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by hnuser123456
24 days ago
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Those things stopped being full time jobs, but they only became more important to understand how they worked. Knowing more math makes you a better "living computer", but it also makes you a better programmer, in terms of code optimization for hardware constraints, and architect, because you have a better understanding of what is possible. A junior developer will still be much better at vibe coding (in the technical sense) than a senior manager who's never looked at code, but perhaps not as good at choosing what to code in the first place. |
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Agreed. At one point, for this reason, they introduced graphic calculators into the classroom, for example, circa 1990, the TI-81. It became more important to understand how they worked than spend the time to do the calculations.
A couple days ago, I wanted to understand how the Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining model works so I spent 3 hours making data visualizations using Claude Code. [0] Look at the math notation which to me is very intimidating. Nevertheless, being able to visualize the values as animated cells in a grid synced with computation, I immediately grokked how the information was transformed into something that can be used to train a model from audio data -> image data -> 512 embedding.
Working through these problems in 3 hours using a coding agent will be analogous to working through calculous and linear algebra problems in 1990 with a graphing calculator. It is still 3 hours of wracking a brain.
[0] https://adamsohn.com/clap/