Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      7 days ago

      most people who are considered skilled programmers seem to know very little math (by my arbitrary standards), so I wouldn’t worry about it. if you get that the remainder of 8 divided by 5 is 3 then you’re 99% of the way there

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        7 days ago

        There are three kinds of programmers. From smallest to largest: Those smart enough to write good math-intensive libraries, those dumb about to think they can, and those smart enough to just use what the first kind made.

    • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      7 days ago

      I think you would need to deliberately choose a mathematical problem to solve, otherwise the most difficult thing you’ll come across will be binary representations of numbers and why floats are FUCKING BULLSHIT (seriously though they can be tricky if you think they are just “numbers in a calculator”).

      If you want to really understand programming language theory, or computer science more generally, you will definitely need mathematics. But if the goal is “I want to tell this chip what to do,” you don’t need to learn a lot of math, in my opinion.

      Edit: also, if you need help with any math, feel free to DM me. I am a former math teacher and sometimes teach algorithms (basically screaming “what is your induction variable”) at the undergraduate level.