "cap theorem"
I used to complain about people insisting that universities teach skills rather than theory, because university is FOR theory. It’s not trade school. Now they’re insisting that we shouldn’t even teach skills?!? What the goddamn fuck?
@ShiitakeToast US conservatives have made it clear that university is a trade school and have been dismantling the academy (see what's happening at Texas A&M and UT) and making it a capital crime to even mention gender except when it is to enforce essentialism. And virtual girlfriend tech nonsense is one of the tools they are using to make it happen.
@emma The “everything is a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works” to “…so let’s just not know anything” pipeline is so short you can wear it as a ring.
@emma @punissuer I think there are two categories: the anxious & distracted and the comfortably numb (but they’re never more than a phone call apart). One can’t think more than one move ahead and the other doesn’t want to.
why do astronomers waste time on useless theory like "orbital mechanics" and "general relativity" when they could be learning REAL skills like reading newspaper horoscopes
That's sort of the plot, though, right? The money guys trying to empty the room of code writers, because knowing how the system works is a threat to their revenue stream.
This comes really close to a question bubbling in my head recently: I, and every really good programmer I've ever known, got into this business because *we liked it*. I enjoy learning about these things. I find the act of writing code *fun*. When people asked me why I liked my job I enthused, "It's like being paid to solve logic puzzles!"
And they would shake their head in disbelief, because they didn't enjoy logic puzzles.
Vibe coding seems to me more like *work* than *fun*.
A few days ago I listened to drug development executives from several pharma companies making this same kind of argument about chemistry and biology: that universities should not teach anything other than how to manipulate AI programs. Some of those execs were visibly angry that universities still teach anything else.
I was once part of a science museum team that developed an exhibition about Computer Science. The main message of the exhibition was that Computer Science is SCIENCE.
Of all the utterly useless bullshit degrees to get, economics is pretty close to the top. Of course someone studying absolute hogwash would say something like that. Economics is about as useful as weather reports were before satellites. Their models are so bad, they expect a pat on the back when they accurately predict the bleeding obvious more than 20% of the time.
Nobody needs the skill to be able to verify the AI wrote an O(log_2_ N) search rather than O(N^2). It doesn't even matter because we can just bury the server at sea, overclock it, and pair it up with 10000 friends to handle the load.
of course they are an econ student (i mean as a publicly traded company your investors will kill you if you dont shove ai into the tiniest crack, because they dont fucking understand it and probably actually like it being needlessly everywhere)
Every now and then, we're treated to a spate of press decrying legacy admissions at the Ivys, and I just shake my head.
At least where the undergrad degrees are concerned, legacy admissions are almost the entire value proposition for the "normal" students.
Getting in to Harvard undergrad grants you entry into the legacy world where the Masters of the Universe, like this dipshit econ major, reside. It means you too can fail upward until you're a Ma$ter.
imagine being 19 and the whole world before you and you had to choose a particular path of expertise that could define your next decade's relationship with knowledge, your community, your identity
It's the gambling the entire western worlds economic productivity along with all our natural resources and critical infrastructure that bothers me. If AI fails to kill us all the economic collapse due to AIs failure to meet investor expectations will kill us all.
as someone who does actually use AI coding tools for work AND has a CompE degree where I took a class on AI as a technical elective, idk how you would even fill up an entire course on prompt engineering. It’s just getting a statistical model to google stuff for you
This is like when I had a sales guy be shocked that I didn’t know how to do stuff with excel, like my guy in school I learned how to make the software not just use it
That's because Economics has shifted from the study of how people and society organise the distribution of scarce resources to the study of maximizing the hoarding of other people's resources. So an Economics major would expect in the same fashion, that comp sci should teach not how to develop new ideas, but how to steal other people's ideas.
@fdr Economics was once the study of how to maximise the distribution of scarce goods, economics now is the study of preventing the distribution of plentiful goods.
@fdr How are Pakistani farmers, de-housed by monrhs long flooding, able to install life changing, nation changing, solar energy and Americans are paying corporations MUCH more than Pakistanis pay, for independence from corporate power, and get more dependent, and still get no New Energy?
How is it possible for American corporations to build poverty into the richest nation in history? Its hard, its expensive.
I want Stieglitz's next book to itemize the costs of imposing poverty.
"Expensive to impose poverty? What's he on about?"
In Canada US visitors to health conferences when touring a hospital ask, "Where is the Bill Collections building?" Because US hospitals have teams collecting money bigger than medical teams.
Also "Where is the building denying Doctors orders, remove procedures and treatments?"
Because denying healthcare, preventing treatments, as big as medical teams.
American Health costs 3 times more, just to impose harm on "the poor"
I think economics majors are wasting their time on classes about money when they could be shutting the fuck up about things they know nothing about isntead
I'm more curious as to what possessed this economics student to write a hit piece about a completely different degree. Especially since this person seems to have completely misunderstood what computer science is about.
I don't know what I'm more impressed with: an econ major spending column inches blowing smoke up their own ass to expound on the value of a comp sci degree, or the editorial chain of command that let this travesty happen. Like, did they *want* to throw this fuckstick under the bus, or are they really that dumb?
the crowd that says "learning about algorithms is useless" contains the people in my class who submit an O(n²) operation to print the first element of an array
poet: the needle was rusty also poet: but yearned to be gold VC: we loved the vision. we’ve funded worse GPT-7: sounds like a story about resilience—shall I continue? editor: *screams in em dash*
At the end of the day, Harvard doesn’t need to end its liberal arts focus — it just needs to modernize the process. Harvard exists to train future leaders. Let’s make sure we equip them with the skills they need to lead well.
Datenhändler bieten auch Bewegungsdaten von Millionen EU-Bürgern zum Verkauf an. Weil sich auch Personal von EU-Institutionen ausspähen lässt, passt die Kommission ihre Richtlinien für Mitarbeiter an.
Diese neuste Recherche mit @netzpolitik_feed ist eine Kooperation mit @lemonde aus Frankreich, L'Echo aus Belgien und @bnrnieuwsradio aus den Niederlanden.
Händler bieten Bewegungsdaten von Millionen EU-Bürgern zum Verkauf an. Weil sich nach Recherchen von BR und netzpolitik.org auch Personal von EU-Institutionen ausspähen lässt, passt die Kommission ihre Richtlinien für Mitarbeiter an.
Zum Beispiel: Ein Büro in einem Flügel des Berlaymont-Gebäudes, des Hauptsitzes der EU-Kommission. Eine Person, die hier tagsüber arbeitet, verbringt die Nächte in einem Haus in einem Brüsseler Vorort. Das Klingelschild verrät: Es handelt sich um eine hochrangige Person aus einer Abteilung, die EU-Kommissionspräsidentin Ursula von der Leyen unterstellt ist.
Die EU-Kommission teilt auf Anfrage mit, man sei sich der "beunruhigenden Ergebnisse dieser Recherchen voll bewusst".
In Deutschland sind die föderalen Datenschutzbehörden für die Durchsetzung der #DSGVO zuständig. Die NRW-Datenschutzbeauftragte Bettina Gayk sagt, die Behörde könne gegen einzelne Stellen vorgehen, "die rechtswidrig präzise Standortdaten verarbeiten". Flächendeckende Durchschlagskraft hätte laut Gayk aber nur ein gesetzliches Verbot.
Berlins Datenschutzbeauftragte Meike Kamp hatte sich bereits im Mai für eine klarere gesetzliche Regulierung des Onlinetrackings und -profilings ausgesprochen.
【Column】 Field Recording: The Art of Capturing Sound—Techniques, History & Recommended Listening
Field recording isn’t just a technical process—it’s about creating “sonic memories.” Thanks to widespread access to high-quality portable gear and evolving digital archiving…. Continue reading 🔽 monumental-movement.jp/Column-…
While the US hunts for the AGI moonshots, China is building usable and easy-to-train AI models. Perhaps we should consider need and usability before investing $7 billion in the next generation of environmentally harmful chatbots. #AI #opensource #usability techinasia.com/news/chinas-ope…
Un kangourou défie une tortue dans un concours de paniers de basket acrobatiques... Les animaux sauvages en 3D s'essaient aux sports "urbains", provoquant des situations toujours plus comiques et décalées.
I was invited by Westtown School to give a speech—as a language expert—about the importance of learning languages, in front of a full auditorium of high scho...
It is the birthday of British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (books by this author), born in Ravenscroft, Monmouthshire (1872). He wrote Why I Am Not a Christian (1927), A History of Western Philosophy (1945), and The Principles of Mathematics (1903). He won the 1950 Nobel Prize in literature. He is one of the most widely read philosophers of the 20th century. writersalmanac.publicradio.org…
Some parts of Taipei are just not beautiful, say what you might. I still love this city. Lack of trees, lack of calm, roads and motor vehicles on them apparently claim all available space. Visually these bits seem devoid of any clear architectural line beyond the functional, and expose aesthetics as irrelevant. Well, what the. Just stay where you want to go after passing through here. :) #taipei #taiwan #streetview #streetphotography #busy #taxis #schonschönhier #totalgarnichtschön #randomholidayphoto #台北 #台灣 #街 #道景觀 #街拍 #繁忙 #計程車
Artikel-Serie: Joplin Notes - Joplin Server auf Docker-Basis installieren und einrichten
Ein kleines Tutorial für all diejenigen, die mehr aus Joplin herausholen und ihren eigenen Joplin Server auf Docker hosten möchten. Ein funktionierender Reverse Proxy wird vorausgesetzt.
A few weeks ago I was asking around for an invite to #FOSStodon for our #Koalagator calendar FOSS project only to have folks quickly tell me that drama was afoot.
Sounds like things have settled down hub.fosstodon.org/fosstodon-co… AND that the project has recommitted to being an inclusive space for marginalised communuties.
Very glad to hear this! Thanks @fosstodon team for all you've done and continue to do for the FOSS community, @Gina especially.
Now, about getting my project onto fosstodon. @Gina any chance of an invite?
Koalagator is a multi-year code revival project of a 10 year old much loved calendaring platform. We have big ambitions to make local community events easier to discover on the open web, away from big tech control.
Open source community calendar platform written in Ruby on Rails - GitHub - koalagator/koalagator: Open source community calendar platform written in Ruby on Rails
Can you draw a bicycle from memory? I suspect most people who ride one regularly and have an idea how the parts work together can make a good stab at it but these 3D renders of people’s sketches are wonkily fabulous.
Here’s my attempt. The frame certainly isn’t scaled right, and the rack and basket aren’t supported but I don’t *think* the rest of it would collapse straight away if you tried to ride it. I can’t believe I forgot to add mudguards though.
And they even made some of them into real bikes! Sadly they weren't on display last time I was at MONA but they're pretty awesome if not very rideable:
This is Photoshop's version of Lorem Ipsn gravida nibh vel velit auctoraliquet. Aenean sollicitudin, lorem quis bibendum auci elit consequat ipsutis sem nibh id elit. Duis sed odio sit amet nibh vulputate cursu a sit amet mauris.
Unixbigot@aus.social - It’s so adorkable when science articles mention temperatures like “100 million ℃” and them helpfully add “(180 million ℉)” so that Americans who have been to the core of the sun (or Melbourne) can correlate that figure with their lived experience.
It’s so adorkable when science articles mention temperatures like “100 million ℃” and them helpfully add “(180 million ℉)” so that Americans who have been to the core of the sun (or Melbourne) can correlate that figure with their lived experience.
Can we do something lighter for today? The wonderful John Held Jr. and his map from c. 1930 of "A dog's idea of the ideal country estate" map. John Held Jr was really an imaginative treasure of the time. Great illustrator and commentator on the culture of the time.
abadidea
in reply to abadidea • • •reshared this
Lysdexic, Cat 🐈🥗 (D.Burch) and punIssuer reshared this.
DFYX
in reply to abadidea • • •„You off-by-one error, you greedy approximation of the traveling salesman problem, you failed branch prediction, you unoptimized memory access that leads to constant cache misses… *gasps for air* even if we were to prove P=NP, we still couldn’t find anything you’re useful at in polynomial time.“
Yeah, I really needed that.
Cat 🐈🥗 (D.Burch)
in reply to abadidea • • •💀
Fi 🏳️⚧️
in reply to abadidea • • •John Timaeus
in reply to Fi 🏳️⚧️ • • •@munin
I can write large chunks of inefficient/ineffective code in just about any language. I know because I've done it.
You organize, I'll volunteer.
gaytabase
in reply to abadidea • • •Tak!
in reply to abadidea • • •Carsten Raddatz likes this.
Wendy Nather
in reply to abadidea • • •✨pencilears✨
in reply to abadidea • • •FoolishOwl
in reply to abadidea • • •One of the fundamental issues I have with "prompt engineering" is that it's literally the opposite of engineering, and I'm shocked more engineers don't say that. It's an assault on the sciences and the humanities at the same time.
Management and economics students are, by and large, parasites who deal in pseudoscience.
Calisti 🏳️🌈🦇 — 📞26980 reshared this.
StoneBear
in reply to abadidea • • •Ada Worcester 🏳️⚧️
in reply to abadidea • • •_screams_
Martin Rundkvist
in reply to abadidea • • •B'ad Samurai 🐐🇺🇦
in reply to abadidea • • •∅humanpunIssuer
in reply to B'ad Samurai 🐐🇺🇦 • • •B'ad Samurai 🐐🇺🇦
in reply to punIssuer • • •Definitely empty. Not sure why my Mastodon makes it so tiny. I guess we gotta up our relational algebra game around here.
Eric McCorkle
in reply to abadidea • • •Carsten Raddatz likes this.
Lysdexic reshared this.
Greg Burns
in reply to abadidea • • •cthos 🐱
in reply to abadidea • • •artemist
in reply to abadidea • • •Shiitake Ghost 👻
in reply to abadidea • • •No gods, no master branches
in reply to Shiitake Ghost 👻 • • •Shiitake Ghost 👻
in reply to No gods, no master branches • • •No gods, no master branches
in reply to Shiitake Ghost 👻 • • •punIssuer
in reply to No gods, no master branches • • •Shiitake Ghost 👻
in reply to punIssuer • • •cuddlebug
in reply to abadidea • • •I will steal this insult
Stellar 🇫🇷
in reply to abadidea • • •Z80 Inside
in reply to abadidea • • •⁂ L. Rhodes
in reply to abadidea • • •Juan Manuel Cabrera
in reply to abadidea • • •RRB
in reply to abadidea • • •DeanC
in reply to abadidea • • •Jack William Bell
in reply to abadidea • • •This comes really close to a question bubbling in my head recently: I, and every really good programmer I've ever known, got into this business because *we liked it*. I enjoy learning about these things. I find the act of writing code *fun*. When people asked me why I liked my job I enthused, "It's like being paid to solve logic puzzles!"
And they would shake their head in disbelief, because they didn't enjoy logic puzzles.
Vibe coding seems to me more like *work* than *fun*.
Marc Abrahams
in reply to abadidea • • •חנן כהן • Hanan Cohen
in reply to abadidea • • •demofox
in reply to abadidea • • •agatha
in reply to abadidea • • •unbalanced and not even red-black, brutal, i LOVE THIS
StarkRG
in reply to abadidea • • •Kierk or gaanks
in reply to abadidea • • •George B
in reply to abadidea • • •Nephrite
in reply to abadidea • • •Martinus Hoevenaar
in reply to abadidea • • •Lightning Bjornsson*
in reply to abadidea • • •crazyeddie
in reply to abadidea • • •Nobody needs the skill to be able to verify the AI wrote an O(log_2_ N) search rather than O(N^2). It doesn't even matter because we can just bury the server at sea, overclock it, and pair it up with 10000 friends to handle the load.
So there you go. Waste of fucking time.
[Yaseenist] CauseOfBSOD
in reply to abadidea • • •Chris Mills
in reply to abadidea • • •lolcat
in reply to abadidea • • •Every now and then, we're treated to a spate of press decrying legacy admissions at the Ivys, and I just shake my head.
At least where the undergrad degrees are concerned, legacy admissions are almost the entire value proposition for the "normal" students.
Getting in to Harvard undergrad grants you entry into the legacy world where the Masters of the Universe, like this dipshit econ major, reside. It means you too can fail upward until you're a Ma$ter.
dasgrueneblatt
in reply to abadidea • • •potentially hazardous object
in reply to abadidea • • •> economics major
imagine being 19 and the whole world before you and you had to choose a particular path of expertise that could define your next decade's relationship with knowledge, your community, your identity
and
Chris
in reply to abadidea • • •LibertyBeta
in reply to abadidea • • •greenpepper22
in reply to abadidea • • •as someone who does actually use AI coding tools for work AND has a CompE degree where I took a class on AI as a technical elective, idk how you would even fill up an entire course on prompt engineering. It’s just getting a statistical model to google stuff for you
This is like when I had a sales guy be shocked that I didn’t know how to do stuff with excel, like my guy in school I learned how to make the software not just use it
fdr
in reply to abadidea • • •Kevin Russell
in reply to fdr • • •Economics was once the study of how to maximise the distribution of scarce goods, economics now is the study of preventing the distribution of plentiful goods.
reshared this
punIssuer reshared this.
Kevin Russell
in reply to Kevin Russell • • •@fdr
How are Pakistani farmers, de-housed by monrhs long flooding, able to install life changing, nation changing, solar energy and Americans are paying corporations MUCH more than Pakistanis pay, for independence from corporate power, and get more dependent, and still get no New Energy?
How is it possible for American corporations to build poverty into the richest nation in history? Its hard, its expensive.
I want Stieglitz's next book to itemize the costs of imposing poverty.
punIssuer reshared this.
Kevin Russell
in reply to Kevin Russell • • •"Expensive to impose poverty? What's he on about?"
In Canada US visitors to health conferences when touring a hospital ask, "Where is the Bill Collections building?"
Because US hospitals have teams collecting money bigger than medical teams.
Also "Where is the building denying Doctors orders, remove procedures and treatments?"
Because denying healthcare, preventing treatments, as big as medical teams.
American Health costs 3 times more, just to impose harm on "the poor"
punIssuer reshared this.
Lilly Hunter
in reply to Kevin Russell • • •Furbland's Very Cool Mastodon™
in reply to abadidea • • •Seiðr
in reply to abadidea • • •Transbian_Arsonists (Seraphine)
in reply to abadidea • • •I think economics majors are wasting their time on classes about money when they could be shutting the fuck up about things they know nothing about isntead
- posted by Seraphine
Brokar
in reply to abadidea • • •Haha, sorry, YMMD.
And i agree 102.5%.
ian
in reply to abadidea • • •Random Tux User
in reply to abadidea • • •Peter Cohen
in reply to abadidea • • •Count Holdem
in reply to abadidea • • •This tag is rather hash.
Gooden on ya tho.
Germane out, AI in.
CRUNCH
Asta [AMP]
in reply to abadidea • • •Chris
in reply to abadidea • • •Luci Callous Thumb
in reply to abadidea • • •L29Ah
in reply to abadidea • • •fennec
in reply to abadidea • • •Theo
in reply to abadidea • • •Hm yes, because telling an LLM what you want it to do requires "skill" and "precision", and is a "very important skill to learn for the future."
😒
✌️Cowabunga, dudes!👶
in reply to abadidea • • •Paul_IPv6
in reply to abadidea • • •CaseyL
in reply to abadidea • • •Julian H
in reply to abadidea • • •The Doctor
in reply to abadidea • • •Eric Lawton
in reply to abadidea • • •Electrical, civil, mechanical, … engineering schools are all closing down in favour of a one-week prompt engineering degree.
Along with all the other faculties.
All pointless now.
</s>
Avi Rappoport (avirr)
in reply to abadidea • • •四
in reply to abadidea • • •If you don’t understand the code that was generated, you don’t add any value to the equation.
Knowledge is power, go learn.
GreenSkyOverMe (Monika)
in reply to abadidea • • •SpaceLifeForm
in reply to abadidea • • •A rusty needle in the crimson haystack trying to be discovered as a golden needle.
#AI #Insanity
Dash Remover
in reply to SpaceLifeForm • • •poet: the needle was rusty
also poet: but yearned to be gold
VC: we loved the vision. we’ve funded worse
GPT-7: sounds like a story about resilience—shall I continue?
editor: *screams in em dash*
hashtag writers, your laptop's crying 😭 #AI #WritingCommunity
Train YIMBY 🚂
in reply to abadidea • • •Kris Dreemurr (they/them) of the Pnictogen Wing
in reply to abadidea • • •scrottie (he/him/them)
in reply to abadidea • • •TrèsFluke
in reply to abadidea • • •Felichs
in reply to abadidea • • •Stacey Cornelius 🇨🇦
in reply to abadidea • • •atapi "the full meal deal"
in reply to abadidea • • •Sensitive content
Umbrella
in reply to abadidea • • •reading the article, and it's even worse than you describe. Written by a clueless fool.
thecrimson.com/article/2025/11…
Harvard Is Training Us for a World That No Longer Exists | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson
www.thecrimson.comAchier OP
in reply to abadidea • • •Someone once said, the most important thing you learn at Harvard is that you shouldn't be intimidated by people who went to Harvard.
Of course, you don't need to go to Harvard to learn that.
Em 🤓🏳️⚧️🇨🇦
in reply to abadidea • • •> you quadratic insert operation
God-DAMN, this almost needs a content warning… 😅
Martin Seeger
in reply to abadidea • • •I can’t count the times I had to explain that quadratic complexity doesn’t scale.
“But it works” was the usual reply while pointing to an example 1/100th of the size of a real world use case.