On Melissa O’Neill’s PCG random number generator

On Melissa O’Neill’s PCG random number generator
lemire.me

I think there are two topics here. One is whether academic research and work is becoming less relevant to practice. The other is whether the formalism of academic-style publishing are becoming less relevant to the modern world where more and more venues for publishing, rating, and discovering work.

On the former, I believe that academic work is as relevant as ever. There are some areas (like systems) where I'm doubtful about relevance from the point of view of a practitioner, but other areas (like hardware and ML where work remains extremely relevant). I haven't noticed a trend there over the last decade, except in some areas of systems where the industrial practice tends to happen on cluster sizes that are often not approachable for academia.

On the latter, academic publication does indeed seem to be getting less relevant. There are other (often better) ways to discover work. There are other ways to tell whether a piece of work is relevant, or credible. There are other, definitely better, ways to publish and distribute work. In some sense I think this is a pity: as an academic-turned-practitioner I like academic-style publications. Still, I think they are going to either change substantially or die.

This article raises another very good point: sometimes the formalism of academic publication makes the work harder to understand, less approachable, or less valuable. That's clear harm, and it seems like this professor was right to avoid that.