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.

I don't know the Sam personally, but I have no doubt he's a genius-level marketer, just not a genius-level technologist. The guy sells visions better than Nostradamus did. You don't raise $64B at a $500B valuation on $18B in revenue while losing a multiple of that unless you are a certified guru-level Jedi master storyteller. The guy definitely warps reality with his narratives, and I give him a well-earned Marketing Genius stamp for that. So extremely smart, but not in an Albert Einstein way, more in a P.T. Barnum way.

I agree with you, LLMs are not "intelligent", they mimic intelligence, and that's a fundamental limitation of autoregressive generation. The more interesting approach to me are diffusion models, particularly video diffusion models. I don't have a Nobel prize, but to me, those exhibit patterns that I'd be more willing to associate with AGI, at least from the perspective of understanding causality and the world it's operating in. The problem is diffusion models are very slow and don't play the quantization game nicely like text does, so nobody is pushing to commercialize them for text purposes.

Math-adept version:

Thank you for pointing out the obvious for the math-challenged. It's only free if electricity is free, and electricity is currently not free. Even if you are given the machine and maintenance for free, it still costs at least $7.50/gallon to produce. Using solar? OK, are they giving solar panels for free too? Nothing adds up, this is a party trick looking for a buyer.

Math-challenged version:

You can totally hook this up in a loop to perpetually fill a gasoline generator and generate endless free excess gasoline! All you need is scale, just like Sam Altman! So order a few dozen, and you can open your own gas station with zero fuel expenses, literally cannot fail. In an act of good faith, I'll buy your now useless solar panels off you for $0.05 per panel, since pennies are dead, and we need to record something for a sales price. You're welcome!

Given it’s well known that AI is like magic beans that you toss out the window and magic happens overnight, are they sure that they yelled "Use more AI" loud enough?

If they've yelled as loud as possible, then we need to apply some deductive reasoning. It's a fact that AI requires no investment in training, and we know it doesn't need specific integrations to leverage it, so the only possible conclusion is that it's the employees’ fault. The solution is to fire them all, and hire a single AI-native who demonstrates proficiency at discussing bondage with ChatGPT. That AI-native mastery will lead to outsized profits, virtually guaranteed.

No sane CTO would pick Windows as the foundation for autonomous agents. "Our outdated and insecure OS with declining market share that uses a non-UNIX file system and runs on non-ARM hardware is the best choice for running autonomous agents!" Where do I sign up?

"ProPublica investigation this year that exposed how Microsoft used China-based engineers to service the Defense Department's computer systems for nearly a decade"

MS let foreign employees service DoD systems? I can't even begin to fathom how this is even remotely possible. Is there a CCP mule leading services at MS? If not, there should be a congressional hearing on this, because this level of incompetence is really inexcusable.

> When I was doing Assembly on the 6809 in the 1980s, I wrote a framework that contained everything I used in most of my programs.

Come one now, no, you didn’t. You maybe wrote a "library", but not a framework. Assembly doesn't have frameworks. Heck, Assembly doesn't even have libraries in the modern sense. Even then, I doubt you linked binary object or archive files. You likely had some .s files you copied in, just like I do to this day.

You're right to call out that not ALL frameworks are bloated, leak, and vulnerability hell spawn, but it's probably safe to say that well under 5% of public frameworks deserve a lean and efficient label.

400kb, really? What are they doing with that post-strip "Hello World"? I completely agree that dependencies are a scourge, but then again I lump Cargo into that pile.