On the use of a life (2020)
daemonology.net
daemonology.net
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24537865
Any kind of applied research in the US academic sector these days is best understood as corporate R & D for established interests in pharmaceuticals, technology, industrial chemistry, etc. You're certainly not free to do blue-skies renewable energy research (budgets for that are still miniscule at best, and have been since the 1980s), for example. The job description has become indistinguishable from that of in-house corporate researcher - narrowly defined assigned problems are what you get to work on, and 'academic freedom to pursue the research wherever it leads' is a quaint myth.
The obvious fix is to eliminate exclusive licensing of academic IP (i.e. repeal the 1980s Bayh-Dole Act), which would force corporations to spend capital on their own private R & D divisions if the wanted exclusivity, and simply make any university-held patented discovery available to any entrepreneur who wanted to develop it for a small flat fee.
Until then the author is 100% correct about entrepreneurship being the only way out of the trap.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/23/1044184/5-mit-pa...
And just to put it at scale, the engineers of Apollo were so early before our times that they had to code the timestamps in negative.
> And just to put it at scale, the engineers of Apollo were so early before our times that they had to code the timestamps in negative.
I don’t understand how this relates to the scale of open source software or Apollo software engineers. I guess I know the Unix epoch is 01/01/1970, but how does that relate to Apollo and negative timestamps? Those timestamp definitions came after the first several Apollo missions, didn’t they?
Yes, except that largely those projects are tangential to the "real" research. Larry Wall, creator of Perl and other useful things, is a linguist who was "studying linguistics with the intention of finding an unwritten language, perhaps in Africa, and creating a writing system for it."[1]. Perl was just a side project.
I'm not certain, but perhaps the parent commenter wasn't being literal. Maybe just a way of saying that the Apollo engineers did their amazing work before what the rest of us consider to be the "beginning of time"?
I took the joke from this comic: https://www.commitstrip.com/2015/10/06/before-timestamp-0/
Or maybe it's a joke. We used to say that some guy has his ID number in roman numerals... or used spears for the matter.
There's so much good open source software that I'm not even annoyed at how wrong your statement really is.
Sadly, yes, you're not wrong. However, have you seen the quality of most proprietary software? No, you haven't, no one has, because it's proprietary.
> Most of it is about people pushing their own agendas and self promoting
Perhaps, but some of it is not, and that is the difference to proprietary software.
That's simply not true.
Academia has a lot of problems, we don't need to start making up new ones.
Universities want money. The #1 concern, by far, of any university technology licensing office is to get those patents working so that they can reap the benefits in terms of huge licensing fees. Literally, no one wants to license anything to anyone who won't develop it.
Also, university licensing offices always have deals where the researchers get the right of first refusal with their own IP.
> Any kind of applied research in the US academic sector these days is best understood as corporate ...
Academics do very little applied research. Overwhelmingly, we do what is called basic research. Finding cool new ideas. Then, we give them to those corporations that do the overwhelming amount of applied research. This is how the system is supposed to work!
> The job description has become indistinguishable from that of in-house corporate researcher
No idea what university you at. But this is totally false for any university I've seen.
> The obvious fix is to eliminate exclusive licensing of academic IP (i.e. repeal the 1980s Bayh-Dole Act)
So.. you want academics to do less impactful research that has fewer applications? Because that's the outcome of denying us the ability to patent our own work.
Yes, but that doesn't prevent them from licensing things to organizations with a lot of money regardless of intent. If there's enough money involved, say a multi-million dollar endowment, the academic administration wouldn't give two shits about whether or not the licensee develops it.
Why in God's name would a corporation with a lot of money pay for a patent they don't want to develop? Wallpaper is a lot cheaper at Home Depot.
Seriously. This doesn't pass the most basic "is this remotely plausible" test.
Anyway, universities tend to give licenses that make them money as the patent is used. There is no world under which they want them to be wasted.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/may/20/oil-company...
Imagine what could be done if we lifted the majority of the population out of wage slavery with a UBI or similar - how many Newtons, Laplaces, or Fermats are currently toiling in obscurity?
. . . are currently playing the equivalent of Cookie Clicker?
That is, if you don't have the time or energy to take on fulfilling creative projects, you can at least fake the sense of accomplishment with video games.
> Reviewers at the Journal of Cryptology didn't understand why they were being asked to read a paper about CPU design, while reviewers at a computer hardware journal didn't understand why they were being asked to read about cryptography.
Why would someone be beholden to these reviewers if their expertise is not adequate or too constrained to review the submission? The author seems to be describing Spectre as well.
-- from the biography of J. J. Thompson
That sort of blue-sky culture needs a whole lot of disinterested money, and that’s hard to come by. In previous generations, we’ve used monopolists, the gentry, and other ways…always a challenge.
You wouldn't believe how much money do top Twitch / YouTube streamers get in an hour. I understand that they provide entertainment / influence and many people need that and pay them -- it's fair business and I don't look down on it. On the other hand... aren't there like sooooo many other and much more pressing concerns in the world to fix with surplusmoney? Yes, there are.
So yeah I sympathize with the "we can't figure out how to fund proper free research". It's really a shame on humanity.
If it can be done, it can be afforded. Only if it is physically impossible can it not be "afforded". That is where we ought to start as a society. Where will we get the money for a universal basic income? There are an infinitude of options--the state literally made the stuff up. The question isn't why there is so little money for so many important things, and so much money wasted--the question is why, despite being ostensibly democratic, we are so bad at statecraft (and have been since the Boomers took charge).
Or, to put it in Thomas Sowell's terms, economics is about the allocation of limited resources that have alternate uses.
You want the government to print a bunch of money? Great. Now we have a bunch of money. We don't have any more actual stuff to buy with the money, though. Are we any better off? No. Is science any better off? Maybe - depends on what we do with the new money. Are the poor and disadvantaged any better off? Maybe - it depends on how much money is created, and how that money is distributed.
Sounds like what you really want is to smooth out who has access to how much stuff, and also support science better. Printing a bunch of money (and distributing it) might do it, but it depends a great deal on the details.
We face, in 2022, a number of problems that are actually pretty easy to solve, but the people in charge won't let us. Well, history tells us exactly what to do when we face that particular problem...
If you are a developer in the US, you are the rich.
Whenever people say “tax the rich” what they invariably mean is tax those that are richer than they are.
If you are arguing from a moral standard, then shouldn’t most Americans be taxed and the actually poor ($2 per day) around the world receive those taxes?
> hyperconsumptive billionaire vampires
Which to the average sample of some outside the USA, the vampire is mostly regarded as the USA, using its economic might to equivalently tax most other countries through many means.
Disclaimer: I’m not against the US, but definitely against some of the effects one of the richest country in the world has on other poorer countries (per capita).
Edit: just noticed this quote: “In 1963, 20 percent of Americans lived in poverty. Today it’s 2.3 percent.” If you are not part of that 2.3%, then you are likely the rich of the world that should be taxed?
Not at all. It's usually meant as "people who have much more money than they objectively need for survival, owning an estate and having some leisure".
No need to resort to a straw man to win a discussion, please.
> If you are arguing from a moral standard, then shouldn’t most Americans be taxed and the actually poor ($2 per day) around the world receive those taxes?
Good idea, a lot of people would welcome it. Although me personally, I wouldn't want USA to become the hub of the world. History has shown us what extreme centralization leads to.
> Which to the average sample of some outside the USA, the vampire is mostly regarded as the USA, using its economic might to equivalently tax most other countries through many means.
Strange thing to say. Plenty of European billionaires are out there as well. Not to mention Chinese and Russian, and who knows how many from other Asian countries.
> Edit: just noticed this quote: “In 1963, 20 percent of Americans lived in poverty. Today it’s 2.3 percent.” If you are not part of that 2.3%, then you are likely the rich of the world that should be taxed?
The biggest problem with these discussions, every time, is that you don't consider that there are a lot of people out there with huge vested interest to misrepresent these percentages. The naive faith in institutions and democracy at large, while commendable, is a huge detractor from the quality of any politico-economical dialogue.
The observable facts -- if you don't deliberately close your eyes, which many do because it's easier to pretend that when you're well-off then everybody else is -- are that democracy has been co-opted and abused as a term while the world is in fact an oligarchy and a rich people club that invents laws to legitimize their behaviour. And that's been true for centuries. But I know I will not convince you. Your criteria for this is likely "well, I don't see armed men trying to storm my house, hence democracy exists" or something similar and thus our discussion is doomed from the start.
Back to "statistics", if you lived in a former Soviet satellite (like I did) you would see through these published percentages in five seconds. There are PLENTY of techniques to misrepresent information and they don't even have to lie -- that's the beauty of it (example: "What is poverty? Let's lower the minimum resources needed to define it. Boom, we have much less poor people officially now! Lol, good job boys, let's go to Thailand and spend money with funds from the fundraiser we have scheduled there.")
And so it goes to eternity.
This led to the dismantling of the "middle class", which is and always has been a state creation. Once the capitalists saw the end of an existential threat--the idea that socialism might work [1] due to its ostensible prominence elsewhere in the world--they realized they no longer needed one. So what is now the former middle class was left to twist in the wind.
The US contributed to the destruction of the Soviet Union by forcing it to spend the bulk of its resources on its military. Granted, the Soviet system was suboptimal in a number of ways, but the constant threat of imperialist/capitalist aggression didn't help... war benefits capitalists and arms dealers, but is historically bad for the common people. It didn't help that a number of important figures within the USSR's final years (e.g., Yeltsin) were corrupt (ideologically and personally) and sought to undermine the system from within for their own financial and political gain.
Capitalism's "winning" of the Cold War was one of the biggest humanitarian disasters of our time. It enabled the end of "nice guy" capitalism and the dismantling of the US middle class, but it also created widespread poverty while it stripped hope from the people of the former Soviet Union. (The reason Russia has done so much evil shit over the past 15 years is that hopelessness creates a market for hubristic imperialism of the kind Putin is selling.) It enabled an attempt to reconfigure the global economy into a for-profit police state that has cost millions of lives in the Middle East. The bipolar war-economy world was a pretty awful place, but the unipolar capitalist world is even worse, and the only thing that has kept us from seeing it is inertia--people who still believe in capitalism have already parted ways from the cliff, but haven't looked down yet.
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[1] Although, of course, the failure of the Soviet Union didn't actually prove that socialism can't work. It existed in a state of siege socialism from which it was never able to extricate itself. Given the harsh conditions from which it emerged, as well as the fervency of the far-right (capitalists, fascists) in their will to kill it, the accomplishments of the USSR are considerable. However, it wasn't a great place to live. It remained mostly poor (because of said initial conditions as well as necessary but massive war expenditures) and was authoritarian to a fault; its great sin was that it was a system of economic totalitarianism--the economy literally controlled everything, from where people could live to what they could say--but, then again, so is ours.
Whoa. You're completely ignoring the fact that USSR's collapse allowed a lot of nations, comprising of easily over a hundred million people, to gain independence. A lot of them, since freed from Moscow's yoke, are thriving in an unprecedented manner. It's basically the opposite of humanitarian disaster for them.
I do agree that Russian jingoism was a problem with the Union, especially for "buffer states" (e.g., Poland, Hungary) whose citizens were treated badly in the midcentury. This likely would have moderated over time under socialism. (Under capitalism, for countries still within Russia's reach, it has not.) In fact, even in the SSRs considered "lesser" than Russia, approval for the USSR and the desire to remain were well over 50% even up to the point of dissolution. The people wanted to fix the Soviet Union, not break it.
As for the prosperity in Eastern Europe, that tends to be the case in countries remain mostly socialist, like Czechia. It's true that they have mostly escaped the horrors of the post-Soviet 1990s and 2000s. What is less clear is how stable their well-being is. I hope this forecast is wrong, but I'm afraid that the EU is not that far behind the US on the path to corrosion, corruption, and ruin. What is happening in the US, I'm afraid, is coming for everyone. Where do the worst people in the world--figurative reptilians, literal pedophiles--meet up every winter? Not in the US, but in Davos, Switzerland. This is a global problem.
Are the people of the FSU better off now than they would have been, had the USSR persisted? It's impossible to know for sure, but I think a strong case can be made that it would have developed a limited market economy, one that avoids our issues of extreme inequality but provides the benefits market systems can (e.g., increased consumer choice). Of course, the USSR did have a lot of problems, especially toward its end, though a number of those problems were caused by external forces (capitalist aggression). On that, and on the notion that capitalism's victory might itself be evidence of our economic model's superiority... I have strong doubts. History tells us that geographic and technological forces have more to do with which side wins a war than having the better economic system, and in the case of the Cold War, this was a matchup between a sea empire (capitalism) and a land empire (the USSR). A land empire has to try to assimilate people, which is hard; a sea empire can dominate them from afar (cf. Latin America). The Soviet Union started from behind, both because it had to integrate some very poor geographic regions, and because it bore the brunt of the casualties in World War II. It was never going to catch up, not unless we let it (which we didn't).
Although we can't know for sure what a 2022 Soviet Union would have looked like--Russia itself would probably be far less belligerent--we do have more than 30 years of data on the trajectory of capitalism, once this threat to it was vanquished... and those data are ugly. For at least two decades and arguably three, the reigning economic system has produced nothing but a devolving culture, absurd political polarization, and a collapsing standard of living.
I say that as someone who actually has a pretty balanced perspective on 'capitalist' aggression too which has historically been severe and also with many unforgivable atrocities. But the USSR was big and powerful enough that its hand was not forced in the atrocities that it enacted.
If that's how you see the US, then I'm affraid our perceptions of reality just differ too much for us to be able to have a conversation. (My take on the US is that it's one of the strongest and most robust states in the world. Objectively, it's not doing great, but subjectively - the rest of the world is mostly an even greater mess, so the US comes on top).
- Regular school shootings;
- Teachers living in their cars;
- People being charged $8K if an ambulance picks them up after an accident;
- One of the highest proportions of the populace with cardiovascular problems and diabetic conditions;
- Incoming real estate bubble pop;
...does not give you a pause and make you think that maybe, just maybe, USA isn't as great as you think it is?
Empires don't fall overnight. The Roman Empire's history -- and the works of fiction based on it, one of which is Asimov's "Foundation" -- demonstrate that once certain positive forces vanish then the collapse becomes imminent BUT it does happen quite slowly, like a tumbling giant. This makes it easy for people to keep pretending that things are going great and everything else are just blips on the news.
(Until one day the courier carrying their package gets robbed and the company shrugs it off and says you won't get a refund. Then it will hit close to home and you'll start believing it, I presume.)
Also sticking to the view that the rest of the countries are worse off than USA is severely mistaken -- but as you said, at this point our perceptions of reality just differ too much indeed.
Late stage communist countries couldn't manage the manufacturing of toilet paper, there were shortages of everything. There is absolutely no reason to believe they could have achieved any prosperity, much less comparable or greater.
USSR didn't fall apart because of external aggression. It was completely inefficient due to its economic system.
> If it can be done, it can be afforded. Only if it is physically impossible can it not be "afforded". That is where we ought to start as a society.
Isn’t this just Marxism? Non-commodity money and all that. I’m not really familiar with his work.
That's a story that's often told, but it doesn't seem to actually be true. An examination of the historical and anthropological record shows that barter systems only exist in societies that formerly had money, but no longer do (for example, because the empire that was backing the currency collapsed). In societies that never had money, you see a variety of things, mostly formal gift economies, but sometimes things like tracking and cancellation of debts not denominated in a single unit.
If you'd like to learn more about this, read "Debt, the first 5,000 years", by the late anthropologist David Graeber.
We need a lot of good innovation right now and that's still missing -- starting with better (small) batteries.
The world doesn't really need to pay yet another batch of 20_000 students trying to invent better cat photos classification NNs. Yet a lot of money are poured in such endeavors.
Academia was supposed to protect people from having to do the things they're bad at--such as sell their ideas to people who lack the ability to deeply understand them--and, unfortunately, it went derelict in that duty a long time ago. Salesmen, in any field other than sales, are like an invasive species who outcompete the natives with their superior social polish, but who struggle to actually do anything, which leads to systemic underperformance and the erosion of trust, which only makes the competitive necessity of salesmanship even greater, setting in motion a death spiral from which a private entity (or, in the long term, an entire industry) almost never recovers.
As a graduate student it's hard not to internalize this framework even though it's soul destroying and leads all too predictably to poor science
If you're very lucky your career success might be orthogonal to or even aligned with your sense of curiosity and intellectual honesty, more often they're antipathetic and you will have to sacrifice one for the other
Although it's mostly small investors/ backers there. You have thought more of the bigger investors, haven't you? Research is expensive indeed...
it’s the best we have right now; it is not without drawbacks. You’re not going to escape wanting to reinvent the grant proposal system.
I recently wrote about and shared this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31956590
not the HN ofc, but the website you linked in the thread
As a fellow developer/owner, this is the mantra I'm always repeating.
Is running a small software biz a great job? Meh. The job has higher highs and lower lows than when I was a dev for other companies.
At the end of the day, there's no better way to make sustained progress on groundbreaking, long-term dev projects than to run a company that dedicated to building such projects. If one is fortunate enough to find a stable cash source (like Tarsnap), it serves as a perpetual license to work on the most interesting dev projects one can fathom succeeding at.
@cperceiva is in the k-equivalence class of people whose ability we lack the granularity to measure. He won the Putnam before making multiple unanticipated contributions to security in general and the security of FreeBSD in particular.
@pg has tagged him in particular as notable.
If he spends his time making information more durable in a probably secure way as opposed to folding proteins, I’m going to leave it to him to have decided between multiple highly compelling outlets for his genius.
In my observation he’s too humble to reply to the ankle-biting haters, but I have no such qualms: this guy is a fucking legend and if you disagree let’s have an argument.
Somewhat related thought. I wonder about this with regard to AGI, I have this fantasy of a symbiote/friend thing. But it is not easy to make that. I don't know if I have the real/actual drive to do it. I'm also a mediocre programmer/developer. That kind of passion where you do it every free moment of your time/not monetary based. It is not for me. I tinker on CRUD stuff/low-end robotics on my free time. So yeah not sure of effort vs. talent/genius.
I used to have that passion. Every waking moment devoted to figuring out cool things. Or at least what seemed cool to me.
Then one day I joined a rocketship company and all my side projects and ideas started to feel small, boring, and insignificant. The grandest idea I could come up with couldn’t hold a light to even the most mundane problems a real business in the hockeystick part of the curve comes up with.
Sometimes I miss the motivation to tinker. Sometimes I cherish my newfound ability to relax. Perhaps one day I will tinker once more.
Some of the most useful inventions that we use today every day have been made by very stubborn people who were told thousands of times that their idea was stupid.
I still have the motivation and desire to work on some very interesting and super hard stuff one day -- and I am 42. You should get back to that enthusiasm. Maybe that business' ideas and actual products are much more useful and interesting on a general socially-accepted level. That doesn't mean that your thing isn't the best in the world to work on for you.
So IMO get back to doing your own stuff when you have the time and energy for it.
I’m sure exciting ideas will come again. Until then “Enjoying my dayjob too much” isn’t a bad place to be :)
That's true; Zuckerberg's parents told him that Facebook idea is stupid and that he should get his Harvard degree. Larry and Sergey couldn't sell Google to Excite for $350k because Excite's managers thought Google was unnecessary.
When I was younger (10+ years ago) I had all kinds of crazy ideas/things to make. High traffic websites, get rich, that kind of thing. But they were all dumb... unvalidated, went nowhere. But now that I know how to build things (web) I don't have any ideas. Funny how that works.
When you look at indie projects seems like there's so many niches/ways to make money out there. But personally I found it hard to do hence 9-5er.
I suspect in my case it’s a combination, but with a big dose of “been there, done that”. There’s only so many times you can get excited about a new tool or optimization.
The answer is, of course, to dive into something that isn’t tech. There’ll be a host of problems that seem/are fresh and interesting.
I used to work for one of the most famous imaging corporations in the world. My little team was part of an elite, worldwide, organization that created instruments that sold for tens of thousands of dollars, and were used to capture some of the most iconic images in history, and make some of the most astounding scientific discoveries.
Since leaving, I have been working; mostly alone, or with very little assistance from others, so my scope has been drastically reduced. I write little apps.
I love it. I am constantly working on code. My GH ID is solid green (no exaggeration), and is not "gamed," the way some folks do it.
I have no intentions of ever working for anyone again. I was constantly told that I was wrong, that my work was insignificant, that I should not cast my eyes heavenward, etc.
These days, I set my own agenda. I design my software the way that I always wanted (and was never allowed) to, and I am absolutely thrilled with the results.
Turns out, I was absolutely right, the whole time.
I wrote something like that, a few years ago; mainly to practice. I am now using it as the backend of the app I'm writing.
Good luck!
But I can see how and why Mark thinks he should build the Metaverse ... (and why I'll never visit it)
In took me roughly 15 years of dealing with this bullshit world to get back to the calm of that time.
These awards certainly exist; the Miller institute at Berkeley, the Simons fellows in NYC, and the Clay Fellows are a few examples. (Some not quite for 5 years, but more than 2. Also, the pay is more like 90k.) The NSF math postdoc is also close to this (2 years full funding if you elect to not teach those years, plus a third year where you have to teach.) Regular NSF grants and NSF CAREER awards are also longer, IIRC, though perhaps less relevant to fresh PhDs.
So, in fact, these "mini-Genius Grants" do exist.
> But that's not how granting agencies work; they give out one or two year awards, with the understanding that those who are successful will apply for more funding later.
I've worked for a funding agency. It's tough to give out five year grants with no deliverables other than "be a genius". When you are funding basic research you have to be prepared for the idea that lots will fail, and many people will decide to leave. How do you know who is a genius when they are finishing their PhD? Everyone finishing a PhD at Oxford/MIT/Stanford/etc has a very impressive resume and the reality is you can't fund them all.
Two year grants seems a reasonable compromise here.
Impressive resumes, sure. But my experience has been that even when students are starting their doctorates there's very clear tiers -- even out of the pool of doctoral students in Oxford.
(In case anyone is thinking this is hubris on my part: I would say I was towards the top but not at the top. The most impressive student I met in Oxford was a mathematician by the name of Lillian Pierce -- and she wasn't even doing her doctorate yet.)
I don't want to claim that nobody was trying to influence your opinion about who the best students were, when you were at Oxford; of course it's common for people to tout their own achievements and those of their friends. But I suspect that if you were in the position of directing millions of dollars a year of no-strings-attached funding, and people knew that, the amount of effort that went into influencing your opinion would be an order of magnitude greater, and might be sufficient to confuse you.
(This pickle is presumably obvious to you but the solution to the pickle isn't obvious to me, so I'm hoping you can outline a solution.)
This might be true, but it's really really hard for someone who doesn't work with them day-to-day to distinguish.
Your article pointed out the same problem in getting novel worked reviewed - it was extremely hard to find people for that. I know in my case it was even worse - funding proposals generally come from research group leaders, and there at least you have a body of work to look at and can judge their likelihood to succeed.
But if you are trying to look at an individual's work how can you judge it when all you have to go on is peer reviews and maybe interviews with supervisors or peers?
Supervisors' motivations are already complicated - most of the time they would want an individual in their group funded because their work is generally aligned with that research group's field.
It's a pretty tricky problem.
It's really not (in mathematics, the field under discussion). It's not hard to look at the CV of a graduating PhD student in math and tell whether they're a semi-reasonable candidate for the Clay Fellowship, or the other fellowships listed above.
Among the small group who makes that cut, of course you need to rely on letters of recommendation, expert assessments, and so on. But the initial cut is fairly straightforward.
By contrast, I read the links for all the current Clay Fellows[1] and noticed that maybe 60-70% of them had one thing in common: They had proved some long standing (30 year+) conjecture. I agree that's a pretty good sign.
Of course the program they did their PhD through is a pretty good initial screen too:
Princeton 4
Harvard 4
Standford 1
Imperial College London 1
MIT 1
UT Austin: 1
Does anyone else have any experience with this and have any recommendations for how to approach it? I imagine I'll probably have more success in areas that are game or recreational mathematics related (like Martin Gardner), at least to get started.
[1] E.g., https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/events/2022-....
I'd start with figuring out roughly what you want to investigate. Try to narrow it down as much as you can, but I understand that it'll start broad and probably eventually narrow down after going down a few rabbit holes. Eventually you have a pretty specific field you know you want to do research in. Find the top conferences in the field, look through some of the papers that seem interesting, and look at what they cite. You should be able to compile a list of textbooks and foundational articles that crop up often - read all of these. Maybe even try to replicate the results of some of the foundational papers - a lot of the time new work is extensions of the foundations, and people writing papers started out replicating those initial works anyway. If you're struggling to narrow things down or figure out what's important, focus on papers from one researcher or research group. Maybe even send them an email if you want their advice on what to read.
Finally, you have a decent grasp of the underpinnings of this narrow field and have seen some examples of how it's been extended in modern times. You might now have some ideas of what to experiment with in your own research, or if not you can try replicating more modern papers and see if that gives you ideas of what more to investigate.
> Is entrepreneurship a trap? No; right now, it's one of the only ways to avoid being trapped.
... Realistically, you need to be rather well off to have even one good shot at starting a company. Get sick at the wrong time and forget about it. Get less than very lucky, and forget about it. Get your ideas stolen by a megacorp; forget about it.
I'm so tired of seeing truly extraordinary people forced to do menial labour to survive, and starting a company in the hopes of getting lucky isn't all that much better.
This * 10.
The teacher/mentor part of me relishes seeing success for others. Meeting many talented, creative and hard working people in my life had been a privilege. But I do feel a sense of injustice and awful waste. To see people who could change the world and solve real problems settle for less, that hurts. When graduation time comes around I sometimes feel a dark sense of helplessness, and maybe something of a hypocrite/imposter because the one thing I cannot teach or offer is opportunity.
> and starting a company in the hopes of getting lucky isn't all that much better.
Maybe not, but I encourage all of them to give it a shot once in life. At least failure is yours to own and not feeling thwarted by some manager prick whose decision to obstruct your dream was just a way to get by for one more day in a firm they couldn't care less for.
On the bright side, it's probably never been easier for genius type people to become societally useful (and rewarded for it) than now! I was just reading Two Years Before The Mast (1835-ish), where the Harvard educated protagonist met a savant type person working on a ship, but that person was doomed to not rise above his position without a lifetime of struggle. It's not foolproof by any means, but our education system at least found @cperciva and gave him ample status just for his applied intellect to where he could pursue almost anything he wished.
I figure scrypt is, but I'm not using that. I'm implementing OPAQUE with Argon2.
I sympathize with that track. It's essential the long-term version of "show your work". He would have spent at least 5 years, perhaps many more, writing papers based on small bits of his overall findings on shared caches in multi-threaded CPUs as a cryptographic side channel. Each paper would focus on a tiny bit of the problem, and eventually build up to a full foundation for the real work. All well and good, until some academic with tenure and a raft of papers to his name decides to go ahead and write the actual paper that needs to be written, and takes credit for the important results.
The stuff that I'm most satisfied with, has never earned me a cent. In fact, it has cost me thousands.
I know that the software that I've written has actually helped save lives, so maybe it's not really a "waste"?
I've been pondering if there's really any "superior" way to spend one's time. If the concept of wasting time even exists.
Especially with hustle porn these days, if you aren't building million dollar project, then you're "wasting time".
But in a start-up, you can follow what you think is important - and see if anyone needs it. Raise the flag, and see if anyone salutes. “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” - Ford
Of course, infrastructure and support etc makes it easier. Industry labs like PARC used to be like this. In addition to the genius part, not everyone has the other qualities needed to run the whole show.
So, while I don't think it's bad for cperciva to have spent a lot of time working on Tarsnap, which is clearly a useful piece of software, I also think things like scrypt actually matter more in the end.
However, I also think cperciva is a better judge of what to spend his life on than I am.
While capping the maximum width of the text paragraphs might be a good idea for readability (slightly less horizontal eye movement; though some might also disagree), it's as if I've stumbled into some alternate universe where web development is very minimalistic.
We all should do more of this and the world would be a better one!
There were two other shared CPU cache side channel attacks on cryptography in 2005 (DJB's "Cache-timing attacks on AES" [2] and Osvik/Shamir/Tromer's "Cache Attacks and Countermeasures: the Case of AES" [3]) so in some ways it feels like the time was right for the community to start finding these attacks -- which makes it all the more baffling to me that your work got rejected.
I'm also a bit dismayed at the advice not to work on anything too novel. I guess it's true in some ways (our Chaff Bugs [4] paper and an associated grant proposal got rejected for four years straight with comments like "the panel was uniformly skeptical that anyone would ever be willing to use this" [5]), but it feels from the inside that it just takes more work to convince people to take a chance on new ideas, and that the larger issue is just how much inherent randomness there is in the peer review system [6] (my advisor used to say it wasn't worth paying attention to the first rejection, and not to worry until it was rejected a second time -- and I think it's only gotten worse since then). Good work gets rejected all the time, and it sucks :(
Anyway, you clearly seem pretty happy with how things ended up, so perhaps I'm just saying that I'm disappointed that we in academic security missed out on the opportunity to have you as a colleague ;)
[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec08/tech/full_papers/n...
[2] http://cr.yp.to/antiforgery/cachetiming-20050414.pdf
[3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2005/271.pdf
[4] https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.00659
[5] Possibly this is true, I admit.
[6] See e.g. the NeurIPS 2014 and 2021 consistency experiments: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.09774, https://blog.neurips.cc/2021/12/08/the-neurips-2021-consiste...