I used canvas for some Harvard extension classes 10 to 5ish years ago. It worked Ok. Work distributed, grades posted. I didn't realized so many schools used it, or that it was all schools on one instance, which seems kind of nuts.
I lost access when I left as it was tied to my work email. I downloaded a lot, but there was still some useful stuff on the boards.
I wonder what the havkers found out about me. Perhaps the class notes will be lifted to train AI, higher quality than a lot thats on the internet anyway.
I discovered one of my old school assignments ended up on some homework help website. I had never posted this document publicly and had only uploaded it to the schools work submission page. Presumably at that point it was shared with multiple third parties for plagiarism checking and such. And then was exposed to a data breach years later and ended up on the public internet.
We used to be amazed when I ran cross country in high school that these pro marathoners would best all of us in our approx 5K(3ish mile) races and then go on to repeat that distance multiple times.
I’ll note at the end of the last century I worked at IBM research which had a budget of 6 Billion dollars. Management was trying very hard to get better return on that investment. Even today IBM though often ridiculed in the tech space (sometimes they do deserve it) spends a lot on R&D.
I've been to the Holmdel office in the decline years. It was very sad. A fraction of the former staff was rattling around in what could've been used for a post apocalyptic sci-fi set. In its heyday it must've been magnificent. Imagine taking an entire great research university and putting it into a single architectural masterpiece. I've also been to Nokia HQ after Elop ruined the place. Also sad.
IBM employees have garnered six Nobel Prizes, seven Turing Awards,
20 inductees into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame, 19 National Medals of Technology,
five National Medals of Science and three Kavli Prizes. As of 2018,
the company had generated more patents than any other business in each of 25 consecutive years.
> the company had generated more patents than any other business in each of 25 consecutive years.
A couple things about those patents, from a former IBMer who has quite a few in his time there.
First, not all patents are created equal. Most of those IBM patents are software-related, and for pretty trivial stuff.
Second, most of those patents are generated by the rank and file employees, not research scientists. The IBM patent process is a well-oiled machine but they ain't exactly patenting transistor-level breakthroughs thousands of times a year.
Why do you need to generate transistor-level breakthroughs multiple times a year? Those breakthroughs are hard to generate, but they're important and industry-spanning. The problem is we've mostly stopped generating them.
I wasn't saying anything about that, I was just pointing out that yes, IBM produces a ton of patents, but they're mostly trivial junk that regular employees generate en masse in order to earn accomplishments and make up for the insultingly low bonuses.
> they're mostly trivial junk that regular employees generate en masse in order to earn accomplishments and make up for the insultingly low bonuses
We did that at Meta and Amazon too (for polycarbonate puzzle pieces, with no monetary award at all!). Every now and then something meaningful came out of it
I also worked (briefly, as an intern) at IBM and IBM’s management also sometimes undermined the R&D that happened at the company.
I started at the tail of one research group’s mass exodus. It was like a bomb had gone off; the people left behind were trying to pick up the pieces. In essence, this group developed a sophisticated new technique, which the company urged them to commercialize. Pivoting to commercialization was a big effort, and not naturally within the expertise of this group, but they did it, largely at the expense of their own research productivity—for several years. They even hired programmers (ie, not people who are primarily computer scientists) and got it done. But just before launch, IBM pulled the plug.
This infuriated the researchers in the group. Keep in mind that career advancement in research is largely predicated on producing new research. In effect, IBM asked people to take a time out and then punished them for agreeing to do it. The whole group was extremely demoralized. Google was the largest beneficiary of this misstep.
I also had a similar, frustrating experience working for Microsoft, so it’s not just IBM, but the same dynamics were at work: bean counters asking researchers to commercialize something and then axing a project as it becomes deliverable.
If AI replaces any role in the company of the future, please let it be the managerial class.
The thing is, Nobel Prizes and other awards don't pay the bills.
Patents do, but in most cases it's trivial patents or patents for a "mutually assured destruction" portfolio (aka, you keep them in hand should someone ever decide to sue you).
That's a fundamental problem with how the Western sphere prioritizes and funds R&D. Either it has direct and massive ROI promises (that's how most pharma R&D works), some sort of government backing (that's how we got mRNA - pharma corps weren't interested, or how we got the Internet, lasers, radar and microwaves) or some uber wealthy billionaire (that's how we got Tesla and SpaceX, although government aids certainly helped).
All while we are cutting back government R&D funding in the pursuit of "austerity", China just floods the system with money. And they are winning the war.
mRNA is not a good example. If anything, it's a demonstration of why the Western capitalist model is superior to anything else. Most of the mRNA research was funded by venture capital as a high-risk high-reward investment.
In the world of government-sponsored research, mRNA likely would have been passed over in favor of funding research with more assured results.
Every year they grant prizes. If hardly anyone is doing core R&D because of cost cutting, there is a higher chance those doing the smallest amount of R&D get the prizes.
A Nobel in 2026 doesnt carry the same weight as a Nobel in 1955.
Toshiba, IBM and Siemens had a DRAM joint development program 1993-1998. Several generations of DRAM was developed there. Also, while IBM exited the DRAM business, the knowledge survived in Rambus to an extent.
A huge factor. I used ada for years and the fact everyone I worked with did hobby projects in other languages didn’t help it. And most of us liked Ada.
It had other warts the string handling wasn’t great, which was a huge problem. It was slow too in a time where that mattered more (we had c and ada in our code base.). I remember the concurrency not using the OSs so the one place we used it was a pain. HPUX had an amazing quasi real time extensions, so we just ran a bunch of processes.
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