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turbo_wombat

49 karma · joined August 22, 2025

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turbo_wombat··on Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says
One of the big changes in the post war era was that immigration was massively opened up in 1965. From 1924 to 1965 the US had very restrictive immigration laws, which led to labor shortages, which allowed unions to become strong, rising wages and the expansion of the middle class. Since 1965 we've had declining union participation.

This is simple supply and demand. If you restrict the labor supply, the value of labor increases.

The same thing was observed after the Black Death, which killed off 30 to 50% of Europe's population. There were labor shortages, which increased the bargaining power of labor, and increased wages.

It's really funny US companies suddenly start pretending they don't believe in supply and demand when it comes to labor.

turbo_wombat··on Microsoft BASIC for 6502 Microprocessor – Version 1.1
The original version of Ultima I was written in a mixture of BASIC and assembly. BASIC is pretty slow, but most BASIC implementations let you call into optimized assembly routines.

Though, past a certain point of complexity, performance aside, assembly might be more readable than BASIC because BASIC relied on line numbers for jumping around, whereas assemblers offered named labels.

turbo_wombat··on Speeding up PyTorch inference on Apple devices with AI-generated Metal kernels
They are comparing unoptimized PyTorch inference, something you would never deploy on a device, to a model with custom kernels.

Yes, of course the model with custom kernels is faster, whether it's written by a human or an AI.

Generally, PyTorch inference is meant to be used during the training process, and when running metrics, not when deploying. When deployed, you should export to ONNX, and then compile the ONNX to the native format of the device.

If you aren't familiar with the pipeline for ML deployment, this is the equivalent of comparing interpreted code to compiled code.

turbo_wombat··on U.S. government takes 10% stake in Intel
You are asking why save Intel of all chip manufacturers, and the answer is because there aren't any other major chip manufacturers in the US.

AMD no longer has a fab. TSMC dominates the global market and basically has no competition.

In the event that Taiwan is invaded, the US would suddenly have a huge problem getting access to any kind of high end chips, be they CPUs or GPUs. This would be a major problem economically and militarily for the US.

Some caveats: Due to the chip act, TSMC does now have fabs Arizona, though I'm not sure what their capacity is. TI, and some others building lower end components also have fabs I believe. For x86, high end ARM, and GPU's, virtually all of that is manufactured by TSMC right now, mostly in Taiwan.