bradreaves2

This isn't the government subsidizing a private venture, it's a private venture offering a discount to the government. What does profitability have to do with whether or not the government should purchase their services?

Academic here.

I assure you that you do not know for a fact that H1-Bs have prevented the US citizens from getting postdocs. Partly because postdocs are hired on J-1, not H1-B.

In any case, postdoc salaries come from research funding, which is basically a fixed pot for the entire country. Salaries for American postdocs would not rise if the labor supply falls. We would just have fewer postdocs and less highly skilled labor.

At the PhD level, if we admitted every American who applies without evaluating their record, we would still need to admit foreign students. Few people want to sign up for that challenge, and it just so happens 95% of all other people are not American citizens.

For tenure track faculty, we hire for fit and quality without regard for nationality. This is a requirement of Federal law, and it makes the country better overall.

Qualified foreigners have no advantage over qualified Americans for academic positions. If you don’t believe me, most state universities have salaries publicly listed for their faculty. You could easily see if foreigners are paid a lower wage.

An argument against foreign students and academics is an argument for a smaller scientific workforce, not a more “American” one.

The Cybersecurity Body of Knowledge (CyBOK) is a systematic anthology of cybersecurity domains. Think of it as a combination of "desk reference," "encyclopedia," and "syllabus."

The latest version was released last week. The list of experts who wrote chapters, edited them, and reviewed them for accuracy is stellar, and the content is absolutely comprehensive.

I will be using this as a reference when I'm preparing my graduate introduction to security course next Spring.

This position paper argues that classic systems security design principles are what we need to secure AI agents.

Is this intended to ensure that students and H1-Bs will not have a path to residency unless they disrupt their lives here?

The article misattributes the cause of the public's loss of trust in science.

The public has lost confidence in science because commercial and political entities have worked systematically to undermine scientific authority that threatens their business models and narratives.

Fossil fuels, tobacco, and refined sugar single-handedly manufactured decades of scientific "controversy" around climate change, tobacco's health impact, and the role of sugars and fats in obesity and heart disease. Religious fundamentalists fund pseudo-scientific books and articles attempting to muddy the waters concerning geological and biological evidence about any time period before the invention of agriculture. Grifters fabricate arguments and data to delegitimize Western medicine to sell placebos at high markup. Politicians attribute all unflattering research to partisan skullduggery.

It is true that hard science, social science, and medicine all have published flawed work; sometimes even in bad faith. These occasional failures -- which should be corrected and never tolerated -- are then used by the same people to indict the entire enterprise.

It's true that there's research misconduct, and it must be weeded out.

What's also true is that funding for research is declining in the US, especially relative to our need for it.

Note how many "tweaks" center on things like sample-size or statistical significance. Human-oriented research is always intractably complex, and we get the scientific outcomes we do because studies are perennially understaffed and under-resourced relative to the questions they seek to answer. Trying to answer fundamental questions about health and wellness with 30 people tracked over 6 weeks is fundamentally flawed, but it's the best we can do with the resources we have.

In a world where funding was plentiful, and career paths not cut-throat and perilous, there'd be far fewer examples of these kinds of "tweaks." People respond to incentives, and if the options are "add a few more participants, because after all the initial sample size was somewhat arbitrary" or "fail to publish, fail to graduate, fail to get a permanent position after a decade of post-secondary education because applicants must be perfect," the only surprise is that they aren't more common.

Where does it say that it will require age verification?

The link you sent basically says "you pinky-promise that you're 18."

Later in the doc it also says "you promise not to send malware."

Gave it a try for a language I know (Spanish) and one I don't (Russian).

On Russian, the explanations of why some answers were correct/incorrect didn't load (presumably an AI call failed?). Especially at lower layers, a good fallback would be a simple dictionary definition.

On Spanish, I did the placement test, then it asked which "dialect" I wanted. I selected Mexican, and was treated with truly excellent renderings of European pronunciation. I wouldn't have been mad if all it had was one set of pronunciation, and it's more frustrating to see the ignored option than to never have it at all.

As for the placement test: I got dropped into lesson 2 for Spanish. For comparison, I placed into Lesson 5 in Russian, where I actually got more incorrect answers. The Spanish placement test wasn't very deep, and I knew all the answers. It told me I got two wrong, so either the test is wrong or I just got punchy and hit the wrong buttons.

Recommendation: scale back on the ambition. Focus on getting the educational and product experience right with languages you know first. Be honest about data provenance and limitations.

All the external noises are a big problem.

But the things that irritate me even more are the infernal modals and alerts on my computing devices. It is hard enough maintaining focus without having to spend an entire work session playing whack-a-mole at random intervals for a hundred different things that aren’t relevant. I never want to know that my scanner software has an update available.

I realized that at its core, this problem is caused by developers and product managers mistakenly believing that I care as much about their product as they do.

It would be nice if the gatekeepers had mechanisms that punished this behavior. Search engines should lower the rankings of every site with random modals. App stores could display a normalized metric of alert click through — “this app has an above average number of alerts that are ignored”.

> This scene might feel like science fiction

This article is fiction followed by commentary.

If the anecdote were real, it would still be an anecdote: tempting to generalize, but wise to hold loosely.

The article is about how AI will lead to a labor surplus in certain professions, while other professions will retain employment.

The article compares this to the Black Death, where labor supply decreased uniformly. Labor was then able to extract concessions from capital.

Industrialization leads to a different outcome: capital captures more value initially, while devastating workers in the short-term. In the long-term, everyone benefits from higher living standards. Even if the article is correct about AI impacts, it doesn't explain why AI is different from all prior industrialization.

Counterpoint: the past continues to inspire, surprise, and delight.

Your comment about “1700’s newspapers” reminded me of The Past Times podcast, where comedians read random newspapers from across American history. The episodes I’ve listened to were delightful, and they covered mundane news in mundane places.

“O brother, where art thou” is one of my favorite movies. It’s a retelling of The Odyssey (a literally prehistoric tale) set in Depression-era Mississippi, made in the early 2000’s.

The specific question of editing out these production artifacts doesn’t rile me either way, though. I didn’t see the original mistake, and I won’t notice the fix either.

I’ll also agree that just as no one steps in the same river twice, how the past is viewed and interpreted changes over time. What is valued or not also changes. 90% of everything is still crap. And quite a bit of the interest in the past is reflected in remixes or retellings for modern audiences.

Still, people also read Beowulf or Chaucer in the original or in modern translation. Others will enjoy both Jane Austen and Bridgerton. People will listen to Beethoven and Jon Batiste. Sure, not all those things are for everyone, but neither are modern music genres, sports entertainment, or most TV shows.