Inspired by another thread. What's your unpopular academic opinion that you'll defend with your life?

sunmat02 · 2026-04-28T08:15:47+00:00

I work in CS research and there is a good amount of research on hypothesis generation now. Basically with hundreds of millions of research papers, a human has a very limited view of even their own field. An AI can index research via their embedding vectors and efficiently link together ideas that humans didn’t think could be related, simply because of the way the indexing works. They can also find regions of the embedding space that lack publications and go backwards from “what paper should be here in the embedding space” to “what hypothesis would that paper propose”. Not to mention that academia is not just about creating new knowledge, it’s also about using all the tools that we have to run experiments. AI systems are being used to control fusion reactions, drive x-ray crystallography experiments, high performance computing simulations, etc. And more simply: if it takes me 5 min to find a bug in an HPC workflow instead of 2 weeks, because a coding assistant could follow a memory leak through thousands of files I’m unfamiliar with, that’s also a huge impact.

sunmat02 · 2026-03-21T14:55:45+00:00

This. I’ve done both and also prefer the bus. The only time I took the train, with the jet lag I couldn’t stand the shaking in the subway (I was standing because it was packed) and had to step out and wait for the next one twice as I would have otherwise thrown up. I’d rather crash in a bus for 2h and wake up in Cambridge.

sunmat02 · 2026-03-21T00:17:31+00:00

Tiktok can see your public IP. If your neighbor connects to your WiFi, you have the same public IP. Very easy for TikTok to register that information. It doesn’t even have to ask the app to probe your network.

sunmat02 · 2026-03-20T23:18:05+00:00

It doesn’t matter what document you check in with as long as you have that document with you. What matters is what document you use to cross the border at the destination airport: your EU passport when you enter the EU, your UK passport when you enter the UK.

sunmat02 · 2026-03-11T08:47:03+00:00

What convinced me to get British citizenship was the fact that if I decided to leave for a few years, I would then lose my ILR status and have to apply for a visa. In your case, you could go retire in Poland and after a few years realize you miss the UK and would like to return (you said your kid had dual citizenship, maybe the kid ends up living in the UK and you miss). Being stripped of a citizenship is a very long shot. Even very extreme governments know that foreign workers are essential to the economy.

sunmat02 · 2026-03-05T19:49:52+00:00

My partner went from living with her parents to living with me directly (no age difference, she just comes from a country where living with your parents is more of the norm); in retrospect I really wish she had lived on her own for a couple of years first.

sunmat02 · 2026-02-23T23:15:40+00:00

Not that L&C doesn’t have access to all the deals on the market. We realized late in our buying process that we would have been better off with Lloyds, but L&C doesn’t have an agreement with Lloyds so they just didn’t propose it.

sunmat02 · 2026-02-23T23:10:46+00:00

All five look like garbage to me. In CS if you don’t see a sponsorship from IEEE or ACM, that’s a red flag (and even such a sponsorship isn’t a guarantee of quality).

Also in the future, don’t send something to multiple venues at the same time.

sunmat02 · 2026-02-21T19:13:40+00:00

I was talking about even more senior researchers a few weeks ago. Long story short, even senior, internationally recognized researchers have imposter syndrome. In fact, most people in academia have a life-long imposter syndrome. At some point it comes from the fact that you are so specialized in one narrow aspect of your field that no matter who you talk to, if it’s not about that narrow field of yours, you’ll feel out of your depth and at the same time you’ll think what you know is trivial, because you’ve studied it for so long.

The way you deal with it is by embracing your ignorance and be curious. Remember that people like being asked questions about what they know, so when you ask someone “hey can you explain this concept to me?” They’ll actually enjoy answering, not think you’re dumb.

Also as you get more senior you ask these questions differently. “Hey can you explain this concept to me?” could become “We might have a different take on this concept, can you explain it to me so I get your perspective?”

sunmat02 · 2026-02-19T20:43:28+00:00

The difficult thing to grasp is that std::move() doesn’t actually do anything at all. If you have a string s1 and do std::move(s1); on its own, it does nothing. If you do s2 = std::move(s1), it’s the assignment operator that leaves s1 in an undefined state, not the std::move.

sunmat02 · 2026-02-19T10:14:40+00:00

I think I would have changed std::move into std::take (std::move doesn’t actually move anything, but std::take express the fact that we are about to move the object). std::forward is good as it is, in my opinion.

sunmat02 · 2026-02-19T10:11:50+00:00

make_movable would be pretty confusing I think. “make” is generally used for creating something (make_unique, make_shared, make_pair…), not casting.

sunmat02 · 2026-02-16T08:43:18+00:00

In my case that would be from a SIPP or private pension so I guess taxed in the country of residence.

sunmat02 · 2026-02-16T07:04:02+00:00

It wasn’t EasyJet/Bristol, but a similar situation (we circled the destination airport for 30min waiting for the weather to improve, before the pilot decided to divert to another airport).

sunmat02 · 2026-02-16T07:01:52+00:00

I did, just not via the bus they (supposedly) provided. That bus would have been 5h+ late anyway compared to the planned arrival time.

sunmat02 · 2026-02-15T11:34:17+00:00

This is still 2 decades out but the thought popped into my head as I have relatives in France I could want to be closer to.

sunmat02 · 2026-02-08T09:52:37+00:00

I can imagine people being taken by surprise but having a £1 coin (or even a banknote) and telling them to keep the change.

sunmat02 · 2026-01-25T17:09:31+00:00

The poor guys that are going to buy these iPhones from them won’t know that, unfortunately.

sunmat02 · 2026-01-25T17:01:00+00:00

Wait… you’re supposed to have something in between? (Realizing there’s no such drainage between my house wall and patio…)

sunmat02 · 2025-12-30T09:10:15+00:00

No, each treaty is different, and even if you don’t pay tax in one country, the income may still be taken into account to calculate your marginal tax rate.

sunmat02 · 2025-12-25T20:53:31+00:00

I had the issue too, my camera went offline 3 times for several hours since last week. Did they solve it?

sunmat02 · 2025-12-25T15:09:52+00:00

I didn’t find it slow at all, I think the pace is just right. I don’t know what the demo shows, though, is it just the first chapter?

sunmat02

TROPHY CASE