I took engineering for a year before I realized it had nothing to do with trains.

The problem is a lot of people who want to learn to code, and are conditioned to desire the college route of education, don't actually know that there is a difference and that you can be completely self-taught in the field without ever stepping foot in a university.

Can you get well paying coding jobs with upward mobility without at least a BA in CS?

I would have done CS if every math class at my school didn't have 500 people in it. Even college algebra. They basically made everything a weed-out class

I do think many of the CS concepts are pretty cool :)

I was interviewed with complex logic problems and a rigorous testing of my domain knowledge.

Most of what I do is updating copy and images.

This hurts so much because it's my life :(

But it's ok because now Nvidia has to deal with your garbage code due to Cyberpunk being the only game that supports the latest graphics tech.

The point of these lectures is mostly not to teach how to work with Turing machines, it is to understand the theoretical limits of computers. The Turing machine is just a simple to describe and well-studied tool used to explore that.

For example, are there things there that cannot be computed on a computer, no matter for how long it computes? What about if the computer is able to make guesses along the way, can it compute more? Because of this comic, no — it would only be a lot faster.

Arguably, many programmers can do their job even without knowing any of that. But it certainly helps with seeing the big picture.

I didn't go to university, because I wanted to learn useful stuff, but because I'm curiousity driven. There is so much cool stuff and it's very cool to learn it. That's the point of university that it prepares you for a scientific career where the ultimate goal is knowledge not profit maximisation (super idealistically).

Talking about Turing Machines it's such a fun concept. People use this to build computers out of everything - like really - it became a Sport by this point. When the last Zelda was Released the first question for many was, if they can build a computer inside it.

Does it serve a practical purpose? At the end of the day 99% of the time the answer will be no, we have computing machines built from transistors that are the fastest we know of, lets just use these.

But 1% of the time people recognize something useful... hey we now found out in principle one can build computers from quantum particles... we found an algorithm that could beat classical computers in a certain task... we found a way to actually do this in reality, but it's more proof of concept (15 = 5×3)... and so on

Never used a Turing machine, but I have a project that generates NFAs and converts them to DFAs so they run faster.

I’m grateful to this strip because reading it caused me to learn the correct spelling of “abstruse”. I’ve never heard anyone say the word, and for some reason I had always read it as “abtruse”, without the first S.