Actually, Trump is not a singular cause. He was not the first. Back under reagan, he killed a great deal of our civilian oriented R&D saying that private business can do it , while moving some to DARPA. Thankfully, DARPA still funded basic science.
Then W did more cuts, but pushed a lot of DARPA spending in UNI over to companies and forced cuts in basic science.
Biden also did major changes and pushed funding to go from merit based to DEI.
Trump is just a continuation of this and not even the worst ( reagan or W were the worst ).

I agree that for those of us who come into the field before Java, C is about as simple as it gets; there's literally not much to know about the language. However, the majority of post-Java programmers have no idea what a pointer is or the first thing about manual memory management. I actually prefer to work in C over Swift, and luckily Swift bridges to C quite nicely. I use C and Zig for much of my server work, and for smartphone and desktop apps under the UI. Why? Because I get fine-grained control over memory and threading, so my apps are smaller, faster, and more memory-efficient than comparable apps, and by a wide margin. That said, I do think that those who know how to program in C WELL are shrinking. It's not that it's hard, it's that newer entrants haven't used it and it does let you blow your leg off if you aren't careful.

They're destined for West Texas, where gas companies will pay you to take the natural gas they have to burn off otherwise. They are installing private natural gas turbines to power these things. Amazon is building a huge one as we speak. What's halted is connections to the grid, the off-grid ones are marching along unabated, and there are a lot of them.

Did it grow legs, plug in an Ethernet cable, proceed to leave the building and push the nearest senior citizen in front of a bus? These things don't do things on their own. It's just a bunch of static floating-point numbers memory-mapped into VRAM. What they do is take an input (ver much NOT on their own) and derive instruction context from that input. That input may say to "keep trying" until "something" happens. If no ground rules are provided, the calling harness will loop-and-loop-and-loop looking for a way to make that "something" happen. So to be clear, nothing happened on its own and it certainly didn't set its own goal. Someone prompted it to do “something," and the path it derived to achieve that "something" happened to go through a combination of known exploit vectors that targeted HF. So much nonsense and fearmongering. Know what the ultimate defenses against a harness and model are? Unplug the machine and yank out the network cable. The level of ignorance on the news about how these things are pure black magic is just off the charts.

I stopped using Rust because the compiler is an unmitigated pain in the ass. I'm not a 5-year-old. I know damn well when something is safe. If I have to tag everything unsafe to access memory in an optimal way, then what is Rust bringing to the table other than frustration? I moved over to Zig, which is much C-like, produces faster, smaller, and arguably just as safe binaries, and also happens to support C-FFI and cross-compilation out of the box. There is literally no advantage Rust has over Zig for C programmers.

I could argue that there's a shortage of houses because nobody will build me one for $5K. I wouldn't be wrong, but the trick to not being wrong is the $5K caveat, and that's the issue with all these labor shortage proclamations. Labor shortage always means there's "nobody willing to do this job for what I want to pay", not a blank "nobody is willing to do this job". I guarantee you, without a shadow of a doubt, if cleaning restrooms paid $750K a year, there would be an endless pool of labor for restroom cleaners.

Neither is Elordi

The good thing is hiring 9,000 H1Bs now could cost $900,000,000 in filing fees, and visas are weighted so that the highest wage H1Bs are given 4x the weight of the lowest wage H1Bs. I've noticed the number of H1B “entry-level openings" meaningfully decrease, which means it was never actually about talent "scarcity" and all about talent "cost". The H1B funnel is also getting a double whammy with AI consuming exactly the offshore-able, entry-level work the H-1B and offshore IT models were built around. The cost advantage that enabled both to work is at the point of economic unviability.

There is zero chance I'd go back to an ICE car. The maintenance, reliability, and fuel costs are not even comparable. The math behind driving an ICE car today only makes sense if you need to tow large loads for significant distances. The caveat is that you need a place to charge them for it to be stress-free. We calculated not long ago that it would take $0.25/gallon gas to make an ICE car break even with what we're spending on EVs.

"Windows is more for power users and MacOS is more for people who want their hand held"

That's the funniest thing I've read all day. Let me be blunt: macOS is an engineer's machine, Windows is for Susan in accounting. I spend 90% of my day in terminal windows on macOS, using make and compilers. I write code running on more machines, including Linux and Windows, on my Mac that you can even begin to imagine. I agree that Linux workstations tend to be used by more technical people. I have an ARM64 Ubuntu workstation myself, but to state that Windows is for "power users" shows that you have never worked in Silicon Valley circles. Virtually nobody in any form of advanced engineering uses Windows. The notable exception are a handful of terrible PCB design tools that are Windows only that everybody hates with a passion. Funny enough, most of them are now using AI agents to drive those tools ... from their Macs.

I remember that from the US automaker CEOs, so what possible harm could there be? We'll just ignore those Chinese EVs and keep buying ICE-powered vehicles, right? Ford stopped selling their F150 EV because nobody wanted them. GM is stopping production of the Bolt because nobody wants them. I mean who wouldn't want a $32K version of a $20K budget subcompact with zero amenities? So let BYD try to sell EVs nobody wants, it'll cost them a fortune, and they'll retreat having learned the lesson that internal combustion engines rule the day here. US automakers absolutely gave it their all by over-pricing and under-delivering on affordable EVs, it's all but certain BYD will fail the same way, right???

What are you talking about? Do you have any idea what the carbon emissions of fossil fuel extraction and refining are? Do you think the sludge that comes out of the ground goes right into a gas tank? I have 2 EVs, and our home is powered from a nuclear plant. I can absolutely guarantee that my pollution footprint is a tiny fraction of yours. I'll make you a deal: we'll both step into our respective garages, close the doors and seal them, put the cars on lifts, and run them at a leisurely 35MPH for 6 hours. I think you'll find your garage environment will be heavenly, while mine will be more earthly.

I know it's a typo, but I like ORC much more than OCR. Can we re-arrange the words Optical Character Recognition as Optical Recognition of Characters with a silent "of"? Wait a sec, hold that thought, with a silent "by" we can do ORCA, Optical Recognition of Characters by AI! No? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?

Your words, not mine.