tomohelix

In term of nanotech, biology is decades or centuries more advanced than what we are doing. They are literally grabbing electron and move them around with the precision of nanometers while here we would be happy if we could manipulate a bacteria.

I think with more powerful computers, biomimicry can go pretty far. When we can simulate nanometer interactions on timescale of microseconds over minutes, lots of things can be unlocked.

Your example is a consultancy. Not really a good example. Most likely they are already skirting the law in the first place.

Gross margin is a bad metrics. It doesn't cover overhead costs or R&D. Take for example J&J whose net profit margin is 13% while Apple is 24%. Or abbvie is also 13% vs Msft 34%.

Also why did you not put in the net income for those big 3 tech companies in the bottom?

I argue a bachelor degree isn't high skilled. It is merely "skilled" nowadays, especially in the occupations we are discussing. Here is H1B requirements from USCIS:

For you to qualify to perform services in a specialty occupation you must meet one of the following criteria:

Hold a U.S. bachelor’s or higher degree required by the specialty occupation from an accredited college or university Hold a foreign degree that is the equivalent to a U.S. bachelor’s or higher degree required by the specialty occupation from an accredited college or university

But I understand if you call a janitor a "skilled" job then a bachelor degree is indeed "high skilled" from your point of view. Regardless, I do not think anywhere is hiring H1B to do janitor work. An engineer or a scientist with just a bachelor degree is never "high skilled" in my field of work.

>Maybe they should be paid better.

The reasons a semiconductor engineer or a biotech scientist don't get paid higher has nothing to do with how big the company they are in. The nature of software means it is inherently more profitable (low manufacturing cost, less legal regulations, more location flexibility, etc). Those result in the workers get paid more of the profit share. A biotech company with 200M funding and 5 years is barely enough to test 1 pharma product just to have the FDA deny it in the 6th year. You can get 5 guys in a garage to churn out a multimillion dollar software product in 6 months. It is not comparable.

My whole argument is this: Granting visa based on salary is a bad take and unfairly prioritize one type of industry over everything else.

I have read about title inflation but I do not know about title deflation. I afraid you need to provide proof for your claim before I take it seriously. I do hear entry positions requiring a few years of experience, but often that is just a way to promote an internal hire, like a contractor or an intern.

How do you define economic value? By money only is a bad metric. Take pharma for example. The top 5 biggest pharma companies combined can't equal the same market cap or liquidity of 1 Apple (1.9T vs 2.5T). Now think about the societal impact. If you have to live in a place without drugs (those 5 pharma produce almost all the lifesaving drugs in the US) and a place without Apple products, where would you go?

I can go into the reasons why Apple is 2.5T and the pharmas is fraction of that, but that would be too long. It is simply the economy of scale, cost of manufacturing, and legal regulations. The cost of doing business results in lower salary for the end workers but it doesn't mean the industry is "lower value".

Because it is not high skilled? That is EB visa? The fact that it is paid at least the average wage for the occupation means you need more proof to claim there is wage repression?

Please read what I wrote. They are required by law to pay above average salary for the occupation they are hiring. Not all industry has the profitability of big tech. Unless you are arguing a software dev job is somehow more skilled than a semiconductor engineer or a biopharma scientist, you have no argument here.

And which visa they are going to be hired for? EB visa? Which take 2-3 years to vet? Which company will wait a year to fill a position instead of just scaling down? If you take down the H1B, there will be shortages and reduced productivity. If you need proof, just check how many of your coworkers are on H1B.

This is so self-centered it is borderline ignorance. First, people on H1B already have to prove they are being paid above the average market. They can't hire a senior engineer for 50k a year for example.

Second, not all industry has high profit margins like software. Places like biotech or semiconductor can't afford 250K for a single worker, no matter how senior they are except in special circumstances. And these fields are just as critical and important as coding. In fact, one may argue that healthcare and chipmaking capacity are more critical to the country than someone writing the next iteration of Microsoft Word.

Third, if H1B is given based purely on salary, then company won't bother with H1B anymore. Imagine what happen if suddenly half the company on market no longer care about having a H1B program. Some politician will start trying to abolish it all together. Xenophobia and "they took our high paying jobs" and "those snobs foreigners get paid how much while American get paid how much?" are easy to sell.

Just a terrible hot take. Try to think broader than just your situation.

Not if the cap is tied to total employee. A shell company with 100 registered employees can't sponsor more than 10 people for example.

They can't get around this as there are tax records of who being paid by whom. This would force company to hire American, reduce fraud, and still being favorable to the big boys paying the lobbying fees. Win win for all who matters (not specifically the regular folks, if they do, it is accidental...)

I don't get it. A is B doesn't always mean B is A.

Am I old or is technology moving too fast these days? Or maybe before I have no idea what is possible and what isn't so I accept incredible stuff as normal but now the "impossible" becomes trivial and my world view is challenged?

Anyway, incredible stuff. I remember the days where a 3D model took a week to make in low res. Maybe the singularity isn't that far away...

An interesting example of "ancient" technology being superior to modern alternatives. In essence, it is the block of code that was commented "do not delete, I don't know what it does but everything breaks if deleted", except this is physical.

Now all the fictions about old civilizations having the better tech than their descendants make sense. But then the trope "reverse engineering" is ruined...

Maybe that is what they want? People coming to Cali to burn their passion and youth, fueling the economy. Then they get a bit of savings if they rent and live like crap for a few years and jump companies to somewhere more affordable.

Because honestly, unless you hit it big somehow or already have a house in SF before, I don't see how an average salaried worker can afford a family home there. Settle down and making a new family is just near impossible.

>To a professional, those applications are toys, easily made and take little effort.

I acknowledged that much. Nothing the AI produce will be a masterpiece, but it is serviceable. The alternative is hiring a contractor or getting an intern and spend more money trying to get a slightly better result, in rare cases, might be worse. Not many places are willing to pay that extra cost.

> They don’t know how to code and thus cannot know if that code is correct.

A bit elitist there. These are still highly educated scientists. They might not know how to code, but to say they can't evaluate the output of the code is a bit much. You might not know how to edit the genes in a fish but you can tell if the fish is glowing or not, right?

That is because you are comparing it to the cost of a professional.

I personally look at it in a different way. Now, a rando on the street knowing nothing about everything can pop out arts rivaling an experienced illustrator. A completely clueless wet lab scientist can coerce copilot or GPT4 to cobble together an automated data analysis pipeline in a language that they know nothing about.

To a professional, those applications are toys, easily made and take little effort. But to someone who does not know anything about the work, it is amazingly useful and open up many possibilities. That is the power and the use cases for AI right now. They are tools to augment productivity, not replacing it. And in that regard, it is very successful imo.

Whether it will progress to the point where it can outright handle everything from start to finish or not is another question.

Well, this was already pointed out a long time ago during the peak hype of AI earlier this year. Something about we overhype the effect of the technology in the short term and underestimate the impact long term.

One thing that is undeniable is that AIs have actual productive use cases. Some of the previous fads did not actually have any major real applications even years after its introduction. Meanwhile, AI technology, specifically the transformer tech, has already revolutionized biotech, art, and NLP fields. Even if all progress on AI hit a stop today, people will still use alphafold, diffusion, and chatgpt for their intended purposes. So I am sure we can agree that AI isn't going down the road of things like NFT or bitcoins.

Next few years would be the optimization and mass adoption steps. Big tech companies are probably plucking all the low hanging fruit already. The hard parts are probably what make it more useful, i.e. cheaper and in a format that can be used easily. Those take time, but 15 years ago, I would be dreaming if I think I can play Crysis on a handheld device. Now I can for a measly $400. So in the next 10 years, it isn't impossible to have something on the level of chatgpt running in real time on something like a phone or smartglass.

And that is discounting the possibility of any major breakthrough or genius application like the GUI to computer interface or the iphone to personal computer. Something like that can pop up and change the world as we know it.

Where do you live that a rank and file would make something like 350K a year? Because that is the minimum required to have 20K a month *after* taxes.

I abandoned the thought of "writing to representative" a while back. I can write them a hundred letters that got read by some interns and compiled into a table that at best get a glance. Or a lobbyist can pay $10000 and get a full 2h saying their piece to them over dinner.

Like I said, those who cares already tried. And it has been proven that it isn't enough. The politicians know very well how the environment is and what will come out of it. They aren't stupid. But let be honest here, if your ultimate goal is to be reelected, would you raise tax and implement disruptive measures that does not bring immediate benefits? Your policies would get scrapped within one term by your successor.

Looking at the data we know that drastic changes are coming and they are inevitable. There is no realistic way to avoid it. You can tax all the companies to bankruptcy tomorrow and it would change nothing. That is a fact. So what is it that you propose to be the solution today? Personally, I think it is cruel to make people spend the last of their few years suffering for nothing instead of letting them enjoy it. Either way, we will all suffer in a couple decades anyway. What is the point...

Honestly, there is nothing I can do about this. Everyone who cares already know and most try to do what they can. But it is obvious from the last decades or so that it isn't enough.

The only way to do anything is to sacrifice something. And since this is such a big issue, the sacrifice also needs to be proportionally big. Personally? I cannot make that sacrifice. I had lived the "low carbon emission" lifestyle before and I do not want to go back to that. I have dedicated the better part of my life so that I do not have to be in that situation again. There are people with more impact to the environment than I am and if they don't lift a finger, why should I? Even if I do, what impact would I have compared to the guy going on a private jet twice a day?

I am tired and jaded. It will be bad and I know it. I am preparing and maybe you should too. But beyond getting ready for the worst, I doubt there is much else to do.

It tracks with the way LLMs work. From what I understand, during training, the LLMs build a correlation between words, a process after which their weight network may be configured in a way that superficially resemble actual reality. Then for whatever input this LLM takes in, it uses its "reasoning" based on this configuration to spit out a response. A bigger LLM has more parameters to model the world and may have a better performance. But I guess even 1 trillion parameters is still not enough to model the actual reality with enough depth.

So if their internal understanding of the world is inherently flawed, you can't expect them to be able to spot their own faults. To be fair, this is the same for human. I am sure we all have that experience trying to tell someone where they are wrong and had a hard time. But with a human, we can update our internal world model on the fly. An LLM at runtime can't do that. It needs to be retrained.

Airbnb strayed from its original purpose. It was meant to be a side gig for homeowners to get a bit of extra income when they have to be away. Now it became a full on business with all the auxiliary jobs around it. People make a living by become airbnb cleaner, airbnb property manager, airbnb landlord, airbnb supplier, etc.

For once, scaling up made it more expensive. All these people and jobs want to be paid a living wage. And so costs stack up and it became no better than a hotel. In some cases, worse than hotel because at least a hotel is a mature and professional service. People involved in this airbnb "gig" aren't guaranteed to be.

That is a great paper! Yes, from my engineering school I know if we dig deep enough, it would all be thermodynamics. But I was not sure if anyone dig that deep yet. This paper seems to be deeper than what I thought was done. Strange how I didn't see it, seems very relevant especially with all the LLM rage these days.

I agree. I actually think that is a very common thought, at least from what I have seen with my colleagues who are mostly scientists in engineering and biotech. It could be because of our background but the kind of complexity and seemingly genius engineering solutions in some biological systems just boggle the mind and make us question how it happened. We often handwave them with evolution and sure we can come up with some ideas of how it actually evolved but at some point I personally felt some explanations we got became too contrived and overly convenient and nearly unfalsifiable...

To be honest though, I still don't think a creator is absolutely necessary. But I also think there is nothing wrong with the idea that there is one. I just personally don't think this creator, if exist, would belong to any of the major religion out there.

When it comes to cosmic scales, it is literally unimaginable by the puny human mind. I don't know about others but I frankly can't really comprehend what does the mass of an entire mountain condensed into a single pebble mean.

And there are stars full of this stuff. And there are stars spinning so fast its magnetic waves would rip the iron out of my blood and destroy the physics that hold my atoms together just because I am standing a few billions miles away from it.

It is absolutely humbling and make it ridiculous to think that there were men ages ago who thought the universe was created solely for human and somehow we, the sacks of meat so fragile it bursts at every miniscule amount of agitation, were "made" as some special, supreme beings in the universe and all of creations. Hilarious and sad.

Slightly off topic but this is hilarious. We are already crafting "chants" and "spells" for LLM, i.e. prompt engineering, now we are teaching it demonology too? Some priest from the middle ages would have a heart attack.

Now I know how the AI apocalypse would look like. GPT-42 would summon hordes of demons from the pit of Hell to bring about the end of days. Who need all that pesky nuclear codes when you can call upon Satan?

This is very common and is basically one of the "ugly truth" that people get to know once they start doing academic research. If you want to live, you have to get published, and to be published, you have boots to kiss. The grant agencies and the reviewers are not going to be "open-minded" about all topics and there are things you are basically pressured into not saying even if you know that is likely how it actually is.

Journals and conferences would also refuse to host your studies if they find the contents to not align with "settled science", regardless of how or what the studies is actually about. And to an academic, that is potentially the end of their career once they got branded as someone too controversial to be associated with. No funding will come and no student will join. Unless they are big enough to carve out their own niche. But those are rare.

This is no surprise to me since the UV here is actually sunlight related. Lots of co-conditions that affect it too. The paper said they adjusted their numbers for socioeconomic factors but still probably that adjustment won't be perfect.

Anyway, from all I have learned and done, the best health advice that I think applies to most people is moderation is the best. Trying too much and too hard on something will just backfire. Eating only meat and milk will cause cancer sure, but eating only vegetables and beans will also affect your health, namely nutritional deficiency. Etc. and etc.

I will just live normally while adjust things within limits and enjoy life while it is still good.

I was wondering why there are suddenly so much vitriol online lately about "protecting the children". I guess it is just the same old social engineering trick.

Like the war on terror and drug war and all kind of "icky things" previously. Just excuses and a red herring to implement something dubious.

In many industries, e.g. biotech, this is how it works. Every product is vetted so much and has so many regulations to follow and liability to cover, the profit margins are not as big as software companies. I argue that is one of the main reasons we see so many breaches and also why software developers are paid so much compared to, say, a biopharma scientist.

I am referring to this paper from 2006.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1559-1816....

I do not know what '50s hoax you are talking about.

The point of subliminal messages is not about if you can consciously notice it or not. It is about imparting something you do not expect to your subconscious. A single frame of a can of coke in a movie is not generally noticeable but it was proven to have a clear effect.

Your mind filters out more than you realize. But only to reduce the burden on your consciousness. Somewhere deep inside, something is still processing that crap ton of data and it knows more than you and can definitely influence the conscious you.

Have you seen this entire thread? The housing situation in SF in general is what everyone else is talking about. Look to me you are of the few trying to keep it specifically about the experience of just this one individual in the article. Why is that I wonder?

And this is from the article to which I quote:

>I need quite a jump, really, in all honesty, in order to be able to afford the traditional apartment here.

So yes, it is not the typical housing in SF, because it is born out of the dysfunctional "typical" ones and many people have no choice but to take it. I criticize the system that let the situation get to this point and the people who are so apathetic and disconnected they saw no problem with this "atypical" condition even when they acknowledge that it is not typical.