this proposal is an extension of the WH crackdown on what it sees as misuse of USG funds for things that are deemed not in the best interests of the USG.
Among other things this proposal attempts to prevent:
1. prevention of DEI related grants
2. prevention of grants promoting anti-american ideologies
3. prevention of gain-of-function research (think covid-19)
4. prevention of ai-powered social media censorship research
5. prevention of FEMA dollars going to help undocumented immigrants
6. prevention of foreign aid dollars being spent in africa on gender ideology
It would but restrictions directly into the grant awards give strong tools to the USG to suspend the grant and prevent the money being dispersed via a subrecipient.
Am I wrong for thinking “good” for a lot of those points? Many are either harmful (I still haven’t heard what we actually expect to gain from gain-of-function research that makes up for the potential cost) to absolute wastes of taxpayer dollars.
You can agree with the stated goals and still disagree with the policy mechanism to achieve them. Indeed, much of the current administration's strategy appears to be to sane-wash the destruction of our scientific institutions while trotting out it's "goals" to non-critical observers. Of course, the true goals are what the policy actually accomplishes, which is to hollow out the capacity for competent dissent.
will AI displace jobs: yes undoubtly. But it's not equal even across the tech sector. Outsourcing jobs are extremely at risk. Companies have been offshoring to vietnam, india, malaysia, etc for decades because they're cheaper to hire/pay than americans. But guess who is even cheaper then them? AI. so all the back office work will transition to AI. it's just a matter of time.
But it remains to be seen if corporations will downsize significantly due to AI. I dont currently see it. In fact the opposite is happening. The hype around AI is driving job growth not decline: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/data-shows-surprising-rebound...
The premise of this that AI will cause a catastrophic wipe out of jobs everywhere is FUD. In software we are much more likely to see the cambrian explosion of software companies and the de-FAANGing of corporate america as software development because easier. a pizza team of 6 can now create something amazing that might have once required a huge budget and organization. The consolidation of tech that has been happening since the 90s might actually be reversing.
AI is something that is empowering new modes of business. Think about how media has become democratized in the last 20 years and big corporate media conglomerates are struggling to hold the publics attention because its now easier than ever to publish your own movies/news. AI (i believe) will democratize things that are now held in control by guilds/companies/etc. And maybe this isn't such a bad thing.
there's a long history of X is dead posts. PHP is dead, Java is dead, jquery is dead, unix is dead, REST is dead, graphql is dead, microservices is dead. and of course none of those things are dead. but... they're great for clickbait.
here's the uncomfortable truth. most software engineers are good enough to hire.
i've seen a few interview types in my time:
1. technical interviews run by nontechnical or junior engineers who can't judge technical talent. this typically produces sub-par hires. imagine you are made the director of UX design and you have to hire someone but know little about the industry. what type of hires are you going to get?
2. technical interviews that focus on CS skills. can you write a red-black tree in Java? can you write a bubble sort in haskell? The problems here is that this has bias towards new CS grads that dont have much industry experience but just took tests on stuff like this in their degree. google pioneered this style of interview and it's taken off as leetcode. the problem is that experienced devs dont typically write bubblesort algorithms. this type of interview is biased toward younger out of college hires and codecamp hires that have little experience but gring on leetcode sites.
3. technical interviews that have too many opinions for a hire recommendation. this seems to be a new trend where you need 3 or 5 or 7 thumbs up to get hired and any negatives sink the candidate. this does raise the bar, but typically what i see is someone on this panel has a high opinion of his/her abilities and gives everyone they seem a thumbs down.
What i've found is that soft skills and team dynamics are > the technical accumen. I can teach you how to write go(lang) but its much harder to teach you how to influence your peers or to communicate effectively.
Experienced devs probably dont know how to ace your leetcode interview, but they do know how to influence and communicate and when to stay away from bad ideas. You dont get tested on these things. It's analogous to a being combat veteran. You've been there, you've done that you know how to survive. You might not know the new tech, but that can be taught. I have never seen an dev not be able to pickup a new platform/language/skill within 6 months of hire - anywhere.
Here's hoping this will get better one day but i'm not holding by breath.
DeepSeek's official privacy policy explicitly states: “To provide you with our services, we directly collect, process and store your Personal Data in the People's Republic of China.”
US companies dont sell AI services in China (as far as I know) but deepseek markets to US companies and customers.
Actually i think AI makes junior devs dumber. Senior devs learned over the gigantic mountains of failed projects they've built. I still get people telling me to build flat file databases - nope. Build me a micro service architecture with 50+ lambdas - nope. Been there, done that. I know why you really shouldnt if you technically can. For me AI make me go 100 mph in the right direction. I see junior devs going 100 mph toward the ocean or into a wall. "lets use ai to build a chatbot in javascript that runs on my desktop that everyone can connect to with a claude skill!" ok buddy. Are they learning? maybe when they get pwned but what I see mostly is the cambrian explosion of bad ideas. What I see is junior devs that no longer understand what a reverse proxy is because AWS made us dumber. Junior devs that can't understand memory management because higher level languages made us dumber. AI is another link in that chain. 10 years from now pretty sure most devs won't be able to read code.
It seems like the intent here is to prevent "subawards" going to foreign linked entities where the USG can't track it. The NIH is introducing a new linked award system where the foreign entity receives their own independent grant number and that primary on the application must be a US entity.
This introduces new activity codes (PF5 regular grant and UF5 cooperative agreement) where upon granting the new money the foreign entity will receive their own RF2 grant or UL2 grant (based on the original grant type).
Under the old system a grant to a US institution (like a university) could be doled out to foreigner institutions as subawards without the USG seeing where the money was going. This is a violation of FFATA and the USG wants to track these dollars because US universities are not reporting it.
Additionally the USG has grown increasing suspicious of certain countries (think russia, china) that are getting subawards that are effectively transferring US IP to these entities via pliant US individuals at an institution. This forces the PI to get a linked award and pull these folks out of the shadows where they are now identified and where the USG can run a background check on them.
This also deals with university outsourcing where an institution can get a grant and then simply pass the money off (mostly entirely) to a foreign entity where the US university became essentially a shadow distribution vehicle. Under the new rules to do this the PI must show that but funnel funds to a foreign institution that institution must offer something not readily available in the US.
Once a foreign funded entity has received money in this way and then violates policy, or breached security it falls on the university to police their grants (which mostly they can't do effectively). So the USG wants to cut out the middleman and for the foreign entity to become a direct recipient of the grant making them legal liable to the USG for all the terms and conditions. If you violate the grant the NIH can sanction them directly without going through the university.
The real reason for the “cartels” in the US is because of the cost of infrastructure versus the subscribers cost. Because the United States is so large there are only a few companies that can create the infrastructure required to service large area areas with fiber.
So companies that have the ability to lay down, fiber do so in necessary cooperation with other providers to create a large patchwork across the country. This means that network companies have to cooperate with each other to send traffic back-and-forth.
It’s not realistic or feasible to have the US government generate a fiber optic connectivity for the entirety of every household in the United States. In fact, the free market was the only realistic possible to deliver this.
> The real reason for the “cartels” in the US is because of the cost of infrastructure versus the subscribers cost. Because the United States is so large there are only a few companies that can create the infrastructure required to service large area areas with fiber.
The "US is large" argument is non-sense. 40% of the US population lives in a coastal county:
And even if it wasn't, looking at history, the US managed to bring electrical cables to just about every household in the country, and later telephone cables. If those two things could be done in the 1900s, why can't fibre be done in the 2000s?
"It’s not realistic or feasible to have the US government generate a fiber optic connectivity for the entirety of every household in the United States. In fact, the free market was the only realistic possible to deliver this."
Why? Other countries with similar population densities have done it. A bigger country should have an advantage due to economies of scale.
I think he means it's not economic viable to the companies, however as you can see the Swiss model was defined by politics.
Even though, I agree with you it's possible, in my city the internet only got better when a monopoly was broken, and a state company decide to work in a new infrastructure, all FTTH, now I pay less than 100BRL for 300/150Mbps with that price 10 years ago it was only possible ADSL connections (25Mbps).
Now every major provider do have FTTH infra with great prices.
> It’s not realistic or feasible to have the US government generate a fiber optic connectivity for the entirety of every household in the United States. In fact, the free market was the only realistic possible to deliver this.
They managed for water and wastewater, which are a lot more complex than fiber.
This is just pure nonsense. The only reason for "cartels" is regulatory capture.
Most of the cost of an ISP is the so-called "last mile". Depending on your locale this is usually either stringing up cables on existing telephone poles or digging trenches, typically in the setback area between the road and the sidewalk that you might maintain but you don't technically own (or the municipality maintains an easement on, it varies).
Once you go from the premises to a central POP, the costs basically go to zero (per install). Backhaul bandwidth for a residential ISP is incredibly cheap, even free with peering arrangements.
The point is that geography really doesn't matter. Wiring up a 10,000 homes in Phoenix, Zurich, Shanghai or Sydney is basically the same (normalized for labor costs). The US is very spread out due to geography. It doesn't matter. The links between towns are a small fraction of the cost and often covered by existing rights-of-way anyway (eg railroads). You compare that to a highly urbanized and concentrated population like Australia where urban density is very similar to many American towns and cities and you're dealing with a very similar cost structure.
Think about it this way: if geography was the issue and not, say, artificial barriers to prevent competition (including from municipal broadband), why would the ISP lobby spend so much moeny to make municipal broadband illegal (as they do in many states)? Or why would they formalize a monopoly into a contract with an "exclusivity" deal (ie franchise agreement)?
I don’t think this is correct. This is about German politics. Their central bank has been attempting to repatriate gold since 2013 in an effort to centralize their holdings. It’s also not just about the US. In theory, Germany could move all its gold holdings to Switzerland. Where there is a major trading hub. The fact that they want it back in the country is domestic politics.
Everything that happens in politics happens because someone managed to assemble a powerful enough coalition. Maybe some people wanted to repatriate gold before, but not enough to make it happen. Now suddenly, there are enough people.
France just did that and even made some gains. Was in HN today as well.
Germany has lost it, no farsightedness or longer plan. So frustrating how the German gov is failing on these longer term issues and are ground up in day-to-day noise. Flood the zone with shit comes to mind.
That was purely an accounting gain (because of selling that gold and buying it back). After realising this PnL the gold is now held at a much higher cost basis.
Alzheimer's is a prion disease. Prions are proteins that cause other proteins to misfold. What's interesting is that most prion diseases are transmitted through ingestion or physical contact - possibly there's a correlation with population density and/or sanitation. It's also possible that there are low occurrences in ancient populations because most people died of other things. For example, 200 years ago bacteria diseases were the most common cause of death. Now that we have conquered most infection disease the primary cause of death now is cancer and cardiovascular issues.
Among other things this proposal attempts to prevent:
1. prevention of DEI related grants
2. prevention of grants promoting anti-american ideologies
3. prevention of gain-of-function research (think covid-19)
4. prevention of ai-powered social media censorship research
5. prevention of FEMA dollars going to help undocumented immigrants
6. prevention of foreign aid dollars being spent in africa on gender ideology
It would but restrictions directly into the grant awards give strong tools to the USG to suspend the grant and prevent the money being dispersed via a subrecipient.
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