It’s unfortunate that Tarsnap uses cryptography (and technology) developed 95% in academia that seems not appreciated by its author who seems focused on the rest of the 5%.
People in industry deliver a product and feel the impact. But sometimes they forget that there is several centuries of innovation in math and physics that has enabled that product.
On cryptography, you need people like DJB who invent algorithms, you need thousands of pages of crypto analysis to make sense of it, you need guarantees, you need to think of quantum computers 50 years in the future, etc etc. For instance, you need Salsa20 and those hash algorithms developed by others. These components each depend on other building blocks developed earlier. I encourage you to see the broader scientific and technological enterprise.
The vast majority of long term research takes place still in academia.
To what part of the post are you responding? If there is any point in which the OP showed a lack of appreciation of what came before them, I missed it.
Probably to the "academia is a lousy place to do novel research" part. I don't know about you, but I also took this as really dismissive of the work done by people in academia.
People in industry deliver a product and feel the impact. But sometimes they forget that there is several centuries of innovation in math and physics that has enabled that product.
On cryptography, you need people like DJB who invent algorithms, you need thousands of pages of crypto analysis to make sense of it, you need guarantees, you need to think of quantum computers 50 years in the future, etc etc. For instance, you need Salsa20 and those hash algorithms developed by others. These components each depend on other building blocks developed earlier. I encourage you to see the broader scientific and technological enterprise.
The vast majority of long term research takes place still in academia.