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I have been in and out of the academic world my entire career. I have worked as a programmer/engineer for two universities and a national lab, and worked at a s
by ddahlen 1y ago
I have been in and out of the academic world my entire career. I have worked as a programmer/engineer for two universities and a national lab, and worked at a startup founded by some professors. There is huge uncertainty with the people whom I have worked with, nobody seems to be sure what is going to happen, but it feels like it wont be good. Hiring freezes, international graduate students receiving emails to self deport, and at my last institute many people's funding now no longer supports travel for attend conferences (a key part of science!).
One of the interesting pieces of science that I think a lot of people don't think about is strategic investment. At one point I was paid from a government grant to do high power laser research. Of course there were goals for the grant, but the grant was specifically funded so that the US didn't lose the knowledge of HOW to build lasers. The optics field for example is small, and there are not that many professors. It is an old field, most of the real research is in the private industry. However what happens if a company goes out of business? If we don't have public institutions with the knowledge to train new generations then information can and will be lost.
- tessierashpool 1y ago> One of the interesting pieces of science that I think a lot of people don't think about is strategic investment. the Internet itself began with DARPA. the web at CERN. both came from publicly-funded research.
- tootie 1y agoAlso, NCSA was started with NSF funds and the put out the first web browse. And now the guy behind that is supporting Trump. Really pulling up the ladder.
- mturk 1y agoLarry Smarr recently spoke at NCSA and they wrote up a fair bit about the history of the institution: https://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/homecoming/ https://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/homecoming/ It has links to some of the panel reports that led to the founding of NCSA, but the OSTI website has been having intermittent 502s for me this morning. The original "black proposal" was online on the NCSA website, but seems to have been missed in a website reorg; wayback has it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20161017190452/http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/20years/timeline/documents/blackproposal.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20161017190452/http://www.ncsa.i... . It's absolutely fascinating reading, over 40 years later.
- throwanem 1y ago[flagged]
- i80and 1y ago[flagged]
- dekhn 1y agoHe means Andreesen, obviously.
- throwanem 1y agoOr he could mean Marc Andreesen. In my defense, I haven't been taking that guy seriously for a long time now. Some of his friends, yes. But an embarrassing omission all the same.
- ojbyrne 1y agoI would guess he means Marc Andreesen.
- tootie 1y agoMarc Andreesen
- swores 1y agoIn case anyone else has the same memory fuzziness I had that led me to thinking "I could've sworn it was ARPA, not DARPA, that the internet came out of"... it was ARPA, but they aren't separate organisations as I for some reason thought they were. To quote Wikipedia: > "The name of the organization first changed from its founding name, ARPA, to DARPA, in March 1972, changing back to ARPA in February 1993, then reverted to DARPA in March 1996"
- monkpit 1y agoHence the name arpanet
- cmontella 1y agoYes, the entire DARPA "challenge" series has been about jumpstarting the US robotics industry. People who were involved in those went on to found driverless car companies, which then went on to create a market for driverless cars, and now America is a leader in the industry. And it needed to happened because the state of American robotics was sad in 2004; the very first challenge was a disaster when all the cars ran off the road, with zero finishing the race. Top minds from MIT and Stanford got us that result. But they held the challenge again and again, and 20 years later we have consumers making trips in robo taxis. e.g. Kyle Vogt, participated in the 2004 Grand Challenge while he was at MIT, went on to found Cruise using exactly the techniques that were developed at the competition. So while Elon Musk is busy slashing whatever federal spending he can through DOGE, it's only because of federal spending that he can even fantasize about launching a robot taxi service.
- bilbo0s 1y ago[flagged]
- ausbah 1y ago[flagged]
- TrapLord_Rhodo 1y ago[flagged]
- cmontella 1y agoIf that's how you're using it, then you're doing it wrong, because you're supposed to be supervising the drive the entire time. It's not self-driving if you're supervising. And you're required to supervise because... they're not confident it can actually self-drive.
- TrapLord_Rhodo 1y ago
- UncleOxidant 1y agoThe irony is that in their supposed effort to "Make America Great Again" they're going to end up accelerating China's rise. We may have decided that basic research is no longer something we want to do, but China's going to continue to forge ahead and leave us in the dust. All thanks to people who have no understanding of how anything works, but only want to tear things down that they don't understand.
- apercu 1y ago[flagged]
- hermitShell 1y agoIs there any evidence towards this allegiance? Why should we attribute to malice what we could attribute to incompetence, or greed?
- Onawa 1y agoYes, there is a LOT of evidence of this allegiance, although maybe just observing Trump's unwillingness to openly criticize Russia and Putin is highly suspect by itself. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates_and_Russian_officials https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associat...
- rcpt 1y agoAnd those "mishandled classified documents"? They were all about Russian interference in elections. We never got them back but I'm sure Vlad liked his birthday present https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/politics/missing-russia-intelligence-trump-dg/ https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/politics/missing-rus...
- arunabha 1y agoOne piece of evidence would be that Russia, Belarus and North Korea have been specifically excluded from US tariffs. You could argue that the net effect is negligible since we don't import a lot from those countries, but the signal being sent to long term allies is devastating to America's future relations with them.
- devwastaken 1y ago[flagged]
- cmontella 1y agoPlease read my sibling reply about DARPA grand challenges. This knowledge was built using public dollars by people who publish papers, which are being read today by people building products. That's the great cycle of progress. Notably DARPA felt the need to do this because they didn't trust private industry to do it on their own; with no money in driverless cars, the government figured industry would get there only if there was some catalyst, which they provided (successfully). If you only ever go where the work is, then you're going to be left behind by societies that have a vision and leadership that will work to make it real.
- ponow 1y ago[flagged]
- cmontella 1y agoThat's an interesting counterfactual but it doesn't really mean much to reality. Fact is, what happened is that public research got the results where private industry did not, and everyone is better for it, including private industry. Progress doesn't wait for private industry to be certain of its profits; if it doesn't happen here, it'll happen elsewhere.
- mlinhares 1y agoIt also complete bullshit, pharmaceuticals are heavily dependent on the basic research that is done by colleges and anyone that thinks these private entities can do more research than the best universities in the planet is just insane. For decades now the main difference between the US and the other economies is the amount of highly qualified labor across the board, this move to destroy academia and elevate the stupid and unqualified will be the end of America and the whole world will be poorer for it.
- AdamN 1y ago[flagged]
- sneak 1y agoTrue libertarians are disgusted by authoritarians. A reduction in the size of the US federal government (and its budget) is long overdue. Both of these things can be true. It isn’t anti-intellectual to say that most of what the US federal government does would be better performed by private industry. If understanding is your goal, it may be a useful intellectual exercise to internally steelman the counterargument to your own position.
- ab5tract 1y ago> It isn’t anti-intellectual to say that most of what the US federal government does would be better performed by private industry. Considering this is simply a religious statement posing as an assertion of fact, I would argue it is anti-intellectual to an extreme. Please share some libertarian paradises where this has proven true. How’s Kentucky doing again?
- kevinventullo 1y agoIt isn’t anti-intellectual to say that most of what the US federal government does would be better performed by private industry. The problem is that industry is inherently narrowly focused in short-to-medium term profitability, and cannot be relied on to carry out work which benefits society as a whole, including many conventionally “intellectual” pursuits such as: educating the populace, or fundamental research with no clear path to monetization. Yes, private schools do both of these things, but in both cases they are only doing so by means of public funding.
- sneak 1y agoSome industries are. Many industries do not. Pharmaceutical companies and aerospace companies are frequently investing in long term projects.
- rtkwe 1y agoIt's also a relatively fragile pipeline. People can't just wait a few years when they hit transition points; universities have already massively curtailed their enrollment for the incoming graduate class because of their attempts to completely shut off grants both new and existing, new PhDs are going to have a tough time getting Post Doc positions and post docs are going to have a hard time getting faculty positions. All those people need jobs so they'll have to either find temporary work and hope to get back on the track after that (competing against all the people who had to do the same over the next 4 years unless they're stopped soon) or go overseas.
- morkalork 1y agoIsn't that basically half the motivation for the national ignition facility? To maintain a pool experts in nuclear physics just in case the government every needs or wants to design new nuclear weapons?
- ggandv 1y agoGenerally concur but I wish we wouldn’t squander credibility by making claims like, “travel for attend conferences (a key part of science!).” Oh come on. Conferences are a monument to waste if ever there was. It’s all kickbacks and hotel and airline industry lobbying and protectionism. Some conferences may be better than others I’m sure, but no, science does not depend upon travel to conferences.
- cmontella 1y agoScience absolutely depends on people meeting and exchanging ideas. Whether that happens at a conference as they exist today is one thing, but if you don't spend money on getting people from around the world to meet and exchange ideas, you're going to lose a key aspect of the scientific process.