You are almost there in terms of getting their point, so I will explain.
Birds existed since forever ago in nature, and they fly by flapping their wings. Then planes got invented, and they fly using a very different mechanism (that doesn't involve flapping wings).
The point made by the grandparent comment: saying "LLMs don't actually reason, because the underlying mechanism they use is different from how humans reason" feels about the same as "planes don't actually fly, because the underlying mechanism they use is different from how birds fly".
it's hard to understand the granparent's statement actually.
It seems to me it would make sense if it were:
it would pack more punch if ASML WAS the only go-to example...
Is that what it's supposed to be? And then, since it isn't the only go-to example it must follow that the example packs little punch.
If it is supposed to be that perhaps the person you are responding to misunderstood and thought it actually meant exactly what it said, which after all was that ASML IS the only go-to example. And thinking what it seemed to be saying was actually what was meant they responded to that.
However I think you and I agree that what was actually meant was a sarcastic observation that hey, ASML is not the only go-to example European company thus this carries a reasonable amount of punch, it was just poorly phrased.
Yeah, I am genuinely confused how the grandparent comment just glossed over it.
I believe that both COVID and LLMs are disrupting educational metrics. But in terms of which one did more short-term scale damage (i.e, within 4 years), I would wager it was COVID.
Wouldn’t there be recovery? Especially for the cohort that started school after the end of restrictions.
A continuous decline across both COVID and llms points towards a different causal relationship to me. I would be more likely to believe algorithmic social media or computerized teaching tools are to blame, but that is pure conjecture.
By what mechanism is that recovery supposed to happen? AFAIK students who studied less during the pandemic weren't made to study more later to compensate, so by default they'll permanently have done less studying than other cohorts at the same age.
If I missed a year of fifth grade in 2020, I have had 5 years to recover any lost progress and should do better in 10th grade than the kids that just missed a year. Especially when you consider that many of the topics being tested against are not even introduced until after 5th grade. Sure you might miss out on some arithmetic, but you have had half a decade to correct and your trigonometry scores should be better than students that missed out on trigonometry the same year.
I think the pandemic had some effect on the current cohort of 15 year olds, but it should not be as large of an effect as the students who were 15 in 2020.
If I missed a week of math class at age ten would it have the same effect on a test given when I was 15 as if I had missed a week of math class just before the test? Your position seems to be that missing math class at any point in your schooling is a permanent unrecoverable setback
No, my position is that a recoverable setback will nonetheless remain unrecovered if there is no restorative force driving the recovery.
A student who is bad at arithmetic will tend to struggle to learn trigonometry. A good teacher can realize this and allocate time to arithmetic practice instead. But this time has to come somewhere. As long as the number of teaching hours remains the same, they have to sacrifice something else. So if the students are all caught up in arithmetic, they will be behind in trigonometry by the same amount.
To fully catch up without sacrifices, students who studied less would need to study correspondingly more to compensate, but there was no concerted effort to make that happen, although the opportunity certainly existed.
This is the first time ever I am hearing of Fujitsu being involved in any bribing/lobbying controversy in the US (whether as a victim or an offender), and I doubt I am the only user in this thread in this position.
Unless it is a very well-known controversy, I feel like there is a need for extra context here. I am not even asking for anything of the "proof beyond any reasonable doubt" nature, I simply want to understand what you are trying to reference.
I think that both you and the grandparent comment are correct at the same time. It feels like there is a strong dichotomy between how H1B visa is treated across different realms of tech.
I have been working in big tech for a decade, and have a few friends working in the more technical financial firms (think more TwoSigma/HRT/Citadel, not JPM/GS), and my experience matches yours. Every H1B I knew at the companies I worked at was absolutely not hired as a cost-cutting measure. It was just simply difficult to find people who could qualify. And god knows we tried, I remember my team interviewing roughly 50 people just to fill a position of just a baseline decent dev (not a rockstar math olympics winner with multiple groundbreaking publications; though that would've been nice). And absolutely none of them were underpaid either, they were on the exact same comp range for the level, with plenty of them topping out the range. In fact, they actually ended up costing more to the employer than a local would, due to having to deal with immigration lawyers/filing fees/etc. (all while being paid the same as everyone else).
Meanwhile, I have a lot of acquaintances from undergrad working as devs at tech consultancy firms and more "general/traditional finance" companies. The stories I hear from them about H1B at their workplaces are pretty much exactly what the grandparent comment describes, and even worse.
> In fact, they actually ended up costing more to the employer than a local would, due to having to deal with immigration lawyers/filing fees/etc. (all while being paid the same as everyone else).
I mean, you were actually underpaying the local workers if this was the case? If you offered the fully loaded salary to the local workers they might have accepted.
Or the local going rate for qualified personel were higher than you were willing to pay (which per def is true, if you had to bring in foreign work?).
> Or the local going rate for qualified personel were higher than you were willing to pay (which per def is true, if you had to bring in foreign work?).
Yeah, by definition this is pretty much always true, no? No matter how scarce local workers are, if you were willing to offer double the market rate you could probably find someone. Scarcity and price are two sides of the same coin, that's how markets work. Bringing in labor from another country when local talent is scarce both reduces costs/wages and reduces scarcity.
Workers on an H1B are more abusable though - if they lose the job they have something like 30 days to find another one or they have to leave the country entirely.
So you talk a good game about work life balance and then after you hire an H1B worker and bring them to the country you can spring 60 hour weeks doing tedius things and many won't be in a position to say no.
The salary might also seem higher to somebody who doesn't understand the cost of living in the US (and how many things are not paid for via taxes like healthcare).
Yep, and that is also an explicit requirement for interviewers at every company I worked at.
I had to do interview training myself at one of them, and the guidelines were fairly specific and clear about this. We neither knew about the immigration status of the candidate nor were we allowed to ask/note/talk about it at all. Same as with age/marital status/etc.
> Or the local going rate for qualified personel were higher than you were willing to pay
Whenever someone says "But then the locals making $400k would make $500k" I have to ask: where are all these qualified locals for whom $400k isn't enough money already? Shouldn't all the laid-off people be champing at the bit for these jobs?
At some price point you genuinely do run out of local talent. At that point it's just a question of whether the work goes abroad or foreign workers come in.
> Or the local going rate for qualified personel were higher than you were willing to pay (which per def is true, if you had to bring in foreign work?).
Nope, immigration fees/lawyer expenses are simply just a negligible cost in the grand scheme of things.
When you hire someone earning $350k+ in annual TC, an extra $10-20k one-time cost of immigration-related expenses is a nothingburger for big tech companies.
Along the same line of reasoning: relocation expenses for candidates within the US. Big tech companies don't stress over a one-time $10k relocation package cost (for a candidate that passed the interviews and accepted the offer, but just happened to be from another state).
Unless he has an actual plan for effective global enforcement of his proposed policy, this is all just posturing at best, and a transfer of power to adversarial foreign states (that have no such moral qualms and worries around superintelligent AI) at worst.
> Immigration agencies are absolutely monitoring social media when people cross borders, apply for visas, etc. There's nothing hypothetical or future about this at all.
The hypothetical part was not about them being able to do it, but about them caring to do anything with that information.
My mother is pretty much locked-in on fb/whatsapp/instagram. She travels internationally rather frequently, including to more "questionable" countries (where she just happens to have relatives that she wants to visit). She has never faced any issues related to her usage of meta products (or social media in general).
It boggles my mind how there are actual adults on HN, who straight up fail to comprehend that telling a normal person (e.g., my mom, who is imo in the majority of the kind of people using social media) something like "you shouldn't be doing it, because muh gubernment surveillance and unencrypted comms and you are being watched by the feds" is gonna just make you sound crazy.
And why wouldn't it? She has never faced any issues, and she has been actively using whatsapp+ig all the time, for over a decade. And the same holds true for everyone she knows as well. Not once did she face any issues ever, despite traveling multiple times a year every year, including to some countries that are on pretty adversarial terms with the US (we are talking "sanctioned" type of adversarial).
The thing is, she faces none of the hypothetical issues that could come from her usage of those services. Neither do any of the people she ever talked to, and that's the overwhelming majority of the users of those services. You are more than welcome to claim that she might not be educated or aware enough to understand the issues at hand (and it is at least partially true). I am just baffled and disappointed by how there is such a large contingent of HN users who straight up cannot even comprehend the mindset and experiences of an average adult user.
> "you shouldn't be doing it, because muh gubernment surveillance and unencrypted comms and you are being watched by the feds" is gonna just make you sound crazy.
Well yeah if that is how you choose to have that conversation then sure.
> more than welcome to claim that she might not be educated or aware enough to understand the issues at hand
I made no such claim.
You seem pretty committed to your strawmen so good day to you sir.
> the reason why the 4 is tolerated but the 8 got axed is that 4 is a honeypot and 8 wasn't
That's certainly a take.
My personal take is that 4chan actually complies with the US laws, specifically the ones around promptly removing+reporting any illegal content that the US cares about (e.g., terrorism threats/CSAM/etc.), and 8chan doesn't.
Out of curiosity, what makes you consider 4chan to be a honeypot, as opposed to it just being a platform that simply complies with the relevant laws?
I will admit, I've spent barely a few minutes on 8 in my lifetime, so I am not equipped to judge the nuance of their situation much. With 4 though, it's been an on-and-off thing for me over the past ~15 years.
we've seen several websites that do not break US law get evicted by registrars, ISPs, DDoS protection services, and other Internet landlords. 4chan miraculously survived multiple mass hysteria periods of the past decade without (iirc) any major disruptions. same as Russian 2ch -- miraculously untouched by Russia's rapid North Koreaization even though its /pol/ is overwhelmingly anti-regime.
In fairness, this at most tells you the UK court system isn't party to any honeypotting.
Despite the memes, the UK is not the 51st state, which is both why it was able to make the fine (1st Amendment doesn't have jurisdiction over the UK) and why it's not able to enforce it (the UK doesn't have jurisdiction over 4chan).
Neither has the power to be enforced outside its own territory.
The entirety of the US constitution carries zero weight to the court system of the nation that the founders of those United States, ahem, engaged in unlawful violent treason against, with the assistance of foreign powers (France, then Spain and the Dutch Republic). :P
Regarding the honeypot allegations, I'm guessing they're referring to the connections between 4chan's founder, Christopher Poole, aka "moot", and Jeffrey Epstein:
/pol was made in October 2023 after a meeting between moot and Epstein. 4chan may not have been a honeypot but it’s likely that /pol was influenced heavily by Epstein/Maxwell which indicates a plausible link between/pol and Mossad aligned Intel activities at least.
Sure. Epstein/Mossad/CIA was not likely involved in the creation of the Chan. But the creation of /pol apparently in response to moot meeting Epstein (and follow-up meetings) as well as Maxwell’s alleged “janitor” status on the board are both deeply suspicious at least.
BTW someone should probably check in on moot once in a while to see if he’s ok lol. Strange bedfellows and all that.
I see you are not familiar with the far left lol. What passes for left in the USA is the tip of the left iceberg. The leftmost edge of the identity politics in USA is a funny cartoon version. OTOH, the Fox News right is adjacent to far right, but also misses it substantively, just not by as far.
There is much farther left than left-libs. The U.S. doesn't get anywhere near as left as it goes. MSNBC is center-left, at most. This is a very right wing country.
I do not agree. I think that Fox news is much farther right than MSNBC is left. Again, MSNBC is generally a cente left publication, in comparison to the entirety of the political spectrum. There might be outright Nazi Groypers farther to the left than Fox, bit they aren't far off nor do they disagree on much. Whereas a center left rag like MSNBC is outwardly hostile to actual socialist or communist ideologies, of which are essentially nonexistent inside the US, hence it being a right wing nation.
It's was mostly a slightly more edgy 4chan with actually some more varied boards and wider range of political views (/leftypol/) was a thing If I remember. So mostly dumb teens and later the whole Q-Anon mentally ill boomers who took over once the board was brought by one of them much to displeasure of the edge teens. In short if that is a threat to a government and a society it's a weak government and society, comparing it to Al-Qaeda or some kind of comparable threat to anything government or nation is crazy.
I heard from friends that physical Suica cards tend to be difficult to obtain these days at times, but digital one isn't at all.
Took me roughly a minute to create one within Apple Wallet ahead of my trip, and that was it. Didn't need to install any apps or register on any websites, because creating a Suica card is natively supported in the wallet app.
Idk how the situation is like with Suica card on Android though, outside of the fact that unless the phone was purchased in Japan, it will typically lack the necessary hardware for it (which isn't a concern with iPhones, because all regional versions include it).
Well you can get it only in some kind of machines, and you need to pay it cash. Also you need to use cash to charge it, and you can charge it minimum by 1000 or 500 yen at a time depending on the station, not less.
The digital version only works on iPhones, since Android phones sold outside Japan doesn't have the Felica chip, or if they have it (e.g. Google Pixel) is disabled in EU/US firmware because the manufacturer doesn't want to pay a fee for every phone to Sony for something 99.999% of people that will never travel to Japan would use.
> Well you can get it only in some kind of machines, and you need to pay it cash. Also you need to use cash to charge it
Totally forgot about that aspect, you are 100% correct.
I remember traveling with my friend who had a physical card, and more than once we had to reroute to a nearby kiosk and wait in line, so he could recharge the balance on the card. Apple Wallet felt more convenient, because recharging it was as simple as picking the amount to recharge and hitting "submit."
Many Android phones have the hardware, regardless of where they are sold, but it's disabled for non-Japanese SKUs so the manufacturer can avoid paying the licensing fees for it.
Thanks for bringing this up, I actually had no idea it was simply disabled, and assumed it was simply not included at all (for whichever miniscule savings it would bring).
Your explanation makes more sense, because it is definitely cheaper/easier to just disable (but include) that hardware to avoid licensing fees (as opposed to having an additional factory manufacturing line just to produce the SKUs that physically exclude that hardware).
Birds existed since forever ago in nature, and they fly by flapping their wings. Then planes got invented, and they fly using a very different mechanism (that doesn't involve flapping wings).
The point made by the grandparent comment: saying "LLMs don't actually reason, because the underlying mechanism they use is different from how humans reason" feels about the same as "planes don't actually fly, because the underlying mechanism they use is different from how birds fly".
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