[godelski]

Don't get me wrong, there is a lot I like about academia. Honestly, there hasn't been any other point of time in my life that I've been able to dedicate so much of my time to learning and researching. Even as I'm in a long term internship, that freedom is slipping away. Academia is supposed to be about protecting that freedom to explore and learn, but simply too much bullshit took over. Bureaucrats love metrics regardless of the value of those metrics. Maybe I wouldn't feel as disenfranchised if I wasn't in the fast moving world of ML with where peer review is like playing a slot machine except bigger schools and big labs get access to slot machines with higher payout rates (I see no quality difference between works from different institutions, rather the arxiv wave primes reviewers or language/proprietary {models,datasets} also prime reviewers).

I actually want people to feel disenfranchised at this point though. Because if there's anything I've learned, it's that we don't fix things before they break or even when they are noticeably broken. Rather we fix things when they're so broken that they're unusable, and typically only fix to minimal usability. Which is such a waste of resources. Maintenance is far cheaper.