Posts by physicsguy

LLM providers on the cusp of an 'extinction' phase as capex realities bite

It's fairly obvious becuase with a well specced Mac Mini you can run many commodity open source models and get similar performance at most tasks. It's only where tool calling integrations have been built in that OpenAI and Anthropic shine, and those are replicable.

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Re: Related?

Not a lot you can do when Crowdstrike install a Kernel Driver, they always are going to have the ability to crash it if they screw things up.

Oracle already wins 'crypto bug of the year' with Java digital signature bypass

How on earth was a port of this from C++ to Java not a straight line by line rewrite, with tests written beforehand? Someone trying to be too clever?

£42k for a top-class software engineer? It's no wonder uni research teams can't recruit

As someone that actually does this job

I work as a Research Software Engineer for a Russell Group university (although will shortly be leaving). I think people here are underestimating the *requirements* needed to do this job. Almost everyone in this area has a computational focused PhD. They're writing software to a professional standard. They're expected to train people in multiple languages (Python, R, etc.). One project might be parallelising codes on GPUs to run on HPC clusters and the next might be web development. The thing is, being that flexible is a skill. The people doing this job are very good software developers generally. That's why they can go elsewhere and earn a lot more money.

The banding of these jobs across the University sector is terrible. Mostly, people are banded on the same scale as academics. So a 'Research Software Engineer' is generally 30-40k (equivalent to postdoc) and a 'Senior Research Software Engineer' is 40 to 50k (equivalent to more experienced postdoc or junior lecturer). Beyond that, you might be line managing 10 people as head of group, and still only earning up to 60k (equivalent to a senior lecturer) and only then would you be promoted to the next band. Generally there are no posts equivalent to a professor (65k+) apart from a few high profile individuals at certain institutions.

Since taking this job I was being constantly contacted by recruiters offering significantly more money. I'm leaving for a significant pay rise after talking to one of these recruiters.