general_ai

Kalanick and Musk are basically the only two remaining adults in SV. Musk basically said on twitter, "I'll go and talk to the guy". Everyone else is more concerned with political correctness and virtue signaling. Hundred thousand bombs dropped into five countries on that list -- not a goddamn peep from anybody. 2150 people killed by drones -- same. Iraqi refugees banned for half a year -- no one has even heard of it. Cuban refugees banned permanently -- okie dokie. But god forbid anyone gets stopped on the border, no sir, we can't have that.

Maybe it's not about funding at all?

Nonetheless, people in Flint didn't have drinkable water for years. If the agency is so toothless with a highly politicized case like this, you can only imagine how toothless it is when it comes to the less publicized cases. So don't tell me how awesome the EPA currently is. Maybe it could, in fact, benefit from a swift kick in the ass.

FYI, the EPA is comprised of 15000 employees, and its annual budet is $8.14B. That's $543K per head. A lot of money for sitting on their hands and making excuses that they're "hamstrung".

Just goes to show that "regulations" isn't all that needs to happen. We've known for years there are problems in various areas, some of the most drastic of which have been widely publicized due to Flint. What's also been publicized by Flint is that the US government can't find $60M in their multi trillion dollar budget (EPA budget alone is $8.1 _billion_) to fix the situation, yet there's $210M to send abroad at the last minute as Obama is heading out the door, none of which, I might add has any chance of reaching the people who need it there either.

Regulations are not enough. Someone needs to actually go in and fix the shit that doesn't meet the regulations. For that to happen, someone needs to make it a priority to actually fix things right here in this country, rather than just tell us regulations aren't met, and writing up new ones all the time.

Your comment would hold a lot more weight if EPA or some other massive government agency found it possible to help people in Flint, MI, which did not have drinkable water for years now, and still don't have it.

You're confusing your grade with academic success. Those two things are related, but not the same. If this is something you want to pursue, go after it. Grades matter, but they're not the only thing that matters.

As an immigrant, I _came here_ for capitalism, and you will have a hard time persuading me that Venezuela should be our role model. :-)

They can also be unceremoniously preempted in the middle of your week long training run.

My student years were in Moscow in early 90's amid chaos and hyperinflation. Even there, I would be able to scrape together a few hundred bucks for something that's critical to my academic success. Get a roommate, maybe? Find a better paying part time job? I'm having a hard time imagining someone who can program and who writes papers about machine learning not being able to find a decent paying part time job anywhere in the world.

It always cracks me up when I read H1B suggestions from people who weren't themselves H1Bs. They always focus on the intake, or on "gaming", or wage thresholds, or whatever the hell else their particular side of the aisle told them to worry about.

Yet this problem is in a dire need of a free market based solution. Let me explain.

H1B, for those who don't know, is the indentured servitude visa. While you can theoretically move between jobs, your next job has to match the one you had before nearly exactly, and you have to find it _before_ you leave your current job. Once you leave or lose the job you're currently on H1B for, you have to GTFO of the country in _two weeks_. I.e. if your employer finds out you're looking, and they fire you (which they can), you will have no recourse whatsoever. Same with them firing you if you ask for a raise or promo: GTFO.

You're in this limbo state until you get your green card, a lengthy process which for me took 7 years, and for someone from India or China would take even longer.

Companies abuse this power quite heavily by either not promoting/giving raises to H1Bs (because what are they gonna do, quit?) or hiring vastly more experienced workers into entry level jobs, or a combination of the two.

Here's what should be done to fix this:

1. Make the grace period between jobs at least 6 months. If people are abused, they should be free to leave their job without leaving the country, and find their next job over a reasonable period of time.

2. Make it possible for an H1B to move to another job more freely. Any job in the same industry should be acceptable. To make things fair to employers, require repayment of visa related fees if employee moves within the first year.

This alone would fix most of the problems you see on the ground today, including the problem of underemployment of fresh grads. Because movement of H1Bs will be unrestricted, they'll command "market rate". That Eastern European double PhD you hired for your entry level position will be able to move to a job that pays commensurate with her expertise, freeing up the entry level position for a fresh grad. The system will just be much more healthy overall.

However, this will never happen. All those tech CEOs who currently go on ad nauseam about helping people, all of them, without exception, want cheap fresh meat that's not going anywhere. And for as long as H1B existed, they were getting exactly that.

I didn't snipe. This is life advice. Get a part time job. If you're in North America (Canada or US) and you can't squeeze out $400-600 from your budget over the period of a year, you're making excuses, pure and simple. Cook at home, drop cable subscription, don't go to Starbucks, do part time jobs, and so on and so forth. That's what students did back when I was one.

Cloud GPUs are not economical if you use them 24x7x365 (which for any serious deep learning researcher or engineer is usually the case). The only scenario I can think of in which they'd be more economical than something under your desk is when you need to run a massive and embarrassingly parallel workload. I.e. try training dozens of models at the same time with different hyperparameters, and run that for a few days. You could do it cheaper, but it would take a long time and it would be a massive pain in the ass, so you pay the pretty penny and get it done in a week.

For my needs I have a machine with a 2011-v3 socket, and four GTX1080 GPUs. Warms up my man cave pretty nicely in winter. I also have access to about a hundred GPUs (older Titans, Teslas, newer 1080s and Pascal Titans) at work that I share with others.

Now, regarding Titan. Titan is actually not that much faster than GTX1080, so in terms of raw speed there's no reason to pay twice as much. BUT, it has 4GB more RAM, which lets you run larger models. NVIDIA rightly decided that for a $100+/hr deep learning researcher $600 is not going to be that big of a deal, and priced the card accordingly. If your models fit into 8GB, you'll be better off buying two 1080's instead.

As to me, I'm thinking of replacing at least one of my 1080s with a Titan, to be able to train larger models.

On a purely TFLOP or even TFLOP/watt basis, it doesn't currently make sense to buy anything that doesn't run Pascal.

Spending 10 months instead of 1 or 2 and not getting anywhere is also not free.

Doing anything large on a machine without CUDA is a fool's errand these days. Get a GTX1080 or if you're not budget constrained, get a Pascal-based Titan. I work in this field, and I would not be able to do my job without GPUs -- as simple as that. You get 5-10x speedup right off the bat, sometimes more. A very good return on $600, if you ask me.

Saying that Carter wasn't "exceptional" is quite an understatement. He kinda sucked at his job in general, and at getting the Congress to support his agenda in particular.

I wonder how it compares to a recent ARM-based Arduino in terms of computational power.

People with decent STEM backgrounds can be MUCH more gainfully employed elsewhere. Higher echelons of US government are badly underpaid, which is why they attract the kind of "talent" they do. A Google search shows that it takes $110K to decently get by in DC. $175K for someone who is expected to be at the top of their game is a bad deal when a professional can make two to three times as much in the private sector. So you get a bunch of has-beens who aren't good for anything else. The only exception I can think of is the USDS, where idealistic young people go to serve their country and take a massive pay cut (which is even more massive if you factor in the opportunity cost), but sooner or later life will catch up to them, too, and they'll discover they need to save for retirement and college, pay for private school for their kids, etc, etc. Shit's expensive.

It's not $1M. It's $1M over 4 years. I doubt they'll last that long.

+1. Can't wait for them to start "protesting" against the exact same kinds of drone strikes and bombing raids Obama ordered for years when Trump starts ordering them.

Seek help from _where_?

+1, would be great to have something like that as an integrated toolkit on the Python (more specifically, Python 3) side. I currently use tqdm for progress bar, but it'd be great to also have a spinner and the rest of the goodies.

I didn't say it'd necessarily be less expensive (although it might end up being that once you factor in the costs of crime needed to obtain expensive drugs in the first place). I said it'd be better for the addicts, which to me seems pretty certain. I know if I had something that was slowly killing me and I couldn't afford treatment, I'd want help at some point. And by help, I mean forced rehab, preferably without a felony charge which will make it impossible for me to find decent work afterwards.

It says that their constituents don't really give a shit about the finer points of things. It also doesn't help that the longer the congress critter stays in congress, the more power they seem to amass, Frank Underwood style. So after 15-20 years they bring in a ton of pork barrel cash to their district, and ensure indefinite reelection until they keel over and die. That's might seem like a good deal for that district, but it's, IMO, not a good deal for the country as a whole.

This is similar to how most eligible voters don't give a shit about electing the president. If Obama could run indefinitely, assuming he managed to not screw up really badly, it'd be a piece of cake for him to get re-elected in perpetuity a-la Putin, simply because it's much easier for the incumbent to win (even goddamn Dubya won!), and he'd be able to adjust the laws to his liking with the support of his party in Congress when they have the majority.

Sure would help if they went through rehab to kick the addiction, and not get AIDS then.

As an adult, you have to make tradeoffs. Given that the supply of money is finite (unless you're Bernie Sanders who believes that money grows on trees), you have to decide whether to spend the money on this, or on, perhaps, kindergartens, schools, public transportation, and the like. TBH, I'd rather the junkies got a different kind of help: forced rehab. Got caught with heroin in your blood? Off to rehab you go. That'd be a good way to spend this money. Facilitating their addiction and making their death spiral "dignified" is a weird take on "help" in my opinion.

You just don't hate those two particular geezers enough. One ran the Democratic Party into the ground (and got rewarded for it with another term as the leader of House Democrats), and another makes Emperor Palpatine look like Mother Theresa. One is 76 years old, another is 74. They should long have retired if they had any decency whatsoever. Anything that shows them where the exit door is will receive my enthusiastic support.

Ok, got it, you want Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell running things forever. It's a bold strategy, let's see how it works out for you.

For better or worse, he's not like the previous presidents in nearly every way.

From the same article: Clinton ended up revoking the order (so his order basically did nothing), and Obama gave waivers even to the previous, watered down 2-year version.

This new order has considerably more teeth than anything that came before, though of course it remains to be seen if Trump grants any exemptions, or follows what was promised on the campaign trail to the letter. If he does, and if he manages to get congressional term limits passed as well, DC will be in a much healthier state once the current crop of entrenched geezers vacates the premises.