this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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What are some science fields or projects that could use programming help? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 week ago by mr_account@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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Sorry if this isn't the right place for this question but I couldn't think of anywhere better to put it.

So I finished my degree in computer science a couple years ago right when the tech crash just started hitting, and the job market has been an enormous clusterfuck. Instead of trying to get a job where everyone seems to be going all-in on LLMs, machine learning, and crypto bullshit, I'd really like to be able to put my programming skills to good use helping out scientific research in some way, but I have no clue where to start. While in college I did help out my university's biology research department by writing small programs here and there to help undergrad/grad students who weren't very knowledgeable about technical solutions, but because of the recent funding cuts to scientific research and education, everyone there is struggling harder than I am.

Ideally I'd love to help contribute to causes that help improve people's lives (or astronomy just because space is cool). Does anyone know of resources I could look into to start down this path?

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[–] jegp@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

Congratulations on the degree! And congratulations on identifying the clusterfuck. It's hard to see the forest for trees.

I agree with the premise in the suggestion for "discrete AI", but my analysis is different: I think we need continuous AI. Three reasons:

  1. Biology is doing it and it's working great.
  2. Modern AI is hitting a power wall in much the same way Titanic realized too late that it couldn't sink. We're going to have a gigantic energy headache soon. (This is the same argument for discrete AI)
  3. We simply do not understand complex dynamical systems well. Which is why the weather is so hard to predict. But the world consists of dynamical systems, so this is really where we want to push the envelope.

I'd argue helping out in the field of neuromorphics. It's basically the combination of DL + dynamical systems, similar to how brains are computing. There's a lot of energy to be saved (> x1000, really) and there's a lot of new, cool hardware coming out you can help interface. And many of the new ideas in DL comes from neuromorphics (sparsity, SSMs...). We're building up an open source community over at open-neuromorphic.org

Happy to answer any questions you have