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by gardenfelder 1469 days ago
My response: It depends. My Story:

Started life going after an aero engineering degree, built an airplane, then married a woman who wanted to live on farm. I thought: wind energy! Windmills are just gliders on a bearing, so I build a windmill to charge batteries, rose to be an early president of AWEA, then was asked: how do you know where to put these machines? Weather stations. Tiny cmos microprocessor-based weather stations.

But farmers would say: can I use that data to predict fruit frost, water needs, pesticide needs? Welp: at that time in history, Byte had a piece on Expert Systems. I was programming my weather stations in Forth, so I transliterated their Basic code to Forth. That's when I learned about recursion. They don't teach that in aero classes.

Which lead to going beyond expert systems into machine learning. But, having given a few conference papers on wind energy and on expert systems, my resume grew to the point where I got hired at an AI company doing ontology coupling in a B2B setting. I was working with Ms and PhD-level developers, and got along just fine

Can you do that? No clue. The secret to my success was a relentless devotion to building stuff, always way over my head.i