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'Without knowledge of FA I'd probably hack around for years with one inadequate ad-hoc solution after another.

Yeah, learning to read and appreciate papers and academic literature is an important skill.

Simply doing some reading before reinventing the wheel...

That's the skill.

On the flip side here, though, once you have that ability it generalizes very well. My original educational background might be in biology, but I know how to read a technical computer science paper and where to find them. It means that I may not have knowledge intuitively, but I know where to find and learn it.

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