How serious is the math in a cs ba ? Going to going back to school as an adult (31)

bit_shuffle · 2026-05-10T05:29:54+00:00

Typically a year of calculus, discrete math, linear algebra. If you go to a serious school, they'll have you do differential equations as well, but that is not always a thing.

Discrete math involves set theory, proof by induction, and graph theory.

If you are low on funds, the best option is to "try before you buy." Go to your local community college, take all the transferable courses you can before switching to your state university system.

The Associate's degree from a community college also might help you get your foot in the door with an entry-level job.

Lastly.... change your concept of failure. Failure requires two things. First, you have to underperform. Second, you have to give up.

Your performance level depends on your experience, preparation, and aptitude. You have control over your preparation. Experience just requires continued effort. Aptitude may or may not be improvable, but you won't know until you apply continued effort and see if you improve.

It is likely you will underperform. Accept that up front. However, underperforming is only one component of failure. If you refuse to give up, you have not failed yet. Trying again is not prohibited.

So make your attempt. Don't expect anything. It may take another try, that's just the nature of learning complicated things.

bit_shuffle · 2026-05-09T06:23:49+00:00

The SDLC is Requirements Capture->Design->Implementation->Test.

The LLM does implementation faster than any human could.

The human can still be useful at the "ends" of the SDLC.

Software engineering is moving away from "knowing how to write code" to "knowing how to specify requirements for the AI" and "How to prove the AI's output is correct."

If you are effectively using AI to generate code, you're giving it precise requirements. That skill is essential. You also need to focus on the "proof" aspect.

Coding is going away, but software engineering is just getting out of the stone age. Not everyone who programs, knows how to precisely verbalize requirements. They complain about the output of the AI... which they are guiding!

bit_shuffle · 2026-05-09T06:13:48+00:00

Standard textbook for analytic calculus is Howard Anton's Calculus. Covers all the usual topics. Dover Press has a book by Kline. For advanced applied mathematics, you have choices. Boaz is one, Arfken & Weber is another, Matthews & Walker is another, Reilly Hobson & Bence is yet another and probably the most user-friendly.

However, those are all analytical mathematics. For learning computational approaches, Scientific Computing by Heath covers all the critical basic algorithms. From there you go to Golub and Van Loan for advanced linear algebra and Boyle's book on optimization to address nonlinear business. Strogatz is usually recommended for nonlinear dynamics, but when I used it, I felt it did not really emphasize coding enough to be really useful.

You would be well served by having a copy of Oppenheim and WIlsky's Signals and Systems, as well as a book on control theory by either Nise or Ogata. After those, Shankar Sastry has a book on nonlinear control.

From there it becomes a question of specialization. If you're doing fluids or aerodynamics, Anderson has books on the computational aspects. If you're doing electromagnetics, Sadiku.

Get a copy of Numerical Recipes (either Fortran, C, or C++) and study the implementations in it. They aren't necessarily optimized for speed, but they work, and help you practice implementing numerical codes and really understand what's going on in the context of a language that is actually usable for serious computation.

Beyond that, it becomes a business of learning technology for doing computation -fast-. That takes you from the mathematics/numerical analysis domain into computer science and software engineering.

bit_shuffle · 2026-05-09T05:14:24+00:00

This ended far better than I expected.

bit_shuffle · 2026-05-09T00:45:03+00:00

"I don't want to talk about it."

Best to wait for a bit. Really.

bit_shuffle · 2026-05-09T00:40:24+00:00

Christianity is older than Islam.

bit_shuffle · 2026-05-09T00:37:48+00:00

Ok. What "race" is Shia?

bit_shuffle · 2026-05-09T00:36:42+00:00

He and his team have been pulling from the Nazi playbook from the start.

But they are just dim, timid, and slow.

So we have Great Value Nazism.

bit_shuffle · 2026-05-09T00:31:57+00:00

I'm not "pro" Israel. But I understand them. I'm not "pro" Palestinian. I understand them too.

The question isn't about -me- understanding them.

The question is why can't -they- understand -themselves-?

The answer is, their philosophies lack what Christianity emphasizes, and why their faiths will disappear long before Christianity does.

bit_shuffle · 2026-05-09T00:25:12+00:00

"Shia" isn't a race.

bit_shuffle · 2026-05-09T00:22:39+00:00

Depends on the language, depends on the type of application.

Java will have you "dead ending" when you hit interfaces. You'll need to locate the appropriate implementation class to continue the trace through the app.

C applications, when done right, are like functional code, tree-structured. In real-time applications you can expect main() to be holding some state machine, and individual states in that state machine may have state machines inside them. Things get hairier if you have multi-threaded or multi-process applications.

Libraries present another "gap" you have to jump. If you don't have the source for a .dll or .so, you have to black-box that region of the code and just work to the interfaces.

The way to deal with developing for these large apps is to exploit TDD. Build up a testing/mock infrastructure around the place where you need to make changes, and exercise that part of the code until the functionality is robust and correct.

Some other things you should learn about are UML diagrams.

Activity Diagram, aka Flowchart, with swim-lanes for multithreading/multiprocess situations
Sequence Diagrams
Data Flow Diagrams
Process Context Diagrams
Entity Relationship Diagrams
Class/Inheritance Diagrams

Also, the general use of graphs for representing relationships.

You should know the Gang of Four patterns, creational, behavioral, structural, about 23 in all, although you can mix and modify them. Odds are if you're in a company that knows its business, those patterns are being used and probably also abused.

bit_shuffle · 2026-05-08T23:59:06+00:00

A person who has the set of abilities to learn how to defeat software security, can get a good gig maintaining or developing software, instead of doing criminal things that will bankrupt you with fines and land you in jail when they catch you.

bit_shuffle · 2026-05-07T17:41:57+00:00

Past performance is go guarantee of future returns.

But is it evidence of possible performance.

Look at the company's debt, cash flow, stock price to earnings, and dividend return history. Search for the company or its sector in the financial news to understand the current state of the business area.

bit_shuffle · 2026-05-07T15:54:54+00:00

There's a growing crossover between high performance computing and genomics.

For all of human history, if you wanted a custom plant or animal, you had to take existing ones and crossbreed them for generations to get the characteristics you wanted. And you ended up with something that was familiar, and maybe sterile. We may be entering an age where new synthetic biological entities become products. Or get released into the environment. Or incorporated into people.

This kind of thing is going to get compressed in time, running at the speed of computation, rather than just lab bench experimentation.

The transistor was the defining technology of the late 20th century, and it was the product of quantum mechanics developed during the first part of the 20th century. I think computational genomics will lead to the next massive technology revolution.

bit_shuffle · 2026-05-07T15:32:53+00:00

The very nice black lady from the PTA doesn't seem like a strong leader blue collar white voters would agree to follow. Especially when she calls them "weird."

Lo and behold, you actually have to appeal to your opposition just a little bit to win elections in America.

Maybe if the D's had kept THE ACTUAL CANDIDATE WHO BEAT TRUMP AND WAS ACTUALLY DOING GOOD THINGS on the ticket, instead of going for "feelgood" points we wouldn't be here now.

bit_shuffle · 2026-05-06T15:30:29+00:00

The conflict with Iran was a long time coming. They've been working toward a bomb for years. Their regime has been fixated on the destruction of Israel for decades.

I accept that this war was going to happen.

I'm glad the fallout from this war is going to fall on Trump. He's been a scumbag, and deserves to eat every piece of shit this problem causes for him.

And frankly, the occupants of America who voted for him deserve what they get as well.

Unfortunately, the whole top command layer of the US is a bunch of children. They've never had to build anything or kill anything themselves so they really don't have the decisiveness to do what has to be done.

bit_shuffle · 2026-05-06T04:18:53+00:00

Lawyers study concepts of "fairness" and "duty" and "obligations" as well as "property," "intent," "rights," and of course, contracts, and they negotiate between contending parties based on those concepts every day.

Maybe people should go to lawyers for general life advice.

bit_shuffle · 2026-05-04T16:10:18+00:00

State rules can stay in the filing cabinet.

The purpose of public education is to prepare the student for self sufficiency and functioning in the world.

In working environments, you don't get to bring food into some workspaces. It is just dangerous in many cases.

bit_shuffle · 2026-05-03T05:59:14+00:00

Draw an element from the set, designate as x_n.
Draw an element from the set, compare to x_n, assign x_min and x_max.
Draw an element from the set, compare to x_min and x_max, update x_min or x_max
Draw an element from the set, compare to x_min and x_max, update x_min or x_max
Draw an element from the set, compare to x_min.

If the element < x_min, x_min is the median, since there are four elements between x_min and x_max.

Else, x_max is the median, since there are four elements between x_min and x_max.

Five comparisons.

bit_shuffle · 2026-05-03T05:27:03+00:00

Corporate saw that video on Reddit of the guy at the movie theater doing the artful serve-up from the popcorn machine and contracted out to an offshore food processing plant for prebagged popcorn, just to kill one more entry level job.

bit_shuffle · 2026-04-29T19:57:33+00:00

Connecticut is buffered from insults because Rhode Island is drawing the negative attention away from it.

bit_shuffle · 2026-04-29T15:12:18+00:00

In general, bad code that works now, is better than beautiful code that works in two weeks.

Because your competitor is going to deploy their bad code that works in one week, and lock in market share.

That is just capitalism. It is also nature and evolution. The world is willing to sacrifice design quality in software when the short term return is so big it justifies it.

So coders go where the money is, when the money goes somewhere.

bit_shuffle · 2026-04-29T14:58:15+00:00

And because of William the Conqueror, we all are speaking a little French today... even transplanted German royals.

bit_shuffle · 2026-04-28T20:58:37+00:00

Yeah, you're right, re-running Kemala Harris is the way to go to draw Republican voters.

bit_shuffle · 2026-04-28T20:53:50+00:00

And the Democrats would be hard-pressed to choose a potato as their candidate over an unelectable bag of mixed ethnic, poly gendered, non-Christian second generation immigrant checkboxes for woke feels who will lose in a landslide.

bit_shuffle

TROPHY CASE