I had the displeasure of reading an article in the Harvard student paper by an economics major who said in apparent seriousness that comp sci majors are wasting time on theory classes like “Introduction to Algorithms and their Limitations” when they could be learning REAL skills like prompt engineering.

Algorithms are not useless theory, you unbalanced red-red tree. They’re the entire fucking point of the degree, you empty hash bucket. Go gamble daddy’s money on a startup your buddies thought up last night, you quadratic insert operation

You circular reference. You denormalized database. You sparse-ass matrix. You fragmented fucking disk. You absolute BUBBLE sort. I can keep going because, you see, I actually have a real computer science degree

@0xabad1dea “you unbalanced red-red tree”
unbalanced and not even red-black, brutal, i LOVE THIS

@0xabad1dea
> economics major

imagine being 19 and the whole world before you and you had to choose a particular path of expertise that could define your next decade's relationship with knowledge, your community, your identity

and

@0xabad1dea what an O(n)

@0xabad1dea There’s something I love about reading this coming from a Teto plushie

@0xabad1dea or with the cloudflare outage today, you need to understand that software ultimately runs on hardware and will crash if it runs out of physical resources to load a config file that has become too big. Probably some engineer did warn of the risks, only a Harvard business grad ignored them.

@Frantasaur oh my gods is that literally today's postmortem

@0xabad1dea @Frantasaur yup. config file grow too big. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/cloudflare-traces-hours-long-outage-to-one-single-file/ar-AA1QGnnL

I bet `TEST-CFG.FILE-018 - handle outsize / malformed config files` got dropped on the schedule room floor because of a suit. "How big can these get how fast? surely some alarm will go off. skip it."

@0xabad1dea @Frantasaur

I am not a network or cloudfare expert but I can see this so clearly. The Cloudfare CDN is (amongst other things) a very complex distributed firewall. They say the cfg file is " is automatically generated to manage threat traffic" - so a bit like the low level iptables rules that gets loaded into your firewall that tells the network kernel to ignore that, pass that, route that.
The memory space for these rules is finite; too many rules == error or bork.

@0xabad1dea he would be so mad if he knew what any of those insults meant