lmihaig

People get this very wrong, CERN is extremely underfunded. People really don't understand how expensive running the accelerators is and most of the budget goes to that. Last years they even had to run for less months than expected because they couldn't afford the rising energy prices.

The buildings are old, the offices suck, you don't even get free coffee and they pay less than the norm in Switzerland. But they have some of the top minds working on very specific and interesting systems, dealing with problems you'd never encounter anywhere else.

I would like to yap more about the current management and their push/reliance on enterprise solutions but to cut it short I really do think cern is a net contributor to open science and they deserve more funding.

When experiments are running the sensors generate about 1PB of data per second. They have to do multiple (I think four?) layers of filtering, including hardware level to get to actual manageable numbers.

Data and more visualisations here https://citiesmoving.com/visualizations/

Since the 70s our society gradually started putting more interest in producing useless things "for profit" or providing inane services instead of actually improving quality of life.

Imo it's a big reason for the productivity paradox

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

The resources now go to "cheap plastic thing made in China but assembled in the USA" or "it's like Airbnb but for cat grooming" which don't fucking improve anyone's lives but make money.

We should be forever grateful that places like CERN exist, which strive for open science and open source.

While the site you provided is completely off the rails now (thank you for the lesson in content moderation). I see people have been using this comment section to complain about rejection messages, while I share the feeling and in no way condone about how poor the situation is, I think it's too negative and depressing. On a light-hearted note I'd like to share the best rejection message I received.

Whilst still a student in university I messaged Valve my resume, I knew they only hired wizards or people with extreme seniority, but I really liked what I knew about the company and I said hey I'd be really cool. I received a rejection in ample time, sent by an account that has an actual person's name (not just [email protected]). The message was a few paragraphs long of (what seemed like) personalized non-auto reply text about what skills I lack, what Valve looks for in a hire, and how the people at Valve acquired their knowledge.

Checking back on the details of the person I now see it wasn't even just an HR person, but an actual engineer. And I do need to say I applied to a lot of considerably smaller (in number of people) companies than them and never have I received such a nice experience.

It is not enough to say that after dealing with hundreds of rejections that one was actually the first uplifting one I ever received. And also the only. So for that I want to thank that person @Valve.

I was a summer student this summer, working right next to that exact building. Unfortunately we did not get to see the tape robot, we did get visits to the experiments though.

I can say from what I've seen that the amount of data they have to deal with is still the #1 problem. Before the multi layered filters they generate a petabyte of data per second.