Yeah we destablised a whole nation (ok much more than one) just to secure a supply of bananas.
"From 1954 onward Guatemala was ruled by a series of US-backed military dictators, leading to the Guatemalan Civil War which lasted until 1996. Approximately 200,000 civilians were killed in the war, and numerous human rights violations committed, including massacres of civilian populations, rape, aerial bombardment, and forced disappearances"
To be fair, the government did it to 'stop communism'. The US fruit companies persuaded the government to 'stop communism' because they wanted to secure cheap bananas.
Cannot tell you how many uncomfortable conversations I have had trying to explain that you still need to run cables for power to wireless cameras (the outdoor cams work off of solar quite well, though).
Accelerated advanced math at Purdue as a freshman flung me into that wall at high velocity. Nothing like a competitively graded class to make you hate a subject for life.
The 'experimental' accelerated calculus program run by Stephen Wolfram had a similar effect and is why I decry trying to learn CS using AI and also why I don't like Mathematica or Wolfram. Fuck that guy. I loved math more than almost anybody I knew before that.
As someone who tried to learn CS properly, as far as deep fundamentals, I was told by advisors that me being terrible at math would stop my career. I switched to a CIS degree, which at my local university was learning networking and Microsoft Office mostly. I dropped out of school and went into sales, while still having an interest in software. I started to pick up software development on my own, and found that I loved it even more without worrying about math. I ended up going to a "career" school, which would have turned out terribly, but I had a professor that taught all of the important programming and CS classes (there weren't too many CS classes, just fundamentals of OOP/data structures and algorithms).
All of this to say I have been writing software professionally since 2006, and while I do struggle with the thinking behind functional programming and math-heavy subjects like graphics programming, I have written lots of business software that has brought me personal satisfaction. I would really like to understand calculus better, but I'm not sure if it would actually do anything for my skills in programming. If math is holding you back, think about whether you need the full breadth of CS knowledge, or if you just enjoy writing software.
I became better at code organization, making code maintainable and simple enough to understand unless performance was an issue, and general people skills. I can understand why math and software are so close to each other, but at the same time, I don't think it needs to hold you back unless you really want to go into a topic that is deeply intertwined with math. It took me four times to get past pre-Calculus, and once I did, I realized that I just did not enjoy that type of math and didn't need it to build useful software (as in makes people's lives easier and/or generates profit for business) that I also find fun to create.
You think that's bad? :) I went to the University of Minnesota Talented Youth Mathematics Program and they assigned a fourth grader (me) about 50 hours of math homework a week.
It genuinely wasn't until I was in my mid twenties that I wanted to look at anything mathematical again :)
reply