chilukrn

Do you have a good reference(s) that starts from the basics all the way to CTC loss? The distill.pub article is good, but personally doesn't provide a good enough intuition...

If there are only non-farmers, the farmland doesn't produce any food (discounting wild berries or whatever grows when farmland is wasted). The farm can simply produce for 1.2 people...

I agree the post makes valid points, but is there anything new in that? It had been discussed several times here and on other forums as well. "RSE" is just another made-up position with a very average pay structure -- even this is not new.

However, RSEs (or just general software training) may help research groups establish a structure on how to format code, put some standards in place, and at least have some basic tests. This way, more people can read/modify the code efficiently (more = not necessarily general public, but it at least helps incoming grad students/postdocs to pick up the project easily).

Also, for all the "projection" they talk of, they are projecting US-centric views on to the wider world innit? Not many countries have cops carrying military grade guns/tanks and randomly shooting...

Not "AWS specialist" to janitor, but AWS to "cloud deployment engineer" or simply "member of technical staff "

I don't think we can call electrodes on (in?) a shaved head 'non-invasive'...

True, but: 1. Any serious quantum computing course/book will have Shor's algorithm in the first few chapters (in fact there are not a lot of quantum algorithms which have clear advantage over classical ones). One can teach quite a bit of useful classical algos (sort, binary search, tree/graph-based) without going into mathematics like FFT or jpeg coding.

2. Again valid, but IMHO measurements (and PoVMs) can lead to deep rabbit holes, and I found myself digging in much deeper.

Probably I should read easier expositions to see how effectively they teach. (I come from a EE+physics background, so I do gravitate to math-heavy rigorous explanations)

I think that's because it is taught by people who are not well trained in CS themselves for the most part, and a not so well defined curriculum. "You can build a cool website/mobile app" can help only so much in inculcating an interest in computing.

I wish there's something more like this book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_o...) for schools which show that computation is a good extension of mathematical thinking (when used in the sciences), and beyond that, it can used to build "cool stuff" like mobile apps or software to control robotic arms.

In case my last sentence was not clear, I'm trying to allude to different roles of software. One can use it as a useful, very fast but dumb calculator doing computations to predict a molecular structure or a spreadsheet doing a bunch of stuff for an accountant/finance guy. Many times, we tend to think of it as useful to build cool tech apps/websites and force feed them Java/C++ or some such things which they're not ready for yet[1]. We should inculcate "computational thinking" before we teach them Javascript websites/java apps.

[1]As per my experience with some fancy schools teaching 5th/6th grade kids how to build their first apps

ok, extremely basic is a bit oversimplifying it. When you start reading quantum algorithms, you will inevitably come across Shor's factorization algorithm, which requires (quantum) phase estimation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_phase_estimation_algor... which requires quantum Fourier transform and some good deal of math. This is when you don't go into the physical implementations. If you want to look at that aspect, things may become a bit more complex.

This is not to discourage anyone, but underselling it as requiring elementary linear algebra is not very helpful (the pop-sci articles have already been overselling it as "magical"/"mind-blowing" etc.).

Ok, my comment was in the context of airplane control systems/sensors/UIs, but yeah, more generally, things should fail softly

Exactly. May be have good documentation, engineering practices and don't oversell a new model claiming "works exactly like the earlier model"?