Mastodawn

I'm a student in #CompSci and #Philosophy (https://www.philocomp.net) at the University of #Oxford. Busy University life will make me unresponsive sometimes.

I'm a #FreeSoftware #OpenSource promoter (co-running https://ox.ogeer.org/) and developer (https://ogeer.org/#code-forges). I would love to increase confidence and become a long-term contributor to communities' projects.

I'm a beginner but interested in #governance - social.coop is an example.

I also enjoy #etymology and language-learning (message me in ES or ZH_Hans), considering and protecting our natural #environment, and music.

I love creative, diverse methods of human expression and existence. I shun prejudice, and try to widen my perspectives. I am learning robust analytical arguments via Philosophy. Respectful, critical argument with me is welcome, but if it requires triggering topics, or could tire some, please put it behind a content warning. I will try to do the same.

PhiloComp.net

The aim of this website is to highlight the many strong links between Philosophy and Computing, for the benefit of students of both disciplines.

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Eric Lawton 1d ago

@ogeer

I did philosophy then comp sci much later.

The CS was mostly obsolete within a few years but the philosophy was useful for my entire careers.

Good luck.

@Dianora

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Dianora (Diane Bruce)1d ago

@EricLawton @ogeer

CS as a branch of math does not go as obsolete. The problem comes when they hard code "You should learn this and that as it is being used now." Of course that is obsolete very quickly. I drifted from math to CS leaning some chem/physics/engineering/linguistics along the way. Regretted not doing philosophy but I am making up for that now. Self-didactic but I rely upon people like Eric to point out things I should be looking at!

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Eric Lawton 1d ago

@Dianora

I already had a maths degree so my CS was just a layer on top of that specific to computing.

Some of the theory didn't agree so much but it was all embedded in libraries. And, oddly, operating systems didn't include spying, advertising and customer retention, though that took a few more decades.

@ogeer

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Dianora (Diane Bruce)1d ago

@EricLawton @ogeer Yes! You can't be a good programmer without math. I have run into the sort who don't believe that.

I remember local colleges teaching such useful things such as 'Flash' etc. Very employment oriented rather than "real" CS. Hence my prior comments.

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Oliver Geer

@Dianora @EricLawton My University is focusing a lot on the maths side (and the programming is using Haskell and Scala, so not the current trendy languages in industry). I can see the value of that even more now.

Nevertheless, I can see how the theory is helpful in practice, which has helped with motivation. I wrote code using the Yjs library (https://ogeer.org/teclat/) and recently decided to read the paper about how it works (https://doi.org/10.1145/2957276.2957310). My discrete maths course, imperative programming course (which focuses on proofs about programs), and funnily enough the logical notation I learned in Philosophy (2 out of 3 Philosophy modules have been very maths-oriented) helped a lot with understanding that paper. The core of it is a correctness proof and time complexity analysis.