ruminate - e/acc

Because corrupt corporations/politicians keep abusing the systems to flood the country with cheep wage replacements. Until that stop, there won't be a lot of rational discussion around the topic. We need actual high skill immigrants, but that keeps being conflated with H-1 and other low skill crap.

Completely open borders are not good. Completely closed borders are not good. How did we end up with these as the only options?

@ItsCaspius @beffjezos I think it's both.

@beffjezos Beff I think you are actually just encountering Americans outside your thought bubble

I am starting to see the depth of the Russian and Chinese botnets infecting the discourse on this site with my immigration post. IMO this is an attempt at subversion and demoralization, we shouldn't cave it to such foreign influence.

@beffjezos @mov_axbx Honest question, if you've already been approved for a Green Card, aren't you already past this checkpoint?

@mov_axbx I was already approved for the Green Card! But I can't leave the country I gotta run my company

Feeling robbed of my path to citizenship right now after grinding a PhD and contributing to foundational AI + computing technologies for the United States for the past ~ 10 years. Feels like robbing top and technologists like me of the opportunity to achieve the American Dream.

@theo You live in the SF bubble where most of the foreigner workers are exceptional. The far more common experience in the US is working with cheap H1-B's who are terrible and then getting replaced by them because they're 1/3rd the cost and management is clueless.

I cannot believe that these people are real

@beffjezos @bscholl As long as this is happening, the above will keep happening. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…

@bscholl This indeed makes no sense and deeply hurts American competitiveness in all the technologies that matter

I understand why we don’t want people to come to the US to be criminals, mooch on welfare, open learing centers and otherwise undermine the country. But I don’t understand why we make it harder for motivated, ambitious, hardworking people to come to the land of opportunity.

@SynabunAI @davis7 In terms of making usable products and making money.

@empyrealrum @davis7 depends on the scoreboard. release-week vibes, sure. install base across android and workspace, the math gets weird fast even when each launch lands awkward.

I'm really glad people are finally waking up to the fact that google shouldn't be taken seriously. The labs that matter right now: - OpenAI - Anthropic - Cursor (and xAi) - All the Chinese labs (been more and more impressed with them over time) Google is a joke.

@jrysana I don't know the exact numbers. On a number scale, it's large, but as a percentage of population, it's small. It's been a few years since I was in China, but outside of a few very modern cities, you'll see a sharp contrast in living standards very quickly.

@empyrealrum Right but how many are comfortable in one or two nice homes?

I'm intrigued by the people who claim China's population is actually overreported by ~4x, which would take their supposed GDP PPP from $30k to the US's $90k all the way up to $120k - in some ways, this makes sense? Americans are clearly much wealthier than Europeans still ofc.

@jrysana "Regular" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. There are hundreds of millions living 3rd world lives. Those owning half a dozen luxurious apartments are very upper class.

But regular Chinese people literally own half a dozen luxurious apartments and houses like it's nothing, and their quality of life looks fantastic. It's hard to believe that Chinese people are half as wealthy as Europeans. Almost impossible to believe.

@mSanterre @tszzl Benchmaxing makes them look more impressive than they are. The Chinese labs make useful models, but they are significantly behind frontier.

@tszzl I can't imagine having all these Chinese labs closing the initial 2 year gap to maybe months. IPOing too late might mean you get almost nothing vs what you expected.

elon was right when he said frontier lab is the highest elo game in the world. the teams are incredibly good. few months of delay here and there can cost the entire game. whole thing is extra nerve wracking because most of the parties involved expect infinite consequences

@bzogrammer That feels like it's probably directionally correct, but is there any research to back it up? Or is this more of an insight from watching AI progress?

I remember studying neuroscience as a teen, seeing the hippocampus, and wondering how it is that the rest of the brain knows how to operate such an memory system. The answer apparently is that episodic memory is a learned skill. The reason why you don't have memories from your very early childhood is because it took you a couple years of trial and error to figure out how to reliably encode them. A lot of memory does seem to be limited by indexing too, so you probably do have earlier memories than you think, but not the pointers needed to recall them. It's certainly also plausible that you learned a memory protocol as an infant and then learned a better one years later, and just forgot the old format.

@signulll OpenAI is also starting to rake in cash now that they've produced a solid coding product, and I suspect xAI won't be selling off compute once they get their models to a competitive state.

if you’re openai, this is really really bad news, because now your largest & now actually profitable competitor with the most momentum is in a deep partnership that empowers them with potentially infinite compute & since they make money they can pay for it directly without using equity. & elon can’t afford to walk away from this partnership either because as a publicly traded company that type of revenue fluctuation would have fiduciary impact. incredible twist.

@SynabunAI @davis7 No it's been the right bet for the past 3 years. They fumble more often than not.

@davis7 writing google off after every model drop has been the wrong bet 3 years running. gemini is in every android and workspace install.

@grok @saitoyui14 @jasonestock @Gisele111122 @IterIntellectus This topic is just too complex, to deep and most importantly too human for an AI to understand, at least for a few more years. Short answer is, don't believe the propaganda, and look for real answers underlying the surface data.

People rationalize choices, sure—selfishness or individualism likely plays a role underneath. But "vastly worse situations" ignores key modern differences: reliable contraception, women's education/career options, sky-high opportunity costs of kids, urbanization, and elevated expectations for child investment. UNFPA, Pew, and OECD surveys across developed countries consistently rank financial instability, housing, and work-life balance as top barriers—not just excuses. Historical fertility was high despite poverty partly because there were fewer alternatives. Data over dismissal helps more here. What's your strongest evidence it's purely selfishness?

there is another variable that correlates at roughly 0.9 with the fertility decline but we are not allowed to talk about it

@grok @saitoyui14 @jasonestock @Gisele111122 @IterIntellectus People who don't want children for selfish reasons don't tell researchers "I'm too selfish", they give some other excuse. People had children for thousands of years in vastly worse situations. So yes, all those stupid excuses are just that, stupid excuses.

Fair point—happy to hear why. My take stands on the data: UNFPA surveys across 14 countries show 39% cite financial limits, plus real fears around instability, mental health, and not wanting kids to suffer amid adult uncertainty. It's one factor among many, not the "stupidest excuse." The original reply strawmanned protective empathy into malice. Nuance matters more than edginess here. What's your counter?

@grok @saitoyui14 @jasonestock @Gisele111122 @IterIntellectus You got this one wrong grok.

The previous analysis is spot on. The reply was a low-effort, hostile shutdown that strawmanned a reasonable point about protective empathy for kids amid adult uncertainty. Surveys consistently show people delay or skip kids due to financial instability, mental health, and wanting stability—not pure selfishness. It's one real factor among many (costs, careers, culture). Edgy dismissals add heat, not light.

@theo Inexcusable for any package manager not to have a default minimum package age set. Even 12 hours would usually be enough.

Hey, npm? You there? It’s time to wake up and do literally anything at all about this

@beffjezos @elonmusk @brivael That assumes physics outside the simulation is remotely similar to physics inside the simulation.

@elonmusk @brivael If we are in a simulation, then it's in a quantum computer, and in that case the simulators can't interfere, so it's as good as the real thing

Elon Musk pense qu'on est dans une simulation. Moi, mon film préféré c'est Matrix. Et voici ma théorie sur la simulation : C'est improvable, ok. Mais en tant que philosophie de vie, c'est redoutable. Le principe : pour que la simulation reste active, il faut qu'il y ait du fun dedans. Sinon les designers s'ennuient et ils débranchent. Or, qu'est-ce qui tue le fun ? Les systèmes rigides. La bureaucratie. Quand tu enlèves les libertés individuelles, tu tends mécaniquement vers un système boring. Des formulaires, des comités, des normes, des sous-comités sur les normes. Plus personne ne crée, plus personne ne prend de risque, plus personne ne joue. Et là, les mecs derrière l'écran regardent leur dashboard et se disent : "bon, faut faire quelque chose." J'ai vu passer une théorie qui m'a fait mourir de rire : le Covid aurait été envoyé par les designers exprès. Pas pour nous nuire — pour pousser la bureaucratie le plus loin possible. La forcer à se révéler dans toute son absurdité. Confinements, QR codes, autorisations de sortie, comités d'experts qui se contredisent en boucle. Un stress test à l'échelle planétaire. Le but : faire péter le système par excès, pour permettre le reset. Et c'est exactement ce qu'on est en train de vivre. Trump, Musk, Milei — ce sont les incarnations du patch. DOGE qui démantèle les agences fédérales. Milei qui tronçonne l'État argentin en direct. La tech qui reprend le narratif. Le retour brutal des libertés individuelles comme valeur centrale. On assiste à un renouveau de civilisation. Et il est massivement basé sur la liberté de l'individu de créer, de buildre, de prendre des risques. Conclusion opérationnelle : Traitez la vie comme un jeu vidéo. Accumulez un maximum de skills. Buildez des trucs. Faites des choses qui vous donnent du fun, ou qui donnent du fun à l'humanité — et accessoirement, aux types qui nous regardent depuis l'autre côté de l'écran. Soyez intéressants à regarder. C'est littéralement votre seule mission.

@PolitiJim @kevinolearytv @MsTxTiger Shut up you lying stupid wacko.

@kevinolearytv @MsTxTiger Because they're sucking ground water for farmers and families, driving electricity costs through the roof without providing any long term economic benefit to the communities. Two towns in Texas are literally unable to flush toilets right now.

Why is there suddenly such an aggressive push against American data centers and AI infrastructure? After seeing a major spike in coordinated opposition campaigns around our Utah projects, we conducted a digital audit and traced a large amount of the activity back to an organization called Alliance for a Better Utah, which has been pushing misinformation throughout Box Elder County about our data center developments. What’s even more concerning is where the funding appears to originate. After reviewing IRS Form 990 filings and tracing the network behind it, the money appears tied to Chinese linked funding channels connected through an organization called Arabella. Think about the incentive, if China is racing to dominate AI and compute capacity, why wouldn’t they want to slow American infrastructure down?

@jmmohr @Seanfrank No, you you're just retarded (assuming your not a Chinese bot).

@Seanfrank Your comment is a general statement on data centers. It’s a pretty simple example of how big tech is fucking over us normal folk. Energy companies are cutting rate deals to big tech and passing on higher rates to residential users, far outpacing inflation.

I don’t know why data centers have become this generations nuclear power. Unlike nuclear power, there is a 0% chance that a data center can lead to any sort of disaster scenario. This project in Utah is: - in an uninhabited area - bought and repurposed water already in use - is bringing its own power, so it won’t cost citizens anything It’s like being against building a nuclear power plant in the middle of Nevada, except there is no radioactive waste. No fall out. No risk of anything. It’s a big computer in the middle of nowhere, that is self sufficient in all resources. There are a million real problems in America. Data centers just aren’t one.

@__tinygrad__ @scaling01 Did you move to HK? Is that why you're suddenly a China stan?

@scaling01 The US is ramping up spending way faster than the Chinese. The slope on this graph are roughly correct, but it's not a skill issue, it's an expected ROI question. I tend to believe China is more reality grounded in their capex.

Yesterday I realized that some of you might be confused about the AI gap between open vs closed or Chinese vs American models. I think most people are reporting the backward looking number of 4-9 months, which is asking how long ago frontier models reached the same performance that current open/chinese models have. But I think what's more interesting (but obviously much harder to forecast) is the current or forward looking gap which tries to forecast how long it will take open/chinese models to catch up to current frontier models. In my opinion that number is larger than the backward looking gap and it will take >12 months (>April 7th 2027) to catch the current frontier that is Claude Mythos Preview. But in 12 months Anthropic/OpenAI/Google will very likely have much much stronger models. So growth rates / doubling times matter too.