I had the displeasure of reading an article in the Harvard student paper by an economics major who said in apparent seriousness that comp sci majors are wasting time on theory classes like “Introduction to Algorithms and their Limitations” when they could be learning REAL skills like prompt engineering.

Algorithms are not useless theory, you unbalanced red-red tree. They’re the entire fucking point of the degree, you empty hash bucket. Go gamble daddy’s money on a startup your buddies thought up last night, you quadratic insert operation

You circular reference. You denormalized database. You sparse-ass matrix. You fragmented fucking disk. You absolute BUBBLE sort. I can keep going because, you see, I actually have a real computer science degree

@0xabad1dea There's this old joke, I don't even know where I heard it first, about the econ major wanting to improve a farmer's financial outcomes.

The econ major visits the farmer regularly for a full year, duly makes his observations and notes everything the farmer does down. He goes back to his computer and crunches the numbers, applies all the modern tools and statistics. Then he comes back to the farmer and says: "So, I've crunched the numbers and done the statistics, and well ...

@0xabad1dea ... that 'sowing' thing you do, that doesn't gain you anything. You should stop that. But the reaping, boy, I'm a fan of the reaping! You should do that more, and none of the other stuff!"