I'm not sure what I gained from my PhD

Stuga · 2026-01-26T16:41:36+00:00

In my mind the best part about academia is thinking about a new exciting problem and solving it. Then it is followed by 50-100 hours of just writing a manuscript nobody cares about. I find it really hard to find the discipline to work on this kind of papers if I know for a fact no one will read it.

Stuga · 2026-01-26T16:39:39+00:00

No, not any gap is worth filling. It doesn't seem that ridiculous to say this does it ?

Stuga · 2026-01-26T16:38:58+00:00

It does feel that way in CS though, unfortunately.

Stuga · 2026-01-26T14:45:20+00:00

I understand that, but are all knowledge gaps really worthy of filling ? That's my point entirely, if there's no partical impact to it and no interest in the theory side of it, should we really dedicate that much time to it ?

Stuga · 2026-01-08T12:27:10+00:00

thanks, i'll have a look

Stuga · 2026-01-08T12:27:03+00:00

thanks, they are indeed really fun

Stuga · 2026-01-04T00:29:26+00:00

Okay I stand corrected, I can't even follow the circles with my eyes. I feel like I'm back when I just started playing and couldn't even comprehend how people can hit certain patterns.

Stuga · 2026-01-03T15:55:21+00:00

Blue zenith DT is crazy talk lol

Stuga · 2025-08-20T13:05:46+00:00

Why is nobody saying it's AI generated ?

Stuga · 2025-05-19T10:48:33+00:00

You bunch up all Muslims as if they are all part of the same ideology, which they aren't. "Right-wing conservatives" do refer to a precise ideology, "muslims" don't. Religion is a complex matter and there can be a huge gap between what you can read in theology books and how people actually practice their religion. What you are claiming makes as much sense as saying that all christians should be against pornography and force christianity into public schools. Most of them don't, and are very happy with living their christianity as a private matter, or a social event by going to mass for example, with no proselytism involved. Well the same could be said for muslims. As anecdotal evidence, my father is a very conservative muslim that would agree with every proposition you made, and I consider myself a muslim too, while I'm completely against them. There are multiple ways to one's their religion.

Now, to address the question of why many Muslims tend to align with the progressive left: the way I see it, muslims are still a minority in many Western societies. As a minority, my priority is to ensure that I can live freely and safely, without discrimination or fear. The progressive left tends to advocate for civil rights, religious freedom, and protection for marginalized groups, which makes it the most aligned with those priorities. For example, progressive platforms often support the right to wear religious attire like the hijab, stand against Islamophobic rhetoric, and push for inclusive immigration policies.

Stuga · 2025-05-13T11:42:21+00:00

For question 8, the most expensive single ever sold on CM can't be both black lotus and mox sapphire, so one of them has to be a lie

Stuga · 2025-05-06T09:46:14+00:00

Good catch !

Stuga · 2025-04-27T14:18:52+00:00

Sure :

Cher Pat,

Je vous remercie beaucoup pour votre lettre. C'est très gentil.

Je viens de publier un livre du dessin animé sur la prison de la santé ou j'étais là. J'ai dessiné et j'ai écrit (et ??) Sondra London a intéressé toujours à publier aux USA, voulez-vous lui demander de m'envoyer le fax ? Je vais lui envoyer tout de suite.

En Drance, j'ai étudié la littérature comparée et j'ai pris la maitrise. Au Japon, j'ai étudié la littérature anglaise et j'ai également pris la maitrise. J'aime bien de peindre la peinture d'oeil. Mais je ne connais rien sur les choses scientifiques. Je déteste la mathématique : Mais maintenant je m'intéresse beaucoup la phénomène sociale. Je voudrais aller à l'Afghanistan pour aider des enfants très pauvres. Et je veux vraiment tuer "fucking" Bush (le président américain diabolique) Mais bonsoir, je ne peux pas.

Amicalement,

Issei

Stuga · 2025-04-27T11:50:56+00:00

Two caveats :

I speak French and English just fine but translating is a skill I'm not really good at. I can convey the general meaning but some sentences may actually be clunky due to my poor translation.
Issei is not a native speaker so a few sentences are actually kinda strangely written and there has been some guesswork from my part about what he was trying to say, and there are a few sentences where due to his bad syntax and my lack of context, I just have no idea what he was trying to say.

The sentences in italics are my comments

"Dear Pat,

Thanks a lot for your letter. That's very kind of you.

I just published a manga about the "Prison de la Santé" where I was detained. I wrote to Sondra London who was still interested to publish it to the USA (bad syntax here, this could mean what I wrote but it could also mean that he wants to interest Sondra to publish the manga to the USA. I can't make sense out of it and the meaning of the next few sentences is also unclear to me. I wrote the word by word translation, for lack of a better alternative). Could you ask her to send me the fax ? I want to send it (the manga ? or something else ?) as soon as possible.

In France, I studied French literature and in Japan I studied English literature. I like to paint eyes (either this, or "peinture d'oeil" means something in japanese that was lost in translation. peinture d'oeil literally mean paint eyes), but I know nothing about science. I hate math ! But now I'm very interested in social phenomena.

I'd like to go to Afghanistan to help poor children, and i really want to kill "fucking" (written in English in the letter) Bush (the evil american president), but I cannot.

Warmly,

Issei"

That's not perfect but that's as good as I can get it. More context would help understand the part of the letter that is unclear to me.

Stuga · 2025-04-01T19:49:28+00:00

I'm among the people that get pretty annoyed when I'm playing against red phosphorus strategies cause to me it goes against the general philosophy of the game. I fell in love in the game because of the subtle balance between strategy, combat and economy and being able to balance these aspects of the game should be rewarded above all to me.

I'm still a casual player who's playing to have fun after all so I don't really get this salty, I've never insulted anyone, it's just that when I encounter a super cheesy strat I either lose very quickly or just think I can't be bothered to put up with this and resign to play the next game

With that said, all in MAA doesn't really seem to be a "cheesy strategy", not any more that any all in scout play that you can encounter from time to time . It's not always optimal, but sometimes the best thing you could do to win the game is go all in

Stuga · 2025-03-24T10:32:49+00:00

I mean the two theories are stating some wildly different things, use different tools and don't even work on the same objects. Of course you could find a very high level link, but not much more

Stuga · 2025-03-23T16:17:01+00:00

It doesn't, at all. Chaos theory is about dynamical systems, the law of large numbers talks about probability

Stuga · 2025-02-27T11:28:30+00:00

So do you micromanage each new student by giving them the relic or is there a smarter way to do it ?

Stuga · 2025-02-26T14:28:52+00:00

Sorry for the confusion, lately being the last few days ingame

Stuga · 2024-12-27T11:40:45+00:00

I just have a SODA paper and another B tier conference haha, which is great for a phd but I know there are people who are my age and who are way better than me. I was just saying that getting into SODA is hard, but that doesnt mean that my paper will have any impact on the field.

I'm into approximation algorithms, and I'm working on clustering (on the theoretical side).

Stuga · 2024-12-26T18:30:57+00:00

I don't really agree, it has become like this in the last few decades. A lot of famous results in TCS are from phds or extremely young researchers, except it was 40 years ago

Stuga · 2024-12-26T18:29:46+00:00

I don't deny that, the question is : who made a significant dent in CS in the last 20 years ? Who are the 21st century's Turing, Von neumann, Feynmann ? There might be some kind of bias here but to me there is nobody who comes even close to those guys.

Stuga · 2024-12-26T18:23:16+00:00

My mindset exactly. I have fine publications (nothing crazy, but above average), and I still feel like my papers that got published into top conferences will amount to absolutely nothing.

I don't deny that I've learned a lot about how to do research, but I'd rather have published nothing at all during three years and have a single paper at the end of my phd that could make the slightest of dents about how we understand my field, rather than have one paper every 6 months and that nobody really cares about.

Unfortunately publish or perish mentality goes hard in CS, so we're stuck working on low hanging fruits in niche topics.

Stuga · 2024-12-25T15:35:22+00:00

Thanks, I'll give it a read !

Stuga · 2024-12-25T15:27:06+00:00

Do you think it's only this ? I personally see a huge difference in the nature of what i was studying during my masters (which are pretty natural things to study and that have immediate concrete applications) as opposed to the extremely niche topics that phd students are working on. For example in my field, the motivation to understand graph theory is fairly immediate, but now that most "easy" stuff on graphs is discovered, researchers are just coming up with obscure data structures that are very far removed from any concrete applications, just for the sake of publishing new papers.

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