I’m not an expert in academic financing, but how much money from NSF research grants went towards building nice dorms?
I went to an inexpensive state college and the infrastructure was horrible. I would guess that things like dorms are largely paid for from tuition. How much is tuition at the state college in your city?
NSF grants can’t be used to build dorms, it’s actually in their official guidance. The rules (from the Uniform Guidance, 2 CFR 200) explicity say that federal research money can’t go toward capital projects like housing. The only "facilities" costs they allow are indirect ones like basic maintenance or utilities for existing research building not new construction. So dorms are totally off limits.
I think there's a third explanation, which is that computer science professors are made to teach computer programming courses to students who want to learn computer programming and not computer science. If you're a skilled computer programmer when you enter the course, you're probably already more knowledgeable about computer programming than the computer science people who are supposed to be teaching you.
I'm sure my professors knew their computer science niches just fine, but they knew very little about programming & software engineering. Programming was my main hobby growing up. In high school I was already using Linux, had written dozens of websites for myself and friends, had written a 3D platforming game from scratch, and had made and published several homebrew games for real video game hardware. Having to then spend a semester "learning" C++ and operating system basics, from someone who has spent their whole life in academia and never published any real software, was godawful. They barely knew what they were talking about and made all kinds of beginner mistakes. I definitely knew way more than my professors about the subject I was there to learn, computer programming.
Well you certainly sound _incredibly_ gifted and it’s truly a shame you pushed through a CS degree that was clearly beneath you. Any reason you didn’t change course once you clearly evaluated college was not for you?
Also, many many topics need to be taught in “layers” where early on you teach a simplified (and this a bit wrong) version. It’s not practical to start off with 100% fidelity.
The past does not predict the future unfortunately. Else we should all be dumping money into NVIDIA and BTC.
From a gut feeling viewpoint, something doing very well in the recent past makes me hesitant out of fear that it’s overvalued and will slow or even reverse in the near term.
> Re-architecting the rust compiler to be faster is probably not going to happen.
This is a statement without the weight of evidence. The Rust compiler has been continually rearchitected since 1.0, and has doubled its effective performance multiple times since then.
> The second way forward is performing massive changes and/or refactorings to the implementation of the compiler. However, that is of course challenging, for a number of reasons.
> if you change one thing at the “bottom” layer of the compiler, you will then have to go through hundreds of places and fix them up, and also potentially fix many test cases, which can be very time-consuming
> You can try to perform the modifications outside the main compiler tree, but that is almost doomed to fail. Or, you will need to do the migration incrementally, which might require maintaining two separate implementations of the same thing for a long time, which can be exhausting.
> this is a process that takes several years to finish. That’s the scale that we’re dealing with if we would like to perform some massive refactoring of the compiler internals
There are other easier paths to improving the build times for common developer workflows.
If I had to choose though, I would choose compilation speed. Buying an SSD to double my storage is much more cost effective than buying a bulkier processor to halve my compilation times.
For better and worse, the Rust project is a "show-up-ocracy": the work that gets done is the one that volunteers (or paid employees from a company donating their time to the project) spend time doing. It's hard in open source projects to tell people "this is important and you must work on it", but rather you have to convince people that it is important and have to hope they will have the time, inclination and skill to work on it.
FWIW, people were working on the cargo cache GC feature years ago[1], but I am not aware of what the current state of that is. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't turned on because there are unresolved questions.
Linux and GCC are OSS projects but CPU companies pour work into their development because it's a strict requirement of being able to sell their products.
$3000 for what? That seems high outside of in-demand urban areas. In the rural parts of Oregon and California where I've lived, $2000 would get you a nice house with 2 or 3 bedrooms, and $1750 would get you a studio or 1 bedroom pretty easily. It just depends.
As a single dude, I don't think I've ever paid $3000 for rent, anywhere I've lived, urban or rural. I think $2200 was the max and that was for a nicer short term rental.
I've never been rich enough to be able to rent a single-family house to myself, only with several roommates or a partner. So to me "rent" has always been "cheap small apartment in a relatively safe but not luxurious part of town". It's all relative :)
Even now, with a steady partner, both mid-career and in our late 30s/early 40s, we can only afford to rent one half of a duplex (for about $2000). That gets us 2bd/2ba next to a nice little hiking spot though, so we feel quite lucky!
It's a very different life than the millionaire FAANG folks live, I assume. We barely scrape by month to month, but we're content and grateful for what we do have :)
Just means no Vision Pro in our futures, lol. But if someone comes out with a good $300-$500ish wearable virtual monitor, I'd love that. Curious about the Xreals...
Lots of places (specially southeastern portion of the US) if you work remote - studio sized apartments in Georgia can easily be found for around 1000 / month.
I lived in the Stone Mountain area a few years back in a small house (2bd 1ba) for about $1200 / month.
It looks like my gut reaction was due to a mismatch in what is being rented.
I live in the suburbs where apartments are rare. The average renter is a family renting a 2-3 bedroom house for around $2400/month.
> I lived in the Stone Mountain area a few years back in a small house (2bd 1ba) for about $1200 / month.
a quick peak at zillow shows only one house listed for less than 1400/month in Stone Mountain. Average for a 1200sqft 2b1b today seems to be around 1800/month.
I'm sure its more now than it was ~5 years ago. A cursory glance on Trulia shows you can still snag reasonably sized houses for around $1400-1600. It doesn't have to be Stone Mountain (Tucker, Decatur, etc are all adjacent) and fine areas.
So it is very doable in Southeast US. I'm not sure where you live where the average rent is $2400 for a similarly sized 2-3 bedroom house, but if you work remotely - it's trivial to find significantly cheaper rents.
I live in a fairly urbanized walkable city so I haven't rented a house in a while. Here $3k / month would get you a pretty posh pad, but it's far more than I spend on my flat.
i live in Portland OR and we visited your area 3 years ago. i was amazed by the affordable price of big, nice houses in fantastic locations outside Atlanta. always front of mind when i think of best-value places to move if we ever decided to uproot
I went to an inexpensive state college and the infrastructure was horrible. I would guess that things like dorms are largely paid for from tuition. How much is tuition at the state college in your city?
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