That's less than the federal grants a single university (UNC) got in 2022. [begin sarcasm] I'm assuming the salaries offered to relocating researchers are going to be in the €200K range at a 32% income tax rate with a regulatory environment that is going to allow them to do research unimpeded by overbearing regulations and abundant 2800 sqft family homes near major research centers in the €700K range? [end sarcasm]

There is more to attracting talent than a token contribution to a communal pool. Europe has lower wages, higher income taxes, higher property prices, and onerous regulations. There was a time when the ancillary benefits of Europe exceeded those downsides, but those times are in the past. Regardless of what misguided nonsense our tariff-in-chief pushes through in his imaginary state-of-emergency, I have no concern about a wholesale brain drain from the US.

I legitimately feel for researchers whose funding got cut. It’s undoubtedly a very unpleasant situation for them. I'm sure they have families to feed and this is going to be hard on them. However, the majority of the grants that were cut were not for STEM or medical research, contrary to the narrative pushed by detractors. Researchers whose funding got cut have options, they can seek out private backers to fund their research assuming there's value to be created from it. If Europe wants to bring in swaths of displaced social science researchers, that's absolutely their prerogative, but the cold hard truth is that the net impact on the US economy from this will be imperceptible.

Biden and Obama went after conservative non-profits for having a political disagreement with their agenda. Biden also pressured social media sites to censor information and people they didn't like. Biden had the FBI raid Trump for having classified documents at home even though Biden himself was guilty of the same thing (this isn't me supporting Trump, I despise him). There is all the scandal surrounding Hunter, both here in the US and abroad, and the things that Biden did to protect his son while harming American citizens and our interests abroad. You have the aftermath of Kabul, undermining of railroad workers, his extremely broad pardons protecting people that caused harm to Americans, etc.

I know, you'll hand wave all of that away, because he's on your team... but he has decades of displaying his authoritarian biases and hating Americans that he doesn't like (including blacks, Indians, gays, etc).

So, care to tell me how you missed the hundreds of stories of governmental abuse posted on slashdot in the last 25 years and think it just started under Trump? At least be honest and consistent with yourself.

You don't know about internment camps, seriously? You don't care about due process (I hope you aren't opposing the removal of undocumented people without due process if killing them is ok)?

They've all been spying on us for decades. The breadth of that spying has only broadened thanks to an increase in technological capability, not a change in desire. Obama and Biden both targeted individuals and groups they politically disagreed with as well. It has escalated under every single President, regardless of party (because they're all authoritarians regardless of their rhetoric).

If you haven't seen it, it's because you intentionally haven't wanted to see it. It's been right here on slashdot going back to the 90s. If you cared, you'd go educate yourself on the matter instead of claiming ignorance.

Woodrow Wilson (internment camps)

FDR (internment camps, destroying food during the Great Depression)

J Edgar Hoover, Eisenhower, JFK, RFK, LBJ, etc (COINTELPRO)

GHWB (Ruby Ridge)

Bill Clinton (Waco, Elian Gonzalez, clipper chip)

GWB (PATRIOT Act, Total Information Awareness)

Obama (droning American citizens)

How young and/or sheltered are you that you never suspected anyone of doing it while it's been happening and making the news for decades? This is just a quick list off the top of my head. We can get into the whole NSA/Snowden thing, the Utah data center, wiretapping everyone, ECHELON, Five Eyes, ALPRs, etc, all of which made headlines on Slashdot itself (and with a 6 digit UID, I assume you've been here for it).

If you think this is unique to Trump and he's the only one acting like a dictator, your political bias is showing.

It's a virtual paradise, barely 5000 crimes a month and only 10% involve physical violence!!!

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.civichub.us%2Fca%2Fsan...

Last time I was in the city, a guy took a dump in front of the window of the coffee shop I was in, but that was performance art, I just misunderstood it at the time.

That makes a whole lot more sense, so it's not actually 1-bit model after all.

I want to know how a single bit, which, by design, can ***ONLY*** be 0 or 1, manages to add a sign bit without actually adding a sign bit. Did bits grow a 3rd state when I wasn't paying attention?

Automattic will have a hard time hiring competent engineers going forward. I'd bet they're on a whole bunch of "do not apply" lists. Although, if you want to have some fun, respond to a recruiter for them with a watermarked response along the lines of "no way in hell".

That show was so good. If you haven't seen it, see it. Back on topic, after watching that clip, read this:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpublichealth.jhu.edu%2F2...

The show set Patient Zero in Indonesia. If they had set it 5 miles north in Singapore, it would have been eerily prescient.

We currently don't have good anti-fungals for these adapted fungi, but I don't see a path to us becoming "clickers". That said, interesting fact, we're actually closely related to fungi, both being eukaryotes, rather than bacteria (prokaryotes) and viruses (acellular). The primary weapon we have against fungal cells hinges on the fact that fungal cellular walls are comprised of chitin rather than proteins. Currently, fungal infections have a ~30% fatality rate under ideal conditions, but if that line of defense falls due to a mutation or mass infections, the Last of Us scenario would move out of the realm of fiction, minus the "clickers", as 80-90% of humanity becomes mushroom fodder.

The C++ macros mess is why I swore off it. I like the Google C++ style of "better C", but templates + macros make code nearly impossible to introspect from source. I've actually moved back over the past few years to languages with fewer abstractions like Go, C, and Zig. I used to like Swift, but cargo-culters have started adding debug / performance-hindering abstractions to it and I see the opacity only getting worse.

I really don't get the "let AI write code for you" and humans can debug, improve, and maintain it. It's completely backwards from what it should be. AI should first be used to write unit tests and run automated tests. So long as the tests are mostly right, that's a big win and there's little potential downside in production. Next, AI should move on to identifying and fixing bugs. That's the natural progression from writing tests. Once AI is good at writing tests and fixing bugs, then you let it take a crack at refactoring and improving existing code. Finally, when AI can write tests, fix bugs, and improve existing code, you let it write Greenfield code, maybe. Slapping together a prototype, generally speaking, is the easiest part of the coding. It's absolutely not the most time-consuming (read: expensive) part of software engineering. The expensive parts are maintenance, debugging, tuning, hardening, and making code testable. Right now, the focus is on "look AI can spit out a prototype it saw on StackOverflow or GitHub!!!". That's the wrong place to start. If you remove the programmers from the initial coding process, it will take orders of magnitude more time and effort to figure out how the code is structured, where the code paths are, and how to improve performance characteristics.

> All of these jobs require more brawn then brain.

I can't tell if you're joking, but Electrician, Plumber, and Nurse Assistant all require on-the-job training, and you have to pass license certification in the US and Canada. I'd hardly call those "brainless" jobs. Do you want an unlicensed electrician to wire your home? How about an unlicensed nurse assistant monitoring your vitals after a heart attack? I've helped a plumber replumb a house I owned; it looks simple, but if you don't get the slopes and runs right, very bad things occur after a little while.

Wish I had mod points, this is definitely informative. I knew private clinics existed in Quebec, but I had no idea Ontario forbade it.

RAM is a minor part of the interference performance equation, no matter how optimal the engine implementation, memory I/O bandwidth is the primary limiting factor for inference performance. Nvidia SoCs don't have the fastest CPUs, but their I/O bandwidth is off the charts with 3.35TB/s for H100, 8TB/s for the B100, 16TB/s for the GB200. For comparison, the fastest Mac M-series SoC is the M3 Ultra with 800GB/s. Inference is about walking memory, I'm sure you can run a lobotomized variant of R1 on a Pi, but you pay in breadth, accuracy and hallucinations. The G4 has memory bandwidth of 2.7GB/s, so with a small enough model, it will "run", a 1000 parameter model would run fine, it would just be useless. Call me when they get a non-quantized 7B parameter model running on a G4. Hint, they won't because the hardware memory bandwidth makes it impossible, even with a hand tuned assembly inference engine, it's just not possible to walk memory fast enough.

They can legally work here if they’re among the "best and brightest" engineers globally; that's the stated purpose of O1 visas. O1 visas, unlike H1B visas, have no caps or lotteries. An officer reviews applications and determines eligibility based on documentation of the applicant’s achievements from their peers.

If they're not currently considered among the best and brightest, then it's trickier. The best bet is to obtain enough credentials to qualify for an O1. Keep working and upskilling until they’ve obtained documented peer recognition. Participate in popular open source projects, publish papers, write books, win coding/math olympiads, present at conferences, apply for awards, get their name known.

If none of that is possible, then they likely only have the H1B option. That's when things turn less copacetic; at least in 2025, you will be displacing similarly qualified Americans, and people tend to get upset when that happens.