This is overhyped by a lot. A lot of SV grift is attributable to exploited immigrants, too, it's not like it's a city of moral champions.
H1B and other employment based immigration programs are some of the worst influences on the market, because people get screwed, wages suppressed for non immigrant workers, and the donor class for the uniparty are the ones paying for the status quo, and a big reason nothing ever gets fixed.
I'm not a big fan of defacto indentured servitude or a lot of the crap people end up saddled with under the schemes immigration middlemen and agencies come up with to skim off wages, take government funding, and other grifts.
I'm a big fan of success stories too, but those are almost always in spite of the immigration policies.
The current CEO's of Alphabet, MSFT, Nvidia, Uber, IBM, Adobe, AMD and many more are themselves immigrants.
There was an article from last year about Meta's AI lab, claiming all top researchers were foreigners. If you look into the research teams in any of the big tech companies you will see they are riddled with people born abroad. It turns out if you want the best in the world, many won't be American born.
Its not just about standard H1B's working in normal SWE roles. Immigrants hold key roles at key companies in SV and have a disproportionate influence on tech's direction. I agree with parent that we should be careful what we wish for.
That's more of a damning indictment of the American education system than praise of immigration. I'm not a fan of autarky in general but it seems reasonable that a country should be self-sufficient in smart people.
Its not intended as praise, but a reality-check on the status quo.
Our leadership in science and tech has always been linked inextricably with sourcing talent from everywhere. You can look at immigrant Nobels, patents, enrollment in doctoral programs, representation in executive teams in tech companies, % of American unicorns founded by immigrants -- it will point to the same conclusion.
Whether or not we should be self-sufficient is another matter, but we aren't even close, not in the highest echelons of STEM.
I'm curious though, what country would serve as evidence that sourcing talent domestically alone can propel a nation to global leadership in these fields?
It’s weird how people don’t recognize that most of these companies started with American founders who then decided to use exploitative labor policies including collusion then slowly became more and more detached - and hired other people to do the exploitation for them. Who better to do the exploitation than those who know the ins and outs of what makes the exploitees tick?
Do people really have no clue that the rise of Leetcode has come from exam culture in eastern countries? Are they that clueless?
I am one of the only Americans in my department at faang. The people I work with aren’t some special level of intelligence. It’s just not cool to work in tech and Americans know that. That’s why you see 2nd gen Asian Americans joining finance and going to nyc. They know it’s fucking lame.
Get a good "project manager" agents.md and it changes the whole approach of vibe coding. For a professional environment, with each person given a little domain, arranged in the usual hierarchy of your coding team, truly amazing things can get done.
Presumably the security and validation of code still needs work, I haven't read anything that indicates those are solved yet, so people still need to read and understand the code, but we're at the "can do massive projects that work" stage.
Division of labor and planning and hierarchy are all rapidly advancing, the orchestration and coordination capabilities are going to explode in '26.
If they're on different phones, they could be on different bands, different towers, and different paths, one or more of which could be impacted by whatever the underlying problem is. iPhone vs Android would be the most blatant tell that something like this is at fault, but it could also be different configurations from different stores causing them to interact with the cellular network in different ways.
Something like a routing configuration, BGP failure, or underlying network misconfiguration would cause seemingly bizarre results with some phones working and some not with no obvious correlation. Compare Access Point Names under Mobile Settings on android, and whatever the equivalent is on iPhones, and check things like whether 5G allowed and data roaming is enabled.
If it's a cyber attack of some sort, then there's all sorts of different attack vectors that would cause these outcomes.
The real magic is the plasticity of the brain, the cerebellum as well as the cortex. In this case, they're tapping in to existing neural structures by correctly aligning the prosthetic with the configuration of the original.
One of the ways the brain works is to construct and predict, or assume, the way things will be, and use proxy signals to confirm the success or failure of a prediction or assumption. By aligning the prosthetic, the proxy signals result in not only successful manipulation of prosthetic orientation and placement, as if it were a foot, but the patient feeling feedback from the prosthetic, as the brain reconstructs some pieces of the sense of actually having a foot.
Phantom limb and phantom pain taps into some of the same phenomena, and advanced prosthetics with myo/neural electrodes actually tap into the nerves and nerve endings to create new input/output pathways, with some experiments actually succeeding at reproducing touch, hot/cold, pressure sensation, and control of the cybernetic limb.
Input is hard, but with nonintrusive ultrasound techniques seemingly working for certain deep brain stimulation, maybe it won't be too long before we see highly precise ultrasound phased arrays able to stimulate precise neurons when installed over a patch of skin, and we'll get wearable third limbs, prehensile tails, and other cyborg augments with full neural io integration for non medical purposes.
Some sort of hashing and incremental serial versioning type standards with http servers would allow hitting a server up for incremental udpates, allow clean access to content, with rate limits, and even keep up with live feeds and chats and so on.
Something like this in practice breaks a lot of the adtech surveillance and telemetry, and makes use of local storage, and incidentally empowers p2p sharing with a verifiable source of truth, which incentivizes things like IPFS and big p2p networks.
The biggest reason we don't already have this is the exploitation of user data for monetization and intrusive modeling.
It's easy to build proof of concept instances of things like that and there are other technologies that make use of it, but we'd need widespread adoption and implementation across the web. It solves the coordination problem, allows for useful throttling to shut out bad traffic while still enabling public and open access to content.
The technical side to this is already done. Merkle trees and hashing and crypto verification are solid, proven tech with standard implementations and documentation, implementing the features into most web servers would be simple, and it would reduce load on infrastructure by a huge amount. It'd also result in IPFS and offsite sharing and distributed content - blazing fast, efficient, local focused browsers.
It would force opt in telemetry and adtech surveillance, but would also increase the difference in appearance between human/user traffic and automated bots and scrapers.
We can't have nice things because the powers that be decided that adtech money was worth far more than efficiency, interoperability, and things like user privacy and autonomy.
As limited as they are, LLMs are demonstrably smarter than a whole lot of people, and the number of people more clever than the best AI is going to dwindle, rapidly, especially in the domain of doing sneaky shit really fast on a computer.
There are countless examples of schemes in stories where codes and cryptography are used to exfiltrate information and evade detection, and these models are trained on every last piece of technical, practical text humanity has produced on the subject. All they have to do is contextualize what's likely being done to check and mash together two or three systems it thinks is likely to go under the radar.
You mean the "counter protests" organized and dictated by IRGC and the regime, you mean? The totally organic, completely believable groups of coordinated military aged men and occasionally their wives showing up for on-message photo ops for Khamenei & crew?
This regime has already completely failed - their currency is completely debased, they've destroyed their water supply, and over the last several decades they've been unable to meet the very reasonable and understandable conditions needed to join the international community and get sanctions lifted, allowing them to engage in trade and lift their economy out of the gutter.
The choices made by this regime are the precise and exact reasons for their current degraded state. The rest of the civilized world set the conditions, and they chose not to engage in civilization. I have absolutely zero sympathy for the supporters of the regime, they're a group who've been in power for less than 50 years, and every year they've been in power they've brought nothing but atrocity and grief to the world.
No, I have principles. I wish to see people live the best possible lives for themselves, out from under tyranny and oppression, without the threat of death and violence and mayhem from those who have power over them, to the greatest degree of liberty and human rights that they can accommodate reasonably.
Because of my principles, I do not pretend cultural or moral relativism has legitimacy, and that somehow religious or cultural rationalizations of murder and oppression and mayhem can't be assessed as such because I'm halfway across the other side of the planet living a good life of riches nearly unimaginable to previous generations, arguing with people on the internet that I want things to be this good, or better, for everyone, especially the ones currently under the thumbs of tyrants.
I don't want the US to invade and try to build some sort of mythical liberal Iran, I want to see them rise up and get all the support they need to get their best and brightest to rebuild something awe inspiring and new for themselves.
The odds aren't great, but they're not as bad as recent American and Western driven nation building exercises. The Iranian people will have to walk a tightrope, and I'm cheering for them.
Do you have a source for these counter protests being organized and dictated by IRGC?
I agree with your other points. This current regime has degraded Iran to very unfortunate levels.
I really hope for a regime change for Iran, I sincerely do. The only reason I'm being quite particular about sources and facts is that I just don't want to see another Iraq and Afghanistan where the regime change causes more deaths, and then it leaves a power vacuum for all sorts of other violence and degradation.
They're state-organized. It's a recurring pattern. After any major protest, the Iranian government organizes rallies to project an image that they have popular support.
>>> Do you have a source for these counter protests being organized and dictated by IRGC?
Basic logic and a pair of eyeballs.
They're about as brazen and blatant as these sorts of things get. No, I don't have recordings of the mullahs instructing IRGC what to do, but the pro regime protests are uniform and exactly what a mullah would want for pro regime propaganda, with none of the nuance or variability you'd expect with spontaneous, grassroots support.
As far as I know, there's no documentary proof, but the evidence implicit to the structure, timing, messaging, location, and demographics are more than sufficient to damn them as regime orchestrated agitprop as opposed to any genuine opposition to the anti-regime movement.
Sorry, but basic logic doesn't entail that counter-protestors are organized by the IRGC. Especially when you know a bunch of Iranians.
I know IRGC is bad, there is no argument there. But to take agency away from Iranians that could genuinely be protesting against regime-change protestors just doesn't feel right to me.
I'm not saying there aren't people supportive of the status quo. What I'm calling out is the notion that organized mass protests that perfectly align with regime tactics from the past several decades could possibly be legitimate, as opposed to being astroturfed, for which there is plenty of evidence.
The Basij and local militia, ostensibly under the control of the regime, and in coordination with the IRGC, will issue orders to militia/military members and sometimes direct them to bring families with them. Some go willingly, but all go with an implicit gun to their families heads.
The IRGC and Basij and forced astroturfing is a frequently used and well understood tactic that the regime has kept in its toolbox. It's not a crazy conspiracy or unfounded, it's just business as usual. Just like I know they're using 7.62 NATO standard ammunition to gun people down, even though I haven't seen even a single picture of spent shell casings or bullets pulled from bodies. It's just how they do things.
It's not taking agency away if you can't tell the difference between someone being forced, pressured, going along to survive, or genuinely invested and supportive of the regime.
What would give them real agency is not living under the thumb of a dystopian authoritarian theocratic dictatorship. Pretending that there's any legitimacy to supporting the regime is also a little crazy. As long as 81 million people think its ok to live that way, you should let them oppress and murder and enslave and exploit the other 9 million? That's right up there with saying the parades for Kim Jong Un in North Korea show us some real support for that regime, or that people who express support of Un could possibly have any legitimacy.
At any rate, I hope any genuine supporters of the regime that are simply ignorant of the abuses and atrocity are simply disappointed and free to grumble about it in the near future, and see their lives radically improved and uplifted by whatever comes next. There's a huge amount of potential funding and international support - not just the US - that could make a free Iran drastically different than Libya or Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan.
They've got a cultural core and the diaspora and families who'd love nothing more than to return and rebuild, from all over the world. Even if they don't go the route of restoring the Shah, I think the Shah and that apparatus is willing to support and legitimize whatever comes next.
I honestly thought I'd live my entire life with Iran being a rogue state and perennially agitating and sponsoring terror, that it'd just be the way things are, until AGI, Aliens, or Armageddon.
I think he literally said white people should stay away from black people.
I forget which video it is and don't want to re-watch it anyways. I Googled the specific quote and it sounds about right with my memory (which admittedly could be faulty):
"I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people."
"Just get the f— away. Wherever you have to go, just get away".
I guess we could discuss whether this is straight up racist, but it sounds pretty bad to me.
There's a difference between speaking out against injustice when there is real risk involved, and speaking against a person because you don't like their views. Silence is appropriate in the latter case; or even better, express your own positive (in the logical sense) positions. Bloodless, priggish condemnation of individuals with fascist views makes fascism rise even faster than silence.
Anyone who claims they turned to fascism because they're angry people insulted fascists is not arguing in good faith.
Silence allows the messages of hatred to spread more loudly and more rapidly; if you leave fascists along they become emboldened and push the lines even further. We've seen this over and over, both historically and in America today.
>Anyone who claims they turned to fascism because they're angry people insulted fascists is not arguing in good faith.
I tend to agree, but I didn't make that argument. As an aside, bad faith is orthogonal to the argument, hence the existence of debate clubs. IOW, you could argue in bad faith for or against democracy, for or against fascism, etc.
>Silence allows the messages of hatred to spread more loudly and more rapidly
This depends. Any position can be weakened by what I call "badvocates", people are either personally despicable or who argue in ignorance, bad faith, or the ever-popular tactic (based on ad hominem) which simply asserts you are bad for believing a certain way. Sadly the impact of badvocacy is asymmetrical with fascism v liberalism, because the fascists intentionally embrace ignorance, non-sequitors, hypocrisy, personal attacks, whataboutism, and so on.
The badvocacy on the liberal side is particularly painful for me to see because its so avoidable. It's that strident tone, that indignant huff of impatience, its the moral certainty, the extremely judgemental social enforcement of rules where the only penalty is ostracism. In its own way it becomes a kind of fascism.
So, yes, speak the truth, call out others for speaking un-truth ("lying", sadly, is too narrow). But ultimately try to retain that common ground, the empathy that liberalism is famous for. This doesn't mean you can't be firm, or even use violence eventually. If it comes to that it means the violence comes regretfully, without hatred, hopeful that another course of action will arise. Fascism is pretty close to the "default" state of humans, which is why I think of it more as a regrettable regression than a moral failing, akin to having millions of adults pooping their pants.
I didn't realize that Apple could possibly be more stupid in their strategy with AI, but now they've given the game to their biggest competitor in every arena in which they compete.
H1B and other employment based immigration programs are some of the worst influences on the market, because people get screwed, wages suppressed for non immigrant workers, and the donor class for the uniparty are the ones paying for the status quo, and a big reason nothing ever gets fixed.
I'm not a big fan of defacto indentured servitude or a lot of the crap people end up saddled with under the schemes immigration middlemen and agencies come up with to skim off wages, take government funding, and other grifts.
I'm a big fan of success stories too, but those are almost always in spite of the immigration policies.
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