The cloud space is absurd.

We've sat by for 2 decades while the likes of AWS define every aspect of deployment, auth, even containerisation.

Containerisation was supposed to mean host anywhere, literally redeploy a complex set of services and their connections on any cloud provider at the drop of a hat.

That is what a f**ing shipping container is, you rock up to any port in the world and the same container is lifted by any crane onto any ship or truck.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft - these people have sold vendor lock-in to the very segment of tech society that should have been fighting it tooth and nail.

20 years ago you ftp'd some PHP files and it just worked, now you have to figure out 20 IAM profiles and shit your files across buckets because everything must be 1000000x scalable out of the box...

...Yes we 100% need fix hosting, everything should be portable, simple, generic.

Remember we used to spend enormous amount of time in school and in our spare time studying computer science?

Algorithms, operating systems, compilers, and etc. All kinds of insights. All kinds of fun. All kinds of hard engineering.

Yet, how much time do we really need to spend in our day-to-day work implementing or using the algorithms and etc that we have learned?

Engineers have done amazing work of abstracting away the hard algorithms and data structures.

In the meantime, there has been little progress or few new fields in the past 10 years or so in business that ask for implementation of new algorithms.

In contrast, getting LLM to work is a new field, so it requires tons of new implementations: KV caches, speculative decoding, all kinds of variants of attention like FlashAttention, all kinds of parallel processing techniques, RL pipelines, post-training pipelines, and etc.

It's just that the field is so concentrated that only luck few get to work on them.

Leaving things alone is an underrated engineering skill.

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Unfortunately, academia is a minefield.

PhD students are largely cheap labor.
Getting a PhD can be a valuable apprenticeship, but often it's abusive and poorly paid.
You might nominally get some freedom, but the grant funding wants you to do something you might not care for.
The opportunity cost of a PhD is huge.
You should consider as an alternative taking a more conventional job, maybe a part time one, and doing science on the side to figure out how to start your business.
A part-time engineer making $50K/year is getting a much better deal than the vast majority of PhD students.

The problem-first vs. science-first framing sounds good on paper, but it would be difficult to accurately determine whether a particular lab has either focus ahead of time.

What you see from the outside is mostly marketing. Most labs are really neither and instead are publication-first.

Publications are the currency valued in academia"

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