wai1234

Most posts on those platforms are drivel, regardless of authorship. Stop picking on em dashes. The reality is that too many people have short attention spans and no idea of coherent presentation. Everything looks like text messages.

The feed algorithms actually penalize thought. On LI, a snarky throwaway comment will get 1000 impressions. A thoughtful paragraph gets 10. Meh.

Your answer to 1 troubles me. A CS degree program greatly expands your toolbox BEFORE you need those tools. The problem I have with "when I need to" is how do you know now is the time? It's a chicken-and-egg thing. If an employer hears "I'll go learn that and get back to you" too often, you will not work there for long.

For 2, fair enough. What school will give you a BS degree for <15K?

I think you should ask yourself two related but separate questions:

1. Will the CS degree increase your knowledge and problem-solving ability faster than you could without it?

2. Will the credential add substantially to your credibility for hiring managers?

The answer to 1 is mostly about your level of self-discipline and ability to learn independently. If you need the stimulus of a structured environment and a peer group to learn at your best, then any accredited program will be helpful, and your ability to pass coding interviews will increase (with a lot of hard work beyond the curriculum).

The answer to 2 is pretty straightforward: unless your degree is from a tier 2+ school, the raw credential is of little value, and even tier 2 is not certain. To count, an online degree must be presented by the school as competitive with an on-site degree. Georgia Tech offers such a degree program as a tier 1 school, for example.

An unaccredited program is of no value whatsoever in answer to 1 or 2. So, avoid them at any price. You are looking at a 3-5 year project, no matter what, and this is probably a good time to do that. The market will take that long to sort itself out and to realize that vibe coding is NOT the miracle it seems.

With a supportive manager like yours, you should ask to get connected with someone in engineering who might mentor you a bit. If your current side work was driven from that end, you would quickly figure out how the culture works there and if you can get comfortable. You may have the luxury of something like an internship without the hassle.

Given the context you provide, I would suggest you try an online course or two rather than books. There are plenty of free ones but stick to those from credible sources like universities. With ADHD, you will struggle over dry textbooks. The external structure provided by a course would probably work better even with your improved health. If you start with a single self-paced course, you can go as fast as you like and avoid boredom. Burn through it in a weekend, great! Take it slower, also fine. The current lesson covers material you already know, skip it!

Ask your manager what language(s) are used at your company if you don't already know, and filter courses to focus on that for the most rapid progress to your goal.

You have a very poor notion of intelligence. Mimicry does not require comprehension. Without comprehension (or, if you prefer self-awareness), you don't have intelligence. This distinction is as old as Eliza (look it up).

The Turing test still applies. Every time someone shows obvious nonsense from the LLMs, they fail Turing, again. You might get some mileage out of, "but people spout nonsense too," which leads to a legitimate claim for Artificial Stupidity if that makes you feel better.

Yes, if the LLMs could do everything I can do, they would be intelligent, but they can't, for any meaningful definition of 'everything'.

The OP covers all the salient points. We might as well throw in antigravity and FTL travel since we have left reality behind. This is classic Musk. Right down to asking the public to solve his problem for free. Nuts.

As far as the dream that maybe THIS data can be compressed that much, this is analog waveform data converted to digital samples (10b each). IF the information is actually low enough frequency that Nyquist can be satisfied at that compression level, the simplest approach is to just drop the sampling frequency and cut out the middle man. Either the people designing this monster are ignorant or the information is actually at frequencies too high to satisfy Nyquist, leading us right back to la la land.

"The humans behind the API possess real intelligence, and by extension, so does the API."

LOL, no.

My calculator can add numbers to get the same answers I do. I use my intelligence to get those answers, so my calculator must also be intelligent? That's quite an extension you've got there. LLMs mimic intelligence by grinding up everything we feed them and spitting back the patterns they have formulated from that data. They have no ability to extrapolate, as we see demonstrated every day when people report the answers to prompts where the LLM spouts self-evident nonsense.

It's actually worse still. ALL of the 17 responses to the real name were negative if you read what he actually posted. That's an infinite increase. NOT 5x.

"the scope of work is very specific" and not under your control. Word.

This.

There are a handful of majors that are wide gateways: accounting (NOT finance), the core engineering disciplines, the core sciences, the core humanities (including Math). Choose one of those that matches your interests. Avoid the fashionable majors no matter what. Even CS can be underpowered and CE almost always is (do EE with a CS minor if you can handle the rigor of EE)

IMO, this is terrible advice. The core concept that school is passive and life is active is, at best, partially true. Very few people answer to no one and the rest get told what to do, all too often, throughout their lives. The rest is mostly based on the author's life in the academic bubble pretending they know what the 'outside' is all about. For example, the claim that college "is fond of seeing imaginary connections, like Arts and marketing, or Maths and computer programming" obviously doesn't understand any of those subjects.

This one is too easy :)

99% of the parenting advice you will get will be crap. Your child will be unique. In fact, every child is unique even within a family. My two sons are very different.

Parenting is a procedurally generated open world game. The mechanics are known (like changing diapers, so learn how) but you can't predict what's over the next hill.

I realized I didn't answer your question.

Yes, it's a form of hazing.