>>13289702>99.9999% will never matterIt's always funny to hear people say this. A lot of people project their own ideas of despair and glory onto academic research. Basically if they aren't getting at least one of the two: big bucks or constant attention, then they tend to think it doesn't matter or that it's useless.
There's a fuckton of PhD level problems in CS, especially theory CS, that have practical use. Theory A constantly solves problems relevant to industry needs or even to things slightly more niche yet useful. All the work gone into sketching and compressed sensing comes to mind, or all the cache oblivious results for optimizing online algorithms.
If you look at theory away from "pure" algo and into things like graphics, you have even more problems theorists regularly make impact in.
I don't know where the FUCK this idea that "uguu, the work you do isn't useful and doesn't matter in the end" aside from maybe the fact that many codemonkeys aren't smart enough to implement your ideas, but thanks to the wonders of abstraction, libraries, and the fact that there are also many *good* software engineers who, despite their *relative* rarity, are still numerous due to the fact that there are so many software engineers in the world right now, your work usually finds use. You just have to market it.
The people who worked on Physically Based Rendering won an Oscars for it. Many head positions at nvidia and pixar are held by CS PhD's. Barring that, you have all the CS PhD's at national labs. Again, I don't know how you think most of the work doesn't matter. What exactly is work that matters?
