^ thread ^ reminds me of https://samzdat.com/2017/06/01/the-meridian-of-her-greatness/ ^ thread ^ So why am I not an academic? There are many factors, and starting Tarsnap is certainly one; but most of them can be summarized as "academia is a lousy place to do novel research". In 2005, I made the first publication of the use of shared caches in multi-threaded CPUs as a cryptographic side channel, and in 2006 I hoped to continue that work. Having recently received my doctorate from Oxford University and returned home to Canada, I was eligible for a post-doctoral fellowship from Canada's National Sciences and Engineering Research Council, so I applied, and... I didn't get it. My supervisor cautioned me of the risks of doing work which was overly novel as a young academic: Committees don't know what to make of you, and they don't have any reputational prior to fall back upon. Indeed, I ran into this issue with my side channel attack: 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. It became clear, both from my own experiences and from advice I received, that if I wanted to succeed in academia I would need to churn out incremental research papers every year — at very least until I had tenure.
Best of Twitter - Week of September 21, 2020
Best of Twitter - Week of September 21, 2020
Best of Twitter - Week of September 21, 2020
^ thread ^ reminds me of https://samzdat.com/2017/06/01/the-meridian-of-her-greatness/ ^ thread ^ So why am I not an academic? There are many factors, and starting Tarsnap is certainly one; but most of them can be summarized as "academia is a lousy place to do novel research". In 2005, I made the first publication of the use of shared caches in multi-threaded CPUs as a cryptographic side channel, and in 2006 I hoped to continue that work. Having recently received my doctorate from Oxford University and returned home to Canada, I was eligible for a post-doctoral fellowship from Canada's National Sciences and Engineering Research Council, so I applied, and... I didn't get it. My supervisor cautioned me of the risks of doing work which was overly novel as a young academic: Committees don't know what to make of you, and they don't have any reputational prior to fall back upon. Indeed, I ran into this issue with my side channel attack: 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. It became clear, both from my own experiences and from advice I received, that if I wanted to succeed in academia I would need to churn out incremental research papers every year — at very least until I had tenure.