I've been a Usenix reviewer twice, once as a program chair (I think that's what they call the co-leaders of a PC?). So this doesn't clarify anything for me.

To out it more clearly. You take a domain (like OS security, perfomance, and administration) and you’ll find those kinds of problems that people feel important to share solutions with each other. Solutions that are not trivially found. Findings you can be proud your name is attached with.

And then you have something like the LLM craze where while it’s new, it’s not improving any part of the problem it’s supposed to solve, but instead is creating new ones. People are creating imperfect solutions to those new problems, forgetting the main problem in the process. It’s all vapourware. Even something like a new linter for C is more of a solution to programmer’s productivity than these “skills”