Isn't writing out requirements in a way a computer can understand the essence of any programming language that has ever existed? So how is this any different? To truly get rid of programmers, the machine would need to look at the world, figure out what the problems were, figure out the requirements to solve it on it's own, and solve it. Then, yes, would programmers be able to look at kitten pictures all day.
The problem before that humans were needed to convert human language requirements into computer code. It was something only humans could do.
Now with the advent of deep learning, perhaps computers can do it.
What many people don't understand is that describing things to a computer, no matter how, is what coding is. The programming language is just a facade. Managing highly complex tasks accurately enough for computers to understand is where the real skills lie.
Just look at one example from the paper:
A new shop near you is selling n paintings. You have k < n friends and you would like to buy each of your friends a painting from the shop. Return the minimal amount of money you will need to spend.
And the output (modified to fit slashdot):
k=int; b=[int]; c=SORT b; d=TAKE k c; e=SUM d
What it proves is that the AI is great at answering test questions. However, in a production environment, no one is going to write and maintain a description like this.
And it is just a tiny function. To match the complexity of a real-life program, you have to imagine the same kind of description but spanning hundreds of pages...
Compilers didn't put coders out of a job, these AIs may be the next step but they still won't displace coders. Although it may require some skill adjustments, it won't fundamentally change the job.
That was before the new breakthroughs in natural language processing. Before computers were really bad at understanding human language. Now, with deep learning that has completely changed. Just use Google Assistant and Alexa and see how far it has come. So, in effect, the modern breakthroughs essentially convert human language into compiler language. If there is ambiguity, then just like Google Assistant and Alexa, it can interactively ask for more details and clarifications.
It will make coders super productive and put lesser ability coders out of work. The good coders will suddenly start cranking out x10 more code as they can figure out how to get the AI system to do parts of their jobs.
Anyways, the current method of development is that the hundred page spec. is currently broken down into thousands of unit tests. So, if you can automate the creation and maintaining of half of these tests, then you've eliminated half of your devs.
Any company that does consulting should be automatically ineligible for H1B as their business model is to provide labor directly on a speculative basis. H1B is meant to fill existing jobs that no one in the country can/will fill, and this does not meet the description of any job in a consulting business model.
Except sponsoring H1Bs have become so complicated that there are multi-billion corporations whose business model is farming H1B visas.
There are a lot of big corporations that don't hire H1Bs because of the complications, but will hire consultants without much thought. They have created a huge market for consulting companies.
If an company can do what they need to cheaper by hiring someone from overseas - especially a disposable someone who they can use and dispose of - they're going to do exactly that. US law has forbidden indentured servitude for a long time, but the H1B visa represents a legal version of exactly that. Here, try this:
Get rid of work visas outright. If a company can't find talent here in the US, they should feel free to sponsor a foreign national for citizenship - and take away the ability to summarily deport the foreign worker when they're through with them. Instead of a revolving door of H1B visa holders, we'll end up with more US citizens - workers who will be incentivized to demand the same pay and working conditions as their peers in the workplace.
I know of a certain international business machine firm that uses (abuses) huge numbers of H1B visa holders precisely because they can get away with it. It's great for their bottom line; they get employees that are willing to accept vastly substandard wages and work unpaid overtime in sweatshop-style conditions because they know that should they even think of standing up to it they'll be shipped back to wherever they came from. Now, if these guys were on the path to citizenship, I'm sure the manufacturer in question could still discharge them (after all, they're only contractors, not employees) - but they'll have a harder time making the case that there's no local talent to be had, because there will be all of these qualified personnel right here working towards citizenship.
Oh, the firm I'm not-so-subtly talking about? They don't pay US citizens very well, either. What should have been at least a $70,000/year salary gig for me ended up being a $24.04/hour job - contractors will be paid better, but they will end up providing unpaid overtime to make up for it (I know; I went down that path with them as well).
In the end, I'm not saying we should prevent immigrants from finding work here in the US. I'm saying we should prevent visitors from allowing large enterprises to degrade compensation and work conditions for employees in the US.
You're still tying citizenship sponsorship to employment. That's still the problem.
Currently, what happens is that the path to citizenship is still 1-2 years at the fastest and during that time you're tied to the sponsoring company. There is still time to exploit.
Make the process at most 1-2 months and the work only starts after the sponsorship process ends.
US gets high skill workers for jobs that are not found locally. The worker can ditch the company the first week if the work conditions are terrible. There is full incentive to pay a competitive salary to the worker rather than dangle sponsorship.
It's a win for the economy and the American worker but not so good for corporations looking to exploit.
The main problem is that the sponsoring company gets more than what worker visas are supposed to provide. Ideally, they should just get a worker to do the work not found locally. They should pay a competitive salary and a small premium as fees for getting foreign labor. But, by tying sponsorship to the company, the worker is trapped and the company gets to exploit the worker.
We were told that globalization is the future, it will increase our prosperity and so on. After decades of this most consumer goods are very cheap and very poorly made. All salaries stagnated. At the same time a whole bunch of folks are out of jobs and can't afford to buy food.
Now we are trying protectionism. Consumer good are still relatively cheap but the jobs are gradually coming back. Salaries ticked up for the first time since 90s.
So could someone explain to me why we hate protectionism?
If you're enjoying your version of reality, great!
If in your reality, protectionism is driving your salary up and reducing the price of goods, enjoy it.
High salaries and cheap goods, man. Great reality. Whatever it takes.
If they could outsource the jobs to India or China where the costs are lower they wouldn't need H1-bs. They want the visas because for whatever reason the work needs to be done here in America.
People from all over the world are willing to move the US but not to each others countries. So, Indians won't move to China, Iran, Russia, Chinese won't move to India, Russia etc. But, they will all move to the US to create a team here.
If your whole team is from one region of one country, then you don't need H1B.
I don't see the problem. If their is literally not a single American that can fill the position, then you should have no trouble paying the H1B that does fill the role what he is worth.
The benefit will mostly go to companies which are located in areas of high cost of living and high salaries (New York, silicon valley).
It's not entitlement because its not a level playing field.
in real money terms, the living costs for foreign workers, and their families in their own country is WAY cheaper than what US citizens and their families in the US need to just get by.
It's entitlement when you think you deserve better for no real reason.
Well to be fair, what's the point of having a country at all if it doesn't entitle you to anything? Just somewhere to throw away your taxes in the hope that you'll get drafted for a war you don't wanna fight?
The president doesn't pay taxes.
An immigrant probably pays more taxes, and fights and dies for America.
I highly doubt that Microsoft has many non-replacable workers from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia in their employ that are actively traveling to their homelands. I also doubt they are going out of their way to hire refugees from these countries. If these people like their jobs then let them become citizens.
Everyone's replaceable.
But, you'd still try and stand by and help your co-workers.
This just proves that Microsoft just doesn't get it. The whole point of Trump's administration is to make American companies hire American workers. Too bad if outsourced workers are cheaper, AMERICANS NEED JOBS!
And you wonder why they'd rather hire a "terrorist" over you. Entitlement much?
Time and time again we hear how this technical talent simply doesn't exist here in the US and we need to go abroad to find it.
If this is true, why don't these entrepreneurial and brilliant technologists build world-class companies and products in their home countries?
Something tells me these H1B visa holders are neither entrepreneurial nor brilliant.
They cannot build world-class companies in India because India does not have the solid institutional and infrastructure to allow for that. There is too much corruption, the markets aren't there, the investment isn't possible and so on.
It used be the same problem with China about 10 years ago. They solved the problem and are creating world-companies left and right. In some metrics, they are even overtaking the US.
Just from statistics, foreign technologists combined with US infrastructure and institutions create more companies. There might be many causes to this. One of them is that US filters immigrants so that it chooses exactly the kind of people that would benefit to come to the US.
I am not a Trump supporter but I am definitely anti H1-B visa and offshoring. The Indian firms are wrong as there is plenty of talent in America capable of writing excellent software. Conversely, I have seen very poor software come out of India that was not only unstable but replete with spelling and grammar errors on the user interface. Some stuff was so poorly written, that friends of mine have told me that they ended up re-writing large portions thereby negating any savings. The only reason the Indian IT firms are calling foul is because they're going to lose money and it isn't foul because the Indians engage in protectionism for their economy. They have very high import taxes.... sky high to as much as 25%. So the Indians get no sympathy from me whatsoever.
It is just going to be shake-up.
On the one hand, you have cheap Indian IT labor. They are not going anywhere.
On the other hand, you have people looking for cheap labor to build products and write software.
You can build enormous walls between them but they'll find a way around it. The current baddie is the H1B because that was the ladder to scale the wall. You take that away, there will be another visa to abuse, another loophole to exploit.
This is capitalism. It flows around artificial restrictions in the market. The buyers and sellers will find a way.
There is terrible code written all over the place, not just by Indians. They have their own type of bad code they write whereas we write our own type of bad code. Good code is not just written right away, it is bad code refined over time, refactored and tested over time.
You can make claims about freedom of religion and all this other nonsense but this issue is about economics, pure and simple. What's being proposed is that incentives to hire people outside of the United States who have no interest in the success of the United States to do the same job for half the wages be greatly lessened. Also, I can tell you from direct experience in the software industry, Indian contractors produce lower quality code, break more builds, have poor communication and many other things that lead to worse quality software. I can't tell you how many times I traced build breaks back to Indian contractors. The only benefit to hiring them is that they cost less.
Before you call me a racist, I have high respect for other cultures and enjoy their cuisine a lot. I love Indian food and I think Indian people in general are pretty cool. What I don't like is when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is throwing all the American citizens under a bus by hiring less skilled workers for a much cheaper price at the expense of American citizens so they can turn even bigger profits when the corporations the Chamber is comprised of are already sitting on vast piles of wealth. It's really a slap in the face. They've taken advantage of the Land of Opportunity so much that it is no longer the Land of Opportunity.
The U.S. Chamber brought this on themselves. They gamed the system too hard and caused a lot of hardship to good, hard-working Americans and that's why this backlash has occurred.
No, H1B reform doesn't solve the problem of hiring people outside the US for cheaper than US employees. It just makes it that they cannot be here in the US. They can still work in Bangalore.
Cheap labor is not going anywhere. The millions of Indian engineers are not going to become farmers next. Restricting H1B just makes room for outsourcing directly to India. It gives firms in the US that can manage labor force in India from the US a huge business opportunity.
You'll still have outsourcing, just a different flavor of it. You won't see Indians in the hallway but they will still writing code for cheap.
I don't understand roku has a bunch of models that range from cheap entry level all the way up to the roku ultra 4k that's priced a little higher than amazon fire tv probably it's closest competitor and just a little less than Apple TV.
Why not give them a green card? If you give them H1Bs they are still slaves and will still be paid less than American workers. This isn't an improvement, it's window dressing. It won't change anything except increase the competition/corruption to get into US schools.
That was the original intention of H1B. It was meant to be a super-short term work visa that would lead to a green card within a year.
There is processes to get people to come work in the US directly with a green card with EB-2 and EB-3.
However, most of H1Bs are Indian nationals and it has overwhelmed the system that there is a decade long queue to get a green card.
Also the system has been so overwhelmed that everything is broken. H1B was supposed to available all year around but it is only available for two days per year now. The green card process is a 1-2 year long process now instead of a quick few months and decades for Indian nationals.
Not anything is working as designed. Everything is working on the extreme cases now. Quotas are hit instantly, processing times are half a year to review a simple application and it is a complex mess that makes everything very expensive except for a few companies who specialize on this.
Raising the minimum H1-B salary from $60K to $150K would mean we could still bring in people like like Linus Torvalds or Tim Berners-Lee, who truly can't be found in the US. People who are truly special. A $150K minimum would eliminate the issue ofb replacing US workers with cheaper imports.
Someone like Linus or Tim would not come on an H1B visa.
They would come with the green card already in their names. There is a separate process for people who are beneficial for national interests that bypasses H1B.
H1B is for skills that cannot be found locally from someone who is looking for employment, the emphasis being locally and with someone looking for employment. It is not for all across the US. It is not about someone locally who has the skill but is already working and not looking for employment.
Company A needs something done but there is nobody locally available to do the job. That is where H1B comes in. It is not a visa for importing exceptional individuals. Those are EB-1 and EB-2 NIW which is directly green card and not H1B.
I've noticed a lot of people do not seem to understand the dangers of AI.
People seem to think that their job is somehow special, that they can never be replaced by a machine.
Also there is another group of people who seem to think that it's not a big deal, that just like the industrial revolution, new jobs will pop up for people to migrate to.
Both are wrong.
As of yet, there is nothing inherently special about a human being that cannot be reproduced by machines. When you can mechanize a human in it's entirety, new jobs created will be filled by machines.
Think creativity is some kind of magical power exempt from being reproduced by AI? Think again. There are AI right now that can paint, create new music, write news articles etc. And their works are indistinguishable from those produced by their human counterparts.
AI can code, robots can build and support and repair robots.
Even jobs who people consider "safe" (doctors, lawyers, etc) will eventually disappear. Imagine an AI doctor, who can in a fraction of a second, know your ENTIRE medical history as well as all drugs you where ever prescribed in your life time and know all possible interactions between those drugs and is up to date on research on your particular ailment that was published 1 hour ago. No human doctor could compete. And these AI doctors will work 24/7,365 days a year. No sick days, no training, no family drama to worry about while at work.....
Do you think it's coincidence that the first widely available commercial application AI happens to be autonomous road vehicles? The transportation industry is the #1 industry in North America in terms of total number of people employed (truck drivers, taxi drivers, pizza delivery, etc.).
Why do you think some governments have started experimenting with or looking into basic universal income?
No point trying to predict the future. There are so many things playing out in so many different ways. Who knows what will be at the end.
Recent research article says autonomous vehicles will be one of the last. It requires a huge infrastructure investment. The first ones will be engineers, lawyers and doctors. All you need is an app that translates natural language to designs, code, legal documents, prescriptions etc. It could use the existing infrastructure but with data center backend enhancements.
Number one rule of not being bullied is to be part of a pack. Don't be singled out. Form a pack with your other colleagues.
So, either drum up the popular support and find a way to change the gaslighter. This option will take a lot of energy and it will take away from your work and life.
They're constantly graded on every aspect of their performance, tightly micromanaged, and working in an extremely competitive environment. What I'm hearing is the business is designed to extract every possible erg of work from its employees and then spit them out when they're burnt out and no longer competitive. I would only work there if they paid enough to retire after five years.
I wish it was an good mix of *collaborative* and competitive environment.
What burns me out is working alone. And, everyone becomes uncollaborative when it's a competitive environment.
If it becomes too collaborative, I would think it becomes the class group project where one person does all the work and the rest slack.
Robots and AI have always been taking the mentally easiest and least skill demanding jobs first. But where do they plan to find AI with the right connections?
The goal is technology that would automate most of the firmâ(TM)s management. It would represent a culmination of Mr. Dalioâ(TM)s life work to build Bridgewater into an altar to radical opennessâ"and a place that can endure without him.
At Bridgewater, most meetings are recorded, employees are expected to criticize one another continually, people are subject to frequent probes of their weaknesses, and personal performance is assessed on a host of data points, all under Mr. Dalioâ(TM)s gaze.
Bridgewaterâ(TM)s new technology would enshrine his unorthodox management approach in a software system. It could dole out GPS-style directions for how staff members should spend every aspect of their days, down to whether an employee should make a particular phone call.
I think the Wall Street story (here gets you past the paywall once) is obsessing over the micromanagement side of the thing and missing the big picture.
This is among the first examples of someone using AI to try to maintain strategic and organizational integrity of an organization after their death. While there's a good chance this just fails utterly (particularly with the obsession on micromanagement and dysfunctional business dynamics), it does lead to a potential problem or opportunity down the road when many of these things have been set up with conflicting interests. There have been many examples through history of powerful people trying to create an enduring legacy through creation and propagation of something throughout time. These endeavors often fail merely because successors have different interests and high levels of incompetency, leading eventually to dissolution of the thing.
Here is a possibility to create something enduring, a machine capable of surviving long durations and implementing its creators' will long after their deaths. Here, the alleged goal is retention of a particular business culture, but who knows what else has been tossed in? There could be all sorts of covert purposes and priorities, some introduced by the patron and perhaps, some introduced by other parties?
Then there's the matter of what happens in the distant future, if this approach turns out to be successful without a corresponding improvement in human longevity? Either it's the only one of its kind, and we have a build up of economic power not subject to the usual restrictions of human lifespan or we have multiple powerful parties in permanent conflict with each other.
This need not be universally bad. For example, an AI could be set up to further environmentalism or poverty elimination goals just as easily as it could a particular business's interests.
In a lot of complex systems, the influence of the inputs and outputs are not linear and uncorrelated.
AI setup for environmentalism and poverty elimination might influence other systems and those influences might be huge in the wrong sectors. It might attribute environmentalism and poverty elimination with population reduction, war etc.
Just like the stock market, there is no real way to predict what will be successful and what will fail. As humans, we always have our 20/20 hindsight bias. As an exercise in proving this, just read slashdot predictions from five to ten years ago. It's almost painful how inane most predictions were.
In short, if it sounds like a good idea try it. It will either succeed or fail, and even if it succeeds it will rarely succeed in the way it was intended to.
Point is someone is doing something. Let's wait and see how it goes. We don't have to convince ourselves that this is good or bad.
Testing on another planet is not that easy, though.
Yes, test it all in production.
Since testing is sooooooooo hard.
Landing is the most complicated part and Beagle and others have failed exactly here. There should be x100 or even more code for unit and integration testing than the actual code itself for the landing code. And, those tests should run through every permutation possible of every possible failure point or bad sensor readings.
There is no way it thinks it has landed with that many sensor inputs. It is simply code that is not put through a good enough testing system.
I am so sick of hearing about "Artificial Intelligence". There's nothing intelligent about it. It's just fancy pattern-matching, because that's all we can do at this point. It's better pattern-matching than we've been able to do before, but it's pure hype to call it "AI".
IDK if this uses it or not, but in the past few years the advent of deep learning has changed what AI means.
It's still better pattern matching but it's better than human now with deep learning.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't writing out requirements in a way a computer can understand the essence of any programming language that has ever existed? So how is this any different? To truly get rid of programmers, the machine would need to look at the world, figure out what the problems were, figure out the requirements to solve it on it's own, and solve it. Then, yes, would programmers be able to look at kitten pictures all day.
The problem before that humans were needed to convert human language requirements into computer code. It was something only humans could do.
Now with the advent of deep learning, perhaps computers can do it.
What many people don't understand is that describing things to a computer, no matter how, is what coding is. The programming language is just a facade. Managing highly complex tasks accurately enough for computers to understand is where the real skills lie.
Just look at one example from the paper :
A new shop near you is selling n paintings. You have k < n friends and you would like to buy each of your friends a painting from the shop. Return the minimal amount of money you will need to spend.
And the output (modified to fit slashdot):
k=int; b=[int]; c=SORT b; d=TAKE k c; e=SUM d
What it proves is that the AI is great at answering test questions. However, in a production environment, no one is going to write and maintain a description like this. And it is just a tiny function. To match the complexity of a real-life program, you have to imagine the same kind of description but spanning hundreds of pages...
Compilers didn't put coders out of a job, these AIs may be the next step but they still won't displace coders. Although it may require some skill adjustments, it won't fundamentally change the job.
That was before the new breakthroughs in natural language processing. Before computers were really bad at understanding human language. Now, with deep learning that has completely changed. Just use Google Assistant and Alexa and see how far it has come. So, in effect, the modern breakthroughs essentially convert human language into compiler language. If there is ambiguity, then just like Google Assistant and Alexa, it can interactively ask for more details and clarifications.
It will make coders super productive and put lesser ability coders out of work. The good coders will suddenly start cranking out x10 more code as they can figure out how to get the AI system to do parts of their jobs.
Anyways, the current method of development is that the hundred page spec. is currently broken down into thousands of unit tests. So, if you can automate the creation and maintaining of half of these tests, then you've eliminated half of your devs.
Any company that does consulting should be automatically ineligible for H1B as their business model is to provide labor directly on a speculative basis. H1B is meant to fill existing jobs that no one in the country can/will fill, and this does not meet the description of any job in a consulting business model.
Except sponsoring H1Bs have become so complicated that there are multi-billion corporations whose business model is farming H1B visas.
There are a lot of big corporations that don't hire H1Bs because of the complications, but will hire consultants without much thought. They have created a huge market for consulting companies.
If an company can do what they need to cheaper by hiring someone from overseas - especially a disposable someone who they can use and dispose of - they're going to do exactly that. US law has forbidden indentured servitude for a long time, but the H1B visa represents a legal version of exactly that. Here, try this:
Get rid of work visas outright. If a company can't find talent here in the US, they should feel free to sponsor a foreign national for citizenship - and take away the ability to summarily deport the foreign worker when they're through with them. Instead of a revolving door of H1B visa holders, we'll end up with more US citizens - workers who will be incentivized to demand the same pay and working conditions as their peers in the workplace.
I know of a certain international business machine firm that uses (abuses) huge numbers of H1B visa holders precisely because they can get away with it. It's great for their bottom line; they get employees that are willing to accept vastly substandard wages and work unpaid overtime in sweatshop-style conditions because they know that should they even think of standing up to it they'll be shipped back to wherever they came from. Now, if these guys were on the path to citizenship, I'm sure the manufacturer in question could still discharge them (after all, they're only contractors, not employees) - but they'll have a harder time making the case that there's no local talent to be had, because there will be all of these qualified personnel right here working towards citizenship.
Oh, the firm I'm not-so-subtly talking about? They don't pay US citizens very well, either. What should have been at least a $70,000/year salary gig for me ended up being a $24.04/hour job - contractors will be paid better, but they will end up providing unpaid overtime to make up for it (I know; I went down that path with them as well). In the end, I'm not saying we should prevent immigrants from finding work here in the US. I'm saying we should prevent visitors from allowing large enterprises to degrade compensation and work conditions for employees in the US.
You're still tying citizenship sponsorship to employment. That's still the problem.
Currently, what happens is that the path to citizenship is still 1-2 years at the fastest and during that time you're tied to the sponsoring company. There is still time to exploit.
Make the process at most 1-2 months and the work only starts after the sponsorship process ends.
US gets high skill workers for jobs that are not found locally. The worker can ditch the company the first week if the work conditions are terrible. There is full incentive to pay a competitive salary to the worker rather than dangle sponsorship.
It's a win for the economy and the American worker but not so good for corporations looking to exploit.
The main problem is that the sponsoring company gets more than what worker visas are supposed to provide. Ideally, they should just get a worker to do the work not found locally. They should pay a competitive salary and a small premium as fees for getting foreign labor. But, by tying sponsorship to the company, the worker is trapped and the company gets to exploit the worker.
We were told that globalization is the future, it will increase our prosperity and so on. After decades of this most consumer goods are very cheap and very poorly made. All salaries stagnated. At the same time a whole bunch of folks are out of jobs and can't afford to buy food. Now we are trying protectionism. Consumer good are still relatively cheap but the jobs are gradually coming back. Salaries ticked up for the first time since 90s. So could someone explain to me why we hate protectionism?
If you're enjoying your version of reality, great!
If in your reality, protectionism is driving your salary up and reducing the price of goods, enjoy it.
High salaries and cheap goods, man. Great reality. Whatever it takes.
If they could outsource the jobs to India or China where the costs are lower they wouldn't need H1-bs. They want the visas because for whatever reason the work needs to be done here in America.
People from all over the world are willing to move the US but not to each others countries. So, Indians won't move to China, Iran, Russia, Chinese won't move to India, Russia etc. But, they will all move to the US to create a team here.
If your whole team is from one region of one country, then you don't need H1B.
I don't see the problem. If their is literally not a single American that can fill the position, then you should have no trouble paying the H1B that does fill the role what he is worth.
The benefit will mostly go to companies which are located in areas of high cost of living and high salaries (New York, silicon valley).
It's not entitlement because its not a level playing field. in real money terms, the living costs for foreign workers, and their families in their own country is WAY cheaper than what US citizens and their families in the US need to just get by.
It's entitlement when you think you deserve better for no real reason.
Well to be fair, what's the point of having a country at all if it doesn't entitle you to anything? Just somewhere to throw away your taxes in the hope that you'll get drafted for a war you don't wanna fight?
The president doesn't pay taxes.
An immigrant probably pays more taxes, and fights and dies for America.
I highly doubt that Microsoft has many non-replacable workers from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia in their employ that are actively traveling to their homelands. I also doubt they are going out of their way to hire refugees from these countries. If these people like their jobs then let them become citizens.
Everyone's replaceable.
But, you'd still try and stand by and help your co-workers.
This just proves that Microsoft just doesn't get it. The whole point of Trump's administration is to make American companies hire American workers. Too bad if outsourced workers are cheaper, AMERICANS NEED JOBS!
And you wonder why they'd rather hire a "terrorist" over you. Entitlement much?
Time and time again we hear how this technical talent simply doesn't exist here in the US and we need to go abroad to find it.
If this is true, why don't these entrepreneurial and brilliant technologists build world-class companies and products in their home countries?
Something tells me these H1B visa holders are neither entrepreneurial nor brilliant.
They cannot build world-class companies in India because India does not have the solid institutional and infrastructure to allow for that. There is too much corruption, the markets aren't there, the investment isn't possible and so on.
It used be the same problem with China about 10 years ago. They solved the problem and are creating world-companies left and right. In some metrics, they are even overtaking the US.
Just from statistics, foreign technologists combined with US infrastructure and institutions create more companies. There might be many causes to this. One of them is that US filters immigrants so that it chooses exactly the kind of people that would benefit to come to the US.
I am not a Trump supporter but I am definitely anti H1-B visa and offshoring. The Indian firms are wrong as there is plenty of talent in America capable of writing excellent software. Conversely, I have seen very poor software come out of India that was not only unstable but replete with spelling and grammar errors on the user interface. Some stuff was so poorly written, that friends of mine have told me that they ended up re-writing large portions thereby negating any savings. The only reason the Indian IT firms are calling foul is because they're going to lose money and it isn't foul because the Indians engage in protectionism for their economy. They have very high import taxes .... sky high to as much as 25%. So the Indians get no sympathy from me whatsoever.
It is just going to be shake-up.
On the one hand, you have cheap Indian IT labor. They are not going anywhere.
On the other hand, you have people looking for cheap labor to build products and write software.
You can build enormous walls between them but they'll find a way around it. The current baddie is the H1B because that was the ladder to scale the wall. You take that away, there will be another visa to abuse, another loophole to exploit.
This is capitalism. It flows around artificial restrictions in the market. The buyers and sellers will find a way.
There is terrible code written all over the place, not just by Indians. They have their own type of bad code they write whereas we write our own type of bad code. Good code is not just written right away, it is bad code refined over time, refactored and tested over time.
You can make claims about freedom of religion and all this other nonsense but this issue is about economics, pure and simple. What's being proposed is that incentives to hire people outside of the United States who have no interest in the success of the United States to do the same job for half the wages be greatly lessened. Also, I can tell you from direct experience in the software industry, Indian contractors produce lower quality code, break more builds, have poor communication and many other things that lead to worse quality software. I can't tell you how many times I traced build breaks back to Indian contractors. The only benefit to hiring them is that they cost less.
Before you call me a racist, I have high respect for other cultures and enjoy their cuisine a lot. I love Indian food and I think Indian people in general are pretty cool. What I don't like is when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is throwing all the American citizens under a bus by hiring less skilled workers for a much cheaper price at the expense of American citizens so they can turn even bigger profits when the corporations the Chamber is comprised of are already sitting on vast piles of wealth. It's really a slap in the face. They've taken advantage of the Land of Opportunity so much that it is no longer the Land of Opportunity.
The U.S. Chamber brought this on themselves. They gamed the system too hard and caused a lot of hardship to good, hard-working Americans and that's why this backlash has occurred.
No, H1B reform doesn't solve the problem of hiring people outside the US for cheaper than US employees. It just makes it that they cannot be here in the US. They can still work in Bangalore.
Cheap labor is not going anywhere. The millions of Indian engineers are not going to become farmers next. Restricting H1B just makes room for outsourcing directly to India. It gives firms in the US that can manage labor force in India from the US a huge business opportunity.
You'll still have outsourcing, just a different flavor of it. You won't see Indians in the hallway but they will still writing code for cheap.
I don't understand roku has a bunch of models that range from cheap entry level all the way up to the roku ultra 4k that's priced a little higher than amazon fire tv probably it's closest competitor and just a little less than Apple TV.
He means Apple TV.
I'm not sure I would ever buy anything from Comcast. There's a long history of people doing that and finding themselves on the losing end of the deal.
Like there is choice.
Why not give them a green card? If you give them H1Bs they are still slaves and will still be paid less than American workers. This isn't an improvement, it's window dressing. It won't change anything except increase the competition/corruption to get into US schools.
That was the original intention of H1B. It was meant to be a super-short term work visa that would lead to a green card within a year.
There is processes to get people to come work in the US directly with a green card with EB-2 and EB-3.
However, most of H1Bs are Indian nationals and it has overwhelmed the system that there is a decade long queue to get a green card.
Also the system has been so overwhelmed that everything is broken. H1B was supposed to available all year around but it is only available for two days per year now. The green card process is a 1-2 year long process now instead of a quick few months and decades for Indian nationals.
Not anything is working as designed. Everything is working on the extreme cases now. Quotas are hit instantly, processing times are half a year to review a simple application and it is a complex mess that makes everything very expensive except for a few companies who specialize on this.
Raising the minimum H1-B salary from $60K to $150K would mean we could still bring in people like like Linus Torvalds or Tim Berners-Lee, who truly can't be found in the US. People who are truly special. A $150K minimum would eliminate the issue ofb replacing US workers with cheaper imports.
Someone like Linus or Tim would not come on an H1B visa.
They would come with the green card already in their names. There is a separate process for people who are beneficial for national interests that bypasses H1B.
H1B is for skills that cannot be found locally from someone who is looking for employment, the emphasis being locally and with someone looking for employment. It is not for all across the US. It is not about someone locally who has the skill but is already working and not looking for employment.
Company A needs something done but there is nobody locally available to do the job. That is where H1B comes in. It is not a visa for importing exceptional individuals. Those are EB-1 and EB-2 NIW which is directly green card and not H1B.
I've noticed a lot of people do not seem to understand the dangers of AI.
People seem to think that their job is somehow special, that they can never be replaced by a machine.
Also there is another group of people who seem to think that it's not a big deal, that just like the industrial revolution, new jobs will pop up for people to migrate to.
Both are wrong.
As of yet, there is nothing inherently special about a human being that cannot be reproduced by machines. When you can mechanize a human in it's entirety, new jobs created will be filled by machines.
Think creativity is some kind of magical power exempt from being reproduced by AI? Think again. There are AI right now that can paint, create new music, write news articles etc. And their works are indistinguishable from those produced by their human counterparts.
AI can code, robots can build and support and repair robots.
Even jobs who people consider "safe" (doctors, lawyers, etc) will eventually disappear. Imagine an AI doctor, who can in a fraction of a second, know your ENTIRE medical history as well as all drugs you where ever prescribed in your life time and know all possible interactions between those drugs and is up to date on research on your particular ailment that was published 1 hour ago. No human doctor could compete. And these AI doctors will work 24/7,365 days a year. No sick days, no training, no family drama to worry about while at work.....
Do you think it's coincidence that the first widely available commercial application AI happens to be autonomous road vehicles? The transportation industry is the #1 industry in North America in terms of total number of people employed (truck drivers, taxi drivers, pizza delivery, etc.).
Why do you think some governments have started experimenting with or looking into basic universal income?
No point trying to predict the future. There are so many things playing out in so many different ways. Who knows what will be at the end.
Recent research article says autonomous vehicles will be one of the last. It requires a huge infrastructure investment. The first ones will be engineers, lawyers and doctors. All you need is an app that translates natural language to designs, code, legal documents, prescriptions etc. It could use the existing infrastructure but with data center backend enhancements.
Number one rule of not being bullied is to be part of a pack. Don't be singled out. Form a pack with your other colleagues.
So, either drum up the popular support and find a way to change the gaslighter. This option will take a lot of energy and it will take away from your work and life.
Or, leave and find somewhere else.
They're constantly graded on every aspect of their performance, tightly micromanaged, and working in an extremely competitive environment. What I'm hearing is the business is designed to extract every possible erg of work from its employees and then spit them out when they're burnt out and no longer competitive. I would only work there if they paid enough to retire after five years.
I wish it was an good mix of *collaborative* and competitive environment.
What burns me out is working alone. And, everyone becomes uncollaborative when it's a competitive environment.
If it becomes too collaborative, I would think it becomes the class group project where one person does all the work and the rest slack.
Robots and AI have always been taking the mentally easiest and least skill demanding jobs first. But where do they plan to find AI with the right connections?
That's why it won Jeopardy.
The goal is technology that would automate most of the firmâ(TM)s management. It would represent a culmination of Mr. Dalioâ(TM)s life work to build Bridgewater into an altar to radical opennessâ"and a place that can endure without him. At Bridgewater, most meetings are recorded, employees are expected to criticize one another continually, people are subject to frequent probes of their weaknesses, and personal performance is assessed on a host of data points, all under Mr. Dalioâ(TM)s gaze. Bridgewaterâ(TM)s new technology would enshrine his unorthodox management approach in a software system. It could dole out GPS-style directions for how staff members should spend every aspect of their days, down to whether an employee should make a particular phone call.
I think the Wall Street story (here gets you past the paywall once) is obsessing over the micromanagement side of the thing and missing the big picture. This is among the first examples of someone using AI to try to maintain strategic and organizational integrity of an organization after their death. While there's a good chance this just fails utterly (particularly with the obsession on micromanagement and dysfunctional business dynamics), it does lead to a potential problem or opportunity down the road when many of these things have been set up with conflicting interests. There have been many examples through history of powerful people trying to create an enduring legacy through creation and propagation of something throughout time. These endeavors often fail merely because successors have different interests and high levels of incompetency, leading eventually to dissolution of the thing. Here is a possibility to create something enduring, a machine capable of surviving long durations and implementing its creators' will long after their deaths. Here, the alleged goal is retention of a particular business culture, but who knows what else has been tossed in? There could be all sorts of covert purposes and priorities, some introduced by the patron and perhaps, some introduced by other parties? Then there's the matter of what happens in the distant future, if this approach turns out to be successful without a corresponding improvement in human longevity? Either it's the only one of its kind, and we have a build up of economic power not subject to the usual restrictions of human lifespan or we have multiple powerful parties in permanent conflict with each other. This need not be universally bad. For example, an AI could be set up to further environmentalism or poverty elimination goals just as easily as it could a particular business's interests.
In a lot of complex systems, the influence of the inputs and outputs are not linear and uncorrelated.
AI setup for environmentalism and poverty elimination might influence other systems and those influences might be huge in the wrong sectors. It might attribute environmentalism and poverty elimination with population reduction, war etc.
Just like the stock market, there is no real way to predict what will be successful and what will fail. As humans, we always have our 20/20 hindsight bias. As an exercise in proving this, just read slashdot predictions from five to ten years ago. It's almost painful how inane most predictions were.
In short, if it sounds like a good idea try it. It will either succeed or fail, and even if it succeeds it will rarely succeed in the way it was intended to.
Point is someone is doing something. Let's wait and see how it goes. We don't have to convince ourselves that this is good or bad.
Testing on another planet is not that easy, though.
Yes, test it all in production.
Since testing is sooooooooo hard.
Landing is the most complicated part and Beagle and others have failed exactly here. There should be x100 or even more code for unit and integration testing than the actual code itself for the landing code. And, those tests should run through every permutation possible of every possible failure point or bad sensor readings.
There is no way it thinks it has landed with that many sensor inputs. It is simply code that is not put through a good enough testing system.
I am so sick of hearing about "Artificial Intelligence". There's nothing intelligent about it. It's just fancy pattern-matching, because that's all we can do at this point. It's better pattern-matching than we've been able to do before, but it's pure hype to call it "AI".
IDK if this uses it or not, but in the past few years the advent of deep learning has changed what AI means.
It's still better pattern matching but it's better than human now with deep learning.