This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The joke is of course that DSP is typically introduced in the third year (or at least was around here). Ie. Linus (widely regarded a brilliant programmer and with a masters degree in CS) managed roughly as well as a student after an introduction to DSP course. I don't think he actually used AI for the C code, or at least it wouldn't make any sense given how there's a dearth of good training material (*) and the programming part itself is incredibly easy for any competent C or C++ programmer who doesn't need particularly optimal code (as Linus outright mentions in the repo). The trick is knowing what DSP algorithms to use and how and why the textbook ones are flawed (or outright bad in many cases).
*: There's a site called musicdsp.org which is a somewhat prominent site with pseudo- and sourcecode snippets of all sorts of audio DSP algorithms. They are also almost all from subtly flawed to horribly bad and and a layman (ie. someone who hasn't studied DSP theory) will have a hard time understanding how and where. Thus it's quite ironically almost exactly what you'd get if someone time traveled into the early 2000s and established a site specifically dedicated to poisoning future AI training on that subtopic (with a fair bit of success, I'd say given how the alternatives are either bits here and there or actual books / papers with math instead of code that can be copy pasted). Way back in the day I went from "Hmm, this looks kinda nifty" to "OMG, everyone there is a goddamn moron" in the course of just one year when I started DSP studies.
University degree by itself is no guarantee (as I found out to my pain during a couple of group work sessions when I had to do everything myself when everybody else was so incompetent) but there are many hard science / engineering fields where more or less everyone competent has a degree in a closely related subject, a maths / physics degree with significant self study or are polymaths with near genius level intellect. So in practise a university degree is a requirement to be any good at them. Programming just happens to be a very notorious exception to that (case in point, I only took a handful of programming classes in university and have been making my living for the last 25 years mostly as a C++ programmer in either DSP or embedded systems).
More options
Context Copy link