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tal

@ tal @olio.cafe

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346
Joined
5 mo. ago

  • Trump to impose $100,000 fee per year for H-1B visas, in blow to tech

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  • As I recall from past reading, in general, the US runs up the least deficit during periods when control of the government is split. That is, the Democrats block some of the things that the Republicans want to do with funds, and the Republicans block some of the things that the Democrats want to do with funds. Tax cuts, spending, whatever.

    Right now, the Republicans hold a trifecta, control all of the Presidency, House, and Senate, so my expectation is that they will probably tend to adopt policy that runs up more deficit than the norm, since they're unchecked.

    Assuming that the Democrats take the House in the midterms, though, the GOP will need to compromise on new policy after that.

  • Trump to impose $100,000 fee per year for H-1B visas, in blow to tech

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  • I mean, I'm not saying that it's a good policy. My kneejerk take is that it's probably not a good policy. I'm just saying that I don't think that there necessarily has to be a more-elaborate motive than trying to pull in more tax from alternate sources.

    EDIT: Also, a lot of these are multinationals. So in terms of the companies involved, they can probably shift workers for whom the tax would be fatal for visa prospects to foreign offices somewhere, as long as the workers are still willing to work for the companies on those terms. That could keep them working for the company. That will kill the path to US citizenship for the workers, though, which an H1-B permits for. In general, I'm skeptical that discouraging highly-skilled workers from becoming US citizens is a great idea for the US.

    EDIT2: I'd add that Trump's been on record as making statements about his H1-B policy that are extremely inconsistent. Back when campaigning for his first term, IIRC he claimed that he would expand them, slash them, and leave them alone, partly depending upon who he was talking to. Just last year, he was talking about how they were just fine:

    https://www.reuters.com/world/us/elon-musk-vows-war-over-h-1b-visa-program-amid-rift-with-some-trump-supporters-2024-12-28/

    Trump sides with Elon Musk in H-1B visa debate, says he's always been in favor of the program

    So it might also be wise to take pronouncements from Trump on the matter with a grain of salt. I don't know how serious this is from the article.

    And, as those people who keep posting the rainbow colored "Lets talk about the Epstein files" memes keep pointing out, Trump has had a pretty long history of doing outrageous things to try to direct public attention away from other things that he doesn't want discussed.

  • Trump to impose $100,000 fee per year for H-1B visas, in blow to tech

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  • Maybe. Could be just needing to offset tax cuts. The present administration and Congress has has cut taxes on the wealthy. Either they find new sources of revenue to fill the hole, or they run up deficit.

    https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/04/what-we-know-about-the-us-h-1b-visa-program/

    The number of H-1B applications approved in recent years has climbed. Nearly 400,000 were approved in fiscal year 2024, most of which were applications to renew employment. Rejection rates of H-1B applications spiked during Trump’s first term but fell under former President Joe Biden.

    Computer-related jobs have been the most common occupation for H-1B workers for more than a decade. Since fiscal 2012, about 60% or more of H-1B workers approved each year have held a computer-related job. In 2023, the share was 65%, and these workers reported a median annual salary of $123,600.

    India is the top country of birth for H-1B workers. Roughly three-quarters (73%) of H-1B workers whose applications were approved in fiscal 2023 were born in India.

    This would amount to a tax, mostly on the tech industry employing skilled workers out of India, of about $40B/year.

    Pew has a list of top employers. Amazon would take the single largest share, at over $1B/year.

    On the other hand, Trump also eliminated the de minimis tariff exemption, which was a move that I would guess is probably very advantageous to Amazon (it let foreign e-retailers sell to American consumers while rarely paying tariffs, since they sold product imported in small quantities, whereas domestic e-retailers selling product tended to import in larger quantity and paid tariff).

    kagis

    https://communicationsdaily.com/article/2025/05/20/cbo-no-de-minimis-would-mean-52-b-in-revenue-first-full-year-2505200047?BC=bc_674b2b83cff7b

    If de minimis ends for all imports in July 2027, as proposed in the tax bill currently being considered in the House of Representatives, the U.S. Treasury would collect an additional $5.2 billion in the first full fiscal year after the change, mostly in tariffs, but including $231 million in customs user fees.

    So if you figure that Trump effectively levied a tax that principally hit Amazon's foreign competitors like Shein and Temu with that move, I expect that that partially offsets how hard this hits Amazon.

    That being said, a lot of other tech firms are gonna get hurt, and aren't e-retailers. I doubt that this is a good move in terms of US tech strength.

  • Looking for a PC FPS with deep gunplay, where NPC enemies are humans

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  • This doesn't meet your "human enemies" requirement, but if you're looking for realistic firearm mechanics, you might want to look at Receiver 2. It does have procedurally-generated layouts, as per your roguelike point, and most of the game is firearm mastery.

  • What normal household item becomes a mythical magic item when given to someone in a fantasy novel?

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  • Oh, another one. A stainless steel knife. Stainless steel apparently didn't exist until the early 1800s.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stainless_steel

    "The knife that does not rust."

    It sounds like we didn't have aluminum until the early 1800s, either (and it was very expensive for a while, until we got processing with electricity), so very lightweight metal objects would be pretty remarkable.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium

  • What normal household item becomes a mythical magic item when given to someone in a fantasy novel?

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  • I'm not sure exactly what you mean.

    If you're asking what household item doesn't actually change, but would be considered extraordinary by someone in a medieval setting, and function and be useful in that environment, I'd say matches.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match

    It sounds like China had a primitive chemical match well before Europe, but that it wasn't until the early 1800s that Europe had the match in common production, so I'd guess that a European fantasy setting likely wouldn't have matches.

  • Removed

    AI error message

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  • Assuming that you're just using their website, I'd guess a problem on their end.

    That being said, could be something you've done that's tripped it.

    You could try reloading the webpage, see if that magically makes the issue go away.

    Could disable all browser extensions, and try that.

    Could try a simpler character and see if it shows up with even that. Don't upload an image or use variables in descriptions or whatever it supports.

    I'm not familiar with that website, but I understand that there are various formats in which characters may be exported. If it has the ability to do so and you're trying to import a pre-created character card, could be something wrong with that character card.

    Could report it to them if they have a route to take reported issues.

    EDIT: They appear to have a support community on the Threadiverse, which you can find at !perchance@lemmy.world.

  • My Proxmox had amnesia after a power loss..

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  • I'd also bet against the CMOS battery, if the pre-reboot logs were off by 10 days.

    The CMOS battery is used to maintain the clock when the PC is powered off. But he has a discrepancy between current time and pre-reboot logs. He shouldn't see that if the clock only got messed up during the power loss.

    I'd think that the time was off by 10 days prior to power loss.

    I don't know why it'd be off by 10 days. I don't know uptime of the system, but that seems like an implausible amount of drift for a PC RTC, from what I see online as lilely RTC drift.

    It might be that somehow, the system was set up to use some other time source, and that was off.

    It looks like chrony is using the Debian NTP pool at boot, though, and I donpt know why it'd change.

    Can DHCP serve an NTP server, maybe?

    kagis

    This says that it can, and at least when the comment was written, 12 years ago, Linux used it.

    https://superuser.com/questions/656695/which-clients-accept-dhcp-option-42-to-configure-their-ntp-servers

    The ISC DHCP client (which is used in almost any Linux distribution) and its variants accept the NTP field. There isn't another well known/universal client that accepts this value.

    If I have to guess about why OSX nor Windows supports this option, I would say is due the various flaws that the base DHCP protocol has, like no Authentification Method, since mal intentioned DHCP servers could change your systems clocks, etc. Also, there aren't lots of DHCP clients out there (I only know Windows and ISC-based clients), so that leave little (or no) options where to pick.

    Maybe OS X allows you to install another DHCP client, Windows isn't so easy, but you could be sure that Linux does.

    My Debian trixie system has the ISC DHCP client installed in 2025, so might still be a factor. Maybe a consumer broadband router on your network was configured to tell the Proxmox box to use it as a NTP server or something? I mean, bit of a long shot, but nothing else that would change the NTP time source immediately comes to mind, unless you changed NTP config and didn't restart chrony, and the power loss did it.

  • My Proxmox had amnesia after a power loss..

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  • I don't think that the grid frequency is used for PC timekeeping. You have internal timekeeping circuits. AC power stops at the PSU, and I don't think that there's any cable over which a time protocol flows from the PSU to the motherboard.

  • Meta Accused of Torrenting Porn to Advance Its Goal of AI ‘Superintelligence’

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  • Not sure what you mean but IIRC, he dropped out to start Facebook.

    kagis

    Yup.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg

    Harvard University (dropped out)

    Incidentally, some other prominent tech founders did the same. Off the top of my head:

    Bill Gates (founder, Microsoft):

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates

    Harvard University (dropped out)

    Michael Dell (founder, Dell Technologies):

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Dell

    University of Texas at Austin (dropped out)

    Steve Wozniak (founder, Apple):

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak

    University of Colorado Boulder (expelled)

    He started Apple later, didn't directly do it from college.

    He did go back to university, years later, after he'd retired from Apple, and got his bachelor's degree.

  • Meta Accused of Torrenting Porn to Advance Its Goal of AI ‘Superintelligence’

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  • Yeah, in all honesty, it's not really my ideal as a quote to capture the idea. Among other things, it's comparing what is for the quoted person, household tasks and employment, whereas I'd generally prefer employment vs employment for most of these.

    And for the quoted person, the issue is that AI is doing work that we tend to think of as potentially-desirable, rather than in the context I'm writing about, where it's more that science fiction often portrays AI-driven sex robots that perform for humans (think Blade Runner or A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)), but doesn't really examine humans performing for AIs.

    Still, it was the closest popular quote I could think of to address the idea that the split between AI and human roles in a world with AIs is not that which we might have anticipated.

  • ASUS Proposes Reinforced PCIe Slot to Deliver 250 W of Power From the Motherboard

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  • I could understand the rationale for wanting a high-power PCIe specification if there were multiple PCIe devices that could benefit from extra juice, but it's literally just the graphics card.

    There was a point in the past when it was common to run multiple GPUs. Today, that's not something you'd normally do unless you're doing some kind of parallel compute project, because games don't support it.

    But it might be the case, if stuff like generative AI is in major demand, that sticking more parallel compute cards in systems might become a thing.

  • Meta Accused of Torrenting Porn to Advance Its Goal of AI ‘Superintelligence’

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  • Fair enough. I will point out that for the context of my comment, this is probably functionally equivalent --- that is, if one has a piece of software to walk the DHT and build a list of torrents on it, it's probably still going to be done in a fully-automated fashion.

  • Meta Accused of Torrenting Porn to Advance Its Goal of AI ‘Superintelligence’

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  • In the broad sense that understanding of spatial relationships and objects is just kind of limited in general with LLMs, sure, nature of the system.

    If you mean that models simply don't have a training corpus that incorporates adequate erotic literature, I suppose that it depends on what one is up to and the bar one has. No generative AI in 2025 is going to match a human author.

    If you're running locally, where many people use a relatively-short context size on systems with limited VRAM, I'd suggest a long context length for generating erotic literature involving bondage implements like chastity cages, as otherwise once information about the "on/off" status of the implement passes out of the context window, the LLM won't have information about the state of the implement, which can lead to it generating text incompatible with that state. If you can't afford the VRAM to do that, you might look into altering the story such that a character using such an item does not change state over the lifetime of the story, if that works for you. Or, whenever the status of the item changes, at appropriate points in the story, manually update its status in the system prompt/character info/world info/lorebook/whatever your frontend calls its system to inject static text into the context at each prompt.

    My own feeling is that relative to current systems, there's probably room for considerably more sophisticated frontend processing of objects, and storing state and injecting state about it efficiently into the system prompt. The text of a story is not an efficient representation of world state. Like, maybe use an LLM itself to summarize world state and then inject that summary into the context. Or, for specific games written to run atop an LLM, have some sort of Javascript module that runs in a sandbox, runs on each prompt and response to update its world state, and dynamically generates text to insert into the context.

    I expect that game developers will sort a lot of this out and develop conventions, and my guess is that the LLM itself probably isn't the limiting factor on this today, but rather how well we generate context text for it.

  • Meta Accused of Torrenting Porn to Advance Its Goal of AI ‘Superintelligence’

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  • Even if they were wearing a mask, new, more-capable biometric analysis could often identify humans.

  • Meta Accused of Torrenting Porn to Advance Its Goal of AI ‘Superintelligence’

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  • I have to say that the basic concept of having Meta pay human adult content performers to perform to teach an AI about sexual performance would be kind of surreal.

    "So what do you do for work?"

    "I'm an exotic dancer."

    "Straight or gay establishment?"

    "Err...I perform for an artificial intelligence."

    You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.

    --- Joanna Maciejewaska

    I expect that Joanna would not be enthused about humans stripping for machines.

  • Meta Accused of Torrenting Porn to Advance Its Goal of AI ‘Superintelligence’

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  • I'd have some questions about the structural integrity of that dryer.

  • Meta Accused of Torrenting Porn to Advance Its Goal of AI ‘Superintelligence’

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  • Themis stands on the launch pad

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  • They did lose some Falcons, though, and it sounds like some of that was related to reusability development, albeit at a later stage. From that WP page:

    In 2013, SpaceX moved to using their mainstream Falcon 9 vehicles for VTVL testing, in addition to their existing tests with flying test vehicles. In March 2013, SpaceX announced that, beginning with the first flight of the stretch version of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle—the sixth flight overall of Falcon 9 (then anticipated for summer 2013), every first stage would be instrumented and equipped as a controlled descent test vehicle.[68] SpaceX attempted numerous over-water landings, both over the sea, resulting in soft landings into the water, and onto specialized Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ships, barges modified to be landing platforms. None were completely successful.

  • Germany explores how to replace France in Europe’s flagship fighter jet project

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  • In all seriousness, if France winds up on their own on another European joint fighter project and there wind up being three European fighter projects (Dassault's CEO, in the past, threatened to just walk out the door and do an update of the Rafale, which seems like a bad idea for France if it's a serious threat, the FCAS with the remaining members and now maybe Sweden, and the UK, Italy, and Japan doing the GCAP), I am skeptical that Europe is going to have the kinds of funds needed to produce globally-competitive fighters. And fighters don't get developed every day, so this is talking about the state of defense for quite some time.

    Not only that, but France wants a CATOBAR-capable fighter, unlike basically every other potential partner/customer in the world except maybe India, so I'd expect that they face an uphill battle on exports.