Nope. I only learned to use computers as an adult, and only learned programming incidentally as a tool for other work.

The truth is that it’s actually much faster to learn as an adult, you just have more momentum if you start as a child.

Ada particularly the SPARK subset. It’s approach is quite different than most languages, focusing on minimising errors and correctness. It’s fairly difficult but I like to use it to teach people to actually understand the problem and how to solve it before they ever write the code.

This blog covers a lot of topics, but very superficially.

This blog covers a lot of topics, but very superficially.

“From computer science papers/academic texts I know this method of reading works perfectly”

This is almost certainly due to pure familiarity. CS papers are just as indecipherable to unfamiliar persons. Possibly even more since things like complexity are heavily used, without any explanation of what it is. Data structures are another common one that the vast majority of non-CS people would not understand when referenced.

I know because this is exactly how I felt coming from an intermediate mathematics background.

“So many papers are extremely hard to read because the formulas are obfuscated like that”

This isn’t really an issue though, of you don’t have enough foundational knowledge to understand what the formula means or how it could be conceivably derived, does knowing how it’s calculated matter?

Mathematicians are good at writing algorithms, but not at the development aspect, which is basically building for different systems, packaging software and documentation.

I would disagree on the performance part, the vast majority of software developers aren’t writing high performance software and the ones that are tend to be computational mathematicians or physicists.

“seeing the differences in the result”

This just means that you are testing against a very narrow output. It’s actually pretty common to run across tests that don’t even check for the likely failure cases, because the developer(s) don’t actually understand the algorithm.

A common example is prime factorisation, most nontrivial factorisation algorithms (Pollard rho, elliptic curves), don’t guarantee producing a prime factor they simply tend to produce them because they prioritize small factors. Programmers see that their function produces primes for the one or 2 test cases (out of say 2^64) and assume that it works. It generally does, but when it doesn’t you get incorrect results (often undetectably) which poisons all the rest of your calculations.

Sure but what degree of influence is actually “radicalising” or a point of concern?

We like to pretend that by banning extreme communities we are saving civilisation from them. But the fact is that extreme groups are already rejected by society. If your ideas are not actually somewhat adjacent to already held beliefs, you can’t just force people to accept them.

I think a good example of this was the “fall” of Richard Spencer. All the leftist communities (of which I was semi-active in at the time) credited his decline with the punch he received and apparently assumed that it was the act of punching that resulted in his decline, and used it to justify more violent actions. The reality is that Spencer just had a clique of friends that the left (and Spencer himself) interpreted as wide support and when he was punched the greater public didn’t care because they never cared about him.

“A deradicalising effect”

I’m sorry what? The idea that smaller communities are somehow less radical is absurd.

I think you are unaware (or much more likely willfully ignoring) that communities are primarily dominated by a few active users, and simply viewed with a varying degree of support by non-engaging users.

If they never valued communities enough to stay with them, then they never really cared about the cause to begin with. These aren’t the radicals you need to be concerned about.

“And those people diffuse back into the general population”

Because that doesn’t happen to a greater degree when exposed to the “general population” on the same website?

You’re literally on a platform that was created to harbor extremist groups. Look at who Dessalines is, (aka u/parentis-shotgun) and their self-proclaimed motivation for writing LemmyNet. When you ban people from a website, they just move to another place, they are not stupid it’s pretty easy to create websites. It’s purely optical, you’re not saving civilisation from harmful ideas, just preventing yourself from seeing it.

You could write bindings to machine-prime . Hardly anything challenging for an actual programmer, but I’ll take the free labor if it is available.

Wrote a basic primality checker library, it’s not by far my most interesting or complex project but I like that I accomplished all my initial goals in a timely fashion.

I’ve personally seen little evidence of her being a crank. I’ve seen many claims and they mostly tie to her running a sort of consultation company, but no evidence of her or her firm promoting objectionable ideas. Sure she might oversimplify some topics, particularly economics and sociology. But I think her main critique in the trans video holds up… a lot of the research is poor quality and while not directly the fault of the researchers (although many of them do promote it) it is used to support hypotheses that were never tested.

I think you are severely overstating the level of knowledge of most journalists. Most science reporting to the public goes like this: journalist hears something, contacts a single scientist in the field, or is contacted by a single scientist. They talk to that person for a few minutes, then write their article. That’s being generous, many simply copy press releases and add their own interpretation.

There are only a handful of decent scientific reporting agencies targeting the public that actually do a good job.

Deuterium is pretty common, and tritium can be produced by lithium irradiation. They are finite resources, but still much larger than pretty much any existing resource.

It is true that fusion equipment suffers from neutron radiation, however this is a potential for breeding tritium.

This requires many assumptions that you or any computational system have no formal reason to make. Having an interpreter that just guesstimates exactly how you want the program structured, is going to run into problems when you, say want to extend the program.

Reading Goldwasser’s paper on elliptic curves, got me into math and then automating math calculations.

Well it was a disappointing post. This is the sort of thing you keep as a novelty program that you run once a year.

I did seriously expect some modeling that wasn’t just rotating points.

Is it really a quasar when you use no actual physics calculations?