I totally lack the patience to be able to deal with sending a command and having to wait 2 days to see the result. Everything about this is awe-inspiring for me.
Imagine opening Vim and gradually typing the commands in to edit a file with a 2-day time lag. Only at the end to notice the fateful words at the bottom of the editor: [read-only].
I wonder if you could teach millions of terminal sessions to an LLM and then have mosh run the inference algorithm to hide the latency (and eventually correct when it gets the real data)..
This is basically why I quit cancer research to go into software. It was like trying to debug via the postal service. You do something to your cell cultures, and you only find out 6 weeks later if something went wrong.
And because a million different things can happen to cells over the course of 6 weeks, you don't get a line number, or a stack trace, or very much debugging information at all.
So you quit potentially life-saving research because you couldn't open a terminal session to a cell culture? Why did you even enter that field in the first place? Genuine question.
Because I legitimately thought it would be a field where I could maximize how much of my brain I used. Instead, it turned out to be 99% dishwashing.
I very much loved undergraduate studies. I legitimately love studying what has been done and what has been discovered already. While we often say that we know nothing (it's somewhat true), the amount of human knowledge that already exists, especially in the life sciences, is unfathomable. And that's genuinely challenging and exciting.
But as soon as you start actually doing the research work, it's a lot less exciting, not much happens, and there is not a lot of problem solving (at least not in comparison to software). It's just a slow methodical grind, with pretty much no pivoting opportunities. You just stick to the plan, and you must try the same thing over and over again. I was surprised by that. Your experiences may differ depending on where you worked, on your funding obligations, and on your specific research area.
And after you finish your PhD, you might get lucky and get one of these fancy $ 40k post-doctoral fellow salaries. /s
(The way science works at a large scale is pretty fantastic, but how it feels for an individual is a very different thing.)
This just sounds like academia needs drastic reforms.
In Engineering we have 22 year olds directing technicians to do that kind of menial work.
The fact that the work is so unvaluable yet years were dedicated to it, seems like a failing somewhere. Not everything needs immediate economic value, but to see supposedly smart people not make 6 figures means:
>They arent that smart, smart engineers get picked up by irrelevant industries simply for being smart
>Someone is directing the smart people poorly.
Of course its both, the leadership of academia has failed us. Those who stick with Academia into PhDs and beyond are essentially second class performers who couldn't make it in Industry.
There are of course a lot of things I would like to change or improve, but I don't know if I share your broad pessimism on academia or research.
Science and engineering are very different endeavours, and while both should take lessons from each other, you just can't approach science in the same way that you approach engineering.
It sounds like my old company (not NASA) when we submitted tickets to offshore tech support - 2 days response time was the norm, and sometimes we never got a response back at all...
I told my dad about the Voyager fix, and he said that back in the days of punched cards, latency of 2 days was quite normal! He was still impressed at the high stakes of the repair though, with no option to go over and turn it off and on again.
My computer course in high school has a one week turnaround time. Send your punched card deck off Thursday of one week, get the printout back the next Thursday.
