filoleg

You are almost there in terms of getting their point, so I will explain.

Birds existed since forever ago in nature, and they fly by flapping their wings. Then planes got invented, and they fly using a very different mechanism (that doesn't involve flapping wings).

The point made by the grandparent comment: saying "LLMs don't actually reason, because the underlying mechanism they use is different from how humans reason" feels about the same as "planes don't actually fly, because the underlying mechanism they use is different from how birds fly".

The grandparent comment doesn't talk about anything Tesla (the company) says. They are sharing findings from independent researchers.

> most HN people have an extremely narrow view of what constitutes "tech" (= web commerce and adware)

The grandparent literally said "it would pack more punch if ASML wasn't the only go-to example European company accomplishing something in tech."

Do you consider ASML to be a web-commerce or adware business? If yes, then I am not sure you could be helped.

If not, then how is this relevant to the discussion?

Yeah, I am genuinely confused how the grandparent comment just glossed over it.

I believe that both COVID and LLMs are disrupting educational metrics. But in terms of which one did more short-term scale damage (i.e, within 4 years), I would wager it was COVID.

Do you mind elaborating?

This is the first time ever I am hearing of Fujitsu being involved in any bribing/lobbying controversy in the US (whether as a victim or an offender), and I doubt I am the only user in this thread in this position.

Unless it is a very well-known controversy, I feel like there is a need for extra context here. I am not even asking for anything of the "proof beyond any reasonable doubt" nature, I simply want to understand what you are trying to reference.

Yep, and that is also an explicit requirement for interviewers at every company I worked at.

I had to do interview training myself at one of them, and the guidelines were fairly specific and clear about this. We neither knew about the immigration status of the candidate nor were we allowed to ask/note/talk about it at all. Same as with age/marital status/etc.

> Or the local going rate for qualified personel were higher than you were willing to pay (which per def is true, if you had to bring in foreign work?).

Nope, immigration fees/lawyer expenses are simply just a negligible cost in the grand scheme of things.

When you hire someone earning $350k+ in annual TC, an extra $10-20k one-time cost of immigration-related expenses is a nothingburger for big tech companies.

Along the same line of reasoning: relocation expenses for candidates within the US. Big tech companies don't stress over a one-time $10k relocation package cost (for a candidate that passed the interviews and accepted the offer, but just happened to be from another state).

I think that both you and the grandparent comment are correct at the same time. It feels like there is a strong dichotomy between how H1B visa is treated across different realms of tech.

I have been working in big tech for a decade, and have a few friends working in the more technical financial firms (think more TwoSigma/HRT/Citadel, not JPM/GS), and my experience matches yours. Every H1B I knew at the companies I worked at was absolutely not hired as a cost-cutting measure. It was just simply difficult to find people who could qualify. And god knows we tried, I remember my team interviewing roughly 50 people just to fill a position of just a baseline decent dev (not a rockstar math olympics winner with multiple groundbreaking publications; though that would've been nice). And absolutely none of them were underpaid either, they were on the exact same comp range for the level, with plenty of them topping out the range. In fact, they actually ended up costing more to the employer than a local would, due to having to deal with immigration lawyers/filing fees/etc. (all while being paid the same as everyone else).

Meanwhile, I have a lot of acquaintances from undergrad working as devs at tech consultancy firms and more "general/traditional finance" companies. The stories I hear from them about H1B at their workplaces are pretty much exactly what the grandparent comment describes, and even worse.

Unless he has an actual plan for effective global enforcement of his proposed policy, this is all just posturing at best, and a transfer of power to adversarial foreign states (that have no such moral qualms and worries around superintelligent AI) at worst.

> Immigration agencies are absolutely monitoring social media when people cross borders, apply for visas, etc. There's nothing hypothetical or future about this at all.

The hypothetical part was not about them being able to do it, but about them caring to do anything with that information.

My mother is pretty much locked-in on fb/whatsapp/instagram. She travels internationally rather frequently, including to more "questionable" countries (where she just happens to have relatives that she wants to visit). She has never faced any issues related to her usage of meta products (or social media in general).

It boggles my mind how there are actual adults on HN, who straight up fail to comprehend that telling a normal person (e.g., my mom, who is imo in the majority of the kind of people using social media) something like "you shouldn't be doing it, because muh gubernment surveillance and unencrypted comms and you are being watched by the feds" is gonna just make you sound crazy.

And why wouldn't it? She has never faced any issues, and she has been actively using whatsapp+ig all the time, for over a decade. And the same holds true for everyone she knows as well. Not once did she face any issues ever, despite traveling multiple times a year every year, including to some countries that are on pretty adversarial terms with the US (we are talking "sanctioned" type of adversarial).

The thing is, she faces none of the hypothetical issues that could come from her usage of those services. Neither do any of the people she ever talked to, and that's the overwhelming majority of the users of those services. You are more than welcome to claim that she might not be educated or aware enough to understand the issues at hand (and it is at least partially true). I am just baffled and disappointed by how there is such a large contingent of HN users who straight up cannot even comprehend the mindset and experiences of an average adult user.

> the reason why the 4 is tolerated but the 8 got axed is that 4 is a honeypot and 8 wasn't

That's certainly a take.

My personal take is that 4chan actually complies with the US laws, specifically the ones around promptly removing+reporting any illegal content that the US cares about (e.g., terrorism threats/CSAM/etc.), and 8chan doesn't.

Out of curiosity, what makes you consider 4chan to be a honeypot, as opposed to it just being a platform that simply complies with the relevant laws?

I will admit, I've spent barely a few minutes on 8 in my lifetime, so I am not equipped to judge the nuance of their situation much. With 4 though, it's been an on-and-off thing for me over the past ~15 years.

> Well you can get it only in some kind of machines, and you need to pay it cash. Also you need to use cash to charge it

Totally forgot about that aspect, you are 100% correct.

I remember traveling with my friend who had a physical card, and more than once we had to reroute to a nearby kiosk and wait in line, so he could recharge the balance on the card. Apple Wallet felt more convenient, because recharging it was as simple as picking the amount to recharge and hitting "submit."

Thanks for bringing this up, I actually had no idea it was simply disabled, and assumed it was simply not included at all (for whichever miniscule savings it would bring).

Your explanation makes more sense, because it is definitely cheaper/easier to just disable (but include) that hardware to avoid licensing fees (as opposed to having an additional factory manufacturing line just to produce the SKUs that physically exclude that hardware).

I heard from friends that physical Suica cards tend to be difficult to obtain these days at times, but digital one isn't at all.

Took me roughly a minute to create one within Apple Wallet ahead of my trip, and that was it. Didn't need to install any apps or register on any websites, because creating a Suica card is natively supported in the wallet app.

Idk how the situation is like with Suica card on Android though, outside of the fact that unless the phone was purchased in Japan, it will typically lack the necessary hardware for it (which isn't a concern with iPhones, because all regional versions include it).

Maybe I am just plainly wrong or encountered some specific stations, but this does not feel true from my experience.

During my last visit to London (in 2025), it felt noticeably slower than even NYC subway tap-to-pay.

Suica is a whole other beast that isn't even in the same category of speed. It genuinely feels sub-200ms instantaneous.