Sure. It also helps to accurately characterize the place we are at today if you want people to take the estimation of trajectory seriously.
Part of the problem is that some part of the country has been calling (perhaps accurately) people fascist for years—hell, just last week people were hysterically chanting that Trump is Hitler at a dinner, which is ridiculous in the particulars (even if there are obvious similarities in mass dehumanization and use of indiscriminate state violence) while simultaneously making it harder for the rest of us to convince others to see those real similarities—while other parts look around and just see the same old country they always did, just with more insane people. If we cannot overcome the massive cultural differences that characterize our broad society and communicate well with each other, we have little hope to fix the underlying problems enabling these people to perpetrate evil.
But, I don't have much hope for this coming decade, frankly. We are all too addicted to finding comfort in our little cultural bubbles to collectively find the will to pull our heads out of the media machines that surround us and reassemble around some sense of the very real shared values that should bind us together: feeding ourselves and our families and finding healthy lives pursuing happiness.
The 'media machines' are pretty much all owned by oligarch allies of the administration.
I agree about not getting too hand-wavy, but it's tough... the trajectory is pretty bad even if we're not all the way down it so far. Maybe it "only" ends up being like Turkey or Hungary or Russia rather than countries in 1930ies era Europe. Still pretty bad though.
Again, I don't think this is as useful as you're implying (although I do agree in magnitude of severity). We aren't Turkey or Hungary or Russia, and the place we're going is uniquely American. Some people who read this and look around expecting to see Turkey or Hungary or Russia are going to conclude you're being unreasonable, and like it or not, they still have as much say as the rest of us and are worth trying to reach.
And yes, this does require we adjust our understanding of politics to disengage with many or most media sources. On the upside I suspect that one person making a concerted effort to reach out to those who see the world differently can have enormous impact. I myself have many friends who have voted differently than me, and effectively communicating my specific concerns with them is not as difficult as e.g. social media interactions might have you believe. It does, however, require meeting them where they are today.
USA is getting there. There is already a private gulag in Salvador for executing people and labor camps (prisons with enforced labor) in USA. Head of state slowly takes over legislative branch of government via some bullshit excuse, and that branch just silently folded under him. He is now eyeing judicial branch and pondering replacing judges with pocket ones. Also slowly taking over media if they stray too far from the party line.
Sounds like a good progress in only half a year. He'll get to troika's and stazi a bit later.
We may never go that direction. I'd guess our flavor of evil will be uniquely american—performative cruelty, benign neglect, feigned helplessness, sporadic senseless violence, and everyone for themselves. Trump (nor, I suspect, Vance, or Thiel behind him) strike me as very much like Mao or Stalin at all.
There is no political movement with any weight in this country remotely comparable to either the bolsheviks or the maoists. The closest we got to that in living memory was probably the black panthers and they were successfully (and bloodily, brutally) put down and scattered to the wind.
Now we are all trapped in highly personalized crazy houses, halls of mirrors, where nothing is real and our very views of reality are too warped for us to assemble into coherent organized political movements. The exception, perhaps, being capital itself, able to whip masses of people into hysteria or discombobulated confusion while rich vampires suck the life out of this country and leave us a schizo husk muttering to ourselves about free speech, the constitution, and cancel culture.
So excuse me if I roll my eyes anyone tries to compare anyone in this country to "left" movements around the world. We are too insane and don't have the spine to move that way.
For those of you asking what the Koreans did wrong (in good faith), that question is framed poorly.
There is simply no visa that allows skilled labor to come to the US, work a temporary job for a multinational that's paying them in their home country, and leave.
The closest thing apparently is the "B-1 in lieu of H-1B"[1] and guess what? Another commenter posted this FT article that accuses them of abusing this B-1 visa [2].
Traveling for work is a huge pain in the ass, doubly so for this sort of temporary work assignment, and triply so if it's to the USA.
I've always been told to use a tourist or family reunification visa. For example, if China cracked down on this, they could easily put 10,000+ Americans in jail for a similar "visa abuse". They obviously would not bite the hand of foreign direct investment like this though.
I think it's informative to interpret the law - especially in the age of Congressional gridlock - as 300 years of terrible legacy code papered over the Herculean efforts of ops teams (the government bureaucracy). When that ops team starts arbitrarily treating the oceans of gray zones to their whims, to reward friends and punish enemies, you start the long trek to serfdom...
> There is simply no visa that allows skilled labor to come to the US, work a temporary job for a multinational that's paying them in their home country,
what about the L-1 transfer visa ?
> and leave.
You don’t even need a visa to leave
> and guess what? Another commenter posted this FT article that accuses them of abusing this B-1 visa
accusations that should be investigated - but in the last news I read it sounded like they would be allowed to stay somehow
I got this set up and working in basically 5 minutes. Going to try to set it up at work. Super cool! It seems like the open source version already has a bunch of features, how do you plan on making sure you can sustainably support it?
That is an orthogonal solution to SSO. I have many apps in my home lab. It doesn't make sense to have individual credentials for everything, even if it is effectively free to keep track of them. Rotating dozens of passwords (even spread out over time) is not my idea of a fun day, nor is supporting individual logins for friends/family who use the apps in my network.
SSO is the quick and easy way, especially when other people are involved.
> the core insight: predict in representation space, not pixels
We've been doing this since 2014? Not only that, others have been doing it at a similar scale. e.g. Nvidia's world foundation models (although those are generative).
> zero-shot generalization (aka the money shot)
This is easily beaten by flow-matching imitation learning models like what Pi has.
> accidentally solved robotics
They're doing 65% success on very simple tasks.
The research is good. This article however misses a lot of other work in the literature. I would recommend you don't read it as an authoritative source.
Something like the Canadian army doing a land invasion from Winnipeg to North Dakota to capture key nuclear sites as they invade the beaches of Cleveland via Lake Eerie and do an air raid over Nantucket from Nova Scotia.
I bet there's some exercise somewhere by some think tank laying this basically out.
This is why conspiracy theorists love these think tank planning exercises and tabletop games much. You can find just about anything
I wrote this opinion essay on the American tech sector, which the Trump administration conveniently ignores when talking about trade surpluses. As global trade is upended, I argue America's trade partners should more carefully examine the place the American tech monopolies have in their countries.
The prevailing wisdom is that American dominates tech simply because American companies are better. While that's true, I argue that a huge portion of this comes instead from the monopolistic winner-take-all dynamics of tech not found in other industries. Despite the American car manufacturers being significantly worse, they still exist. The European tech industry is significantly worse, and they're almost nowhere to be found in tech. The Chinese tech industry is worse in many ways as well, yet shielded by the Great Firewall, they've found themselves with cloud hyperscalers, frontier AI models, global consumer businesses, etc.
Once upon a time, this mattered less, but as American values diverge from the rest of the liberal democracies, the the effect American tech has on our political discourse and economies are becoming a matter of national security.
This is from the perspective of someone who works in the American tech industry but is not American, and has spent a fair amount of time in China.
As an opinion piece, I'm not sure my arguments are entirely correct, but I think they're worth thinking about.
I'm not saying getting hidden would be a good thing.
Just that it would happen.
Every time something like this comes out, his supporters mass flag the article no matter how relevant it is to tech. Browsing /active is the only way to see some of these.
In their defense, if every atrocity and grift this administration committed were allowed free and fair voting on HN, it would completely clog the front page.
