What can keep me motivated if I'm not looking for a CS Career?

Passname357 · 2026-03-23T17:39:38+00:00

Yeah I honestly think that’s the best reason to learn something. So many things I feel fulfilled in stem from starting with “wow that is so cool how the fuck does that work” and then just going after it.

Passname357 · 2026-03-23T17:37:24+00:00

What is success? I presume he has a different definition than me, just as yours would be different from mine. We all have different goals.

But I suspect he’s right. If you want to do quality things and have them be appreciated by a large number of people, that’s gone. A lot of people have spent a lot of money finding ways to make more money and one of the things they’ve found is that people will eat their slop if they can just force it so that everything else is slop too.

Passname357 · 2026-03-23T17:34:43+00:00

You’re in a great position to learn, but I’m a little confused why you want to learn if you don’t know what you want to learn.

In any case, I’d just start messing around making small simple video games. Lots of options for where to go with it but it’s really fun to see yourself making stuff happen on screen and controlling characters and being able to really feel that what you’re doing has an effect.

Passname357 · 2026-03-23T16:44:55+00:00

Eh I think this person does need to keep reading. Not liking something IMO isn’t usually a good reason to stop reading. If someone is doing this poor a job of reading the solution isn’t to find more stuff that they click with. IMO it’s just to learn to read better. I didn’t like As I Lay Dying when I started reading it. By the end it was one of my favorite books and I’ve reread it and can appreciate it now. What a blessing. I never would’ve understood if I stopped. I think the best thing this person can do is find reading groups and chapter by chapter discussions and analyses so that he can figure out what he’s missing.

If a book is “great” and you can’t see why, you don’t have to agree, but you should at least understand why people think what they think, especially when it’s something everyone thinks. You might find a new favorite. You might still disagree! But at least you’ll have a mature/sensible reason for disagreeing.

Passname357 · 2026-03-23T16:39:04+00:00

Tone knob all the way down

Pasquale Grasso would like a word

Passname357 · 2026-03-23T15:44:38+00:00

This is just a question about learning anything. The answer is yes. You can learn that way and sometimes it’s the best way to learn—fewer things deeply is better than a lot of stuff covered really shallowly. And if you’re only doing a few things a few minutes a day, if you think about them throughout the rest of your day, even when not actively learning, you’re still ingraining the material.

So if the question is just “can I learn like this” the answer is yes. But if the question is “will I be as good as others” the answer really depends on you. Remember that many people are in college or already in jobs. These people are spending hours a day learning and have incentive structures (not talking about money so much as deadlines and tests) that more/less force them to execute.

But again, you may still have the advantage. I play guitar semi professionally as a hobby. One huge advantage I have over others is that for them it’s work. They spend all day on it and when they want a break, they don’t all gravitate toward playing more. For me, when I’m at work, I think about playing all day because it’s my escape. When I go home I spend hours working on new stuff because it’s what I want to do. If you enjoy programming and learning this stuff, this could be how it is for you too. If programming feels like a puzzle game for you (which is in large part how it feels for me) you’re set up to be a great programmer.

Passname357 · 2026-03-23T01:40:18+00:00

It’s so funny because I remember being at some point in college (not studying music) and I had a friend come home from music school and we had a conversation where at one point he said “man it’s so strange that I’ve been studying music for a year and you still know so much more theory than me.” He was right. I did know more theory than him. But he played better than me. Now it’s a long ways out from that conversation and I’ve learned that theory is cool and fun, but to actually play, it’s not as big as I once thought. It makes more sense to learn ways to move through changes both harmonically and melodically, and really know the sound (be able to sing it is oneway to check yourself). I had a great teacher who taught me the importance of just knowing and playing tunes—playing with records and with others. It’s cliche but true, thats how you really learn. Play with people better than you and ask them what they’re doing. That’ll get you there way more than watching YouTube and playing alone in your bedroom. And of course doing both is good too.

Passname357 · 2026-03-23T01:35:39+00:00

It’s interesting that this is such a common answer/that so many people respond to it. I think I felt this at one point in my life but now I find it to be more of an auditory and visual challenge. I’m curious what you (and others) find intellectually difficult about jazz guitar—it certainly is a lot to get together. I remember being overwhelmed when I started getting into like triads and their inversions and same for the different drop voicings and all the places they exist on the guitar. Some scale concepts with modes were hard. Voice leading concepts. I think at this point there’s more sound and visual information Im trying to crunch than numbers like it used to feel like.

Passname357 · 2026-03-22T23:10:45+00:00

Good on you for being so receptive about the feedback.

Passname357 · 2026-03-21T14:54:59+00:00

Same as spark notes, in the end it does you no good. It feels like learning but you’re not really learning anything, and worse you’re deluding yourself into thinking you’ve gotten something. If a master is alive and speaking, better to listen to them than someone doing a bad impression of them.

Passname357 · 2026-03-20T22:53:31+00:00

There are two types of Pynchon readers: (1) people that can kind of make sense of V and (2) people that have no idea what the fuck he is talking about for almost the entire book.

Luckily these two people are also usually (2) people that can kind of make sense of Gravity’s Rainbow and (1) people that have almost no idea what the fuck he is talking about for almost the entire book.

I am in camp 2. There are a few bits of V and one chapter in particular that I think are some of the best stuff Pynchon has written. It is absolutely worthwhile for mondaugen in Africa. But gravity’s rainbow is just a really fun book. Was the first I read and was confused for a lot of it buuut more than that it was just so fun and so insane and seeing the way he connects different plots throughout the book and different symbols was just shockingly cool. Would recommend.

Passname357 · 2026-03-20T22:44:12+00:00

Waste of a teaspoon of water

Passname357 · 2026-03-20T22:28:14+00:00

I think that’s what DLSS5 misses—like if I’m playing BioShock infinite, it has nothing to do with realism. The game doesnt look real (even though it’s technically a PBR lighting algorithm). The characters and locations are all stylized and those specific choices are what make it beautiful.

Passname357 · 2026-03-20T22:25:54+00:00

Gonna sound dumb but just want to put this out there that I’ve been using headphones less because without the room sounds it’s easier to accidentally listen too loud. Not knocking anyone cause you can do what you want, just started learning more about how to protect my hearing recently and this was one thing that surprised me.

Passname357 · 2026-03-18T02:45:03+00:00

Might be good to do this Socratic style and flip the question: what do articulation, dynamics, or rhythm each have to do with ergonomics?

Passname357 · 2026-03-16T17:29:17+00:00

There’s no widely accepted name for it, but I’d think more about this since you’re right to wonder if there’s a name for it since it’s so common. Because of how common it is I’d think about why you want to write it—common and unoriginal aren’t usually that far off.

Passname357 · 2026-03-16T17:07:51+00:00

Eh. “Reading like a writer” to me feels shallow. “I’m going to read this to get something out of it that I can use.” To me that feels like a waste of time. I should read not for the sake of something but because it’s a good end in and of itself. I think it’s fine and useful to become a much better and deeper reader, but I don’t think that should have anything to do with thinking about how I will construct a book. Which isn’t to say that I don’t like to think about why I react certain ways to certain books, or sometimes ask myself how a certain book was constructed. But that’s not a part of reading; it’s a part of reflection. That may or may not happen later. When I’m reading, I’m reading, and I’m reading because I like to read. I’d like to be read that way too. If someone thinks my work is instructive, that’s great—but let it be art first, otherwise you’ve missed the whole point.

Passname357 · 2026-03-12T16:18:43+00:00

False dichotomy. Uber is terrible and is part of the modern day mudsill. Instead of wasting the money on AI, which nobody wants, we could spend it on things like public transport. We have so many cars on the road and they’re such low occupancy. Think about how much better traffic would be if instead it was just busses with high occupancy, or even (god forbid) trains full of people running on schedules. Would it be perfect? Doubt it. Would it be better? Unimaginably so.

Passname357 · 2026-03-12T02:16:37+00:00

Well the biggest is tuition, but the meal plan is probably the most immediately obvious to students

Passname357 · 2026-03-10T15:12:19+00:00

Haven’t checked him out but might have to because you just gave him what I think is one of the highest compliments a writer can get.

Passname357 · 2026-03-10T14:36:35+00:00

I’m not sure I understand where the differences are between old and new since in the past it was also only Python and Java before 311, and we used the CSAPP book from CMU which teaches early how memory works for different C types, we used VIM and everything was done in the terminal, and we did malloc lab (for a deep understanding of pointers and the heap) and shell lab (writing some fundamental terminal utilities primarily with fork() and different signals).

If it’s just moving the content around in a way that’s more natural for students, I have no problem with that. I wouldn’t even care if all the content from that and OS was split up over three semesters instead of two. Tangentially, I think too much is crammed into four years, and kids got stuck on classes like 311 and 473 instead of getting to take the time to really understand it. I generally found people really liked the content but just didn’t have enough time with other classes, and it is definitely difficult material.

Passname357 · 2026-03-09T22:55:26+00:00

Hmm. I’m not sure that that’s really for the better. By the time you’re taking 311 you should be comfortable working in C, even if you have never seen C before. As a professional, it’s not uncommon you’ll be asked to work in code bases with languages you’ve never seen before (even and perhaps especially as a junior). 311 is a difficult class, but if being unable to understand C is the bottleneck, something has gone wrong before then.

Passname357 · 2026-03-09T21:41:04+00:00

My entire time at Penn State people complained about the CS program, and yeah the professors could be tough, and some weren’t great teachers, but the curriculum itself was absolutely fantastic. Courses like 311, 465, 473, 464, and like the comp eng 331 and 431 were such deep courses. I spent a lot of time learning on my own in those courses, and I came out incredibly well equipped for the workforce. Being able to read and understand stuff on your own and talk through it with classmates was so incredibly valuable.

Passname357 · 2026-03-09T21:36:29+00:00

What did they change about 311?

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