A new grad is not necessarily the same as a potential H1B hire. Tech workers are not fungible. A company might prefer to hire an Indian or Polish person who has won ICPC, has hard-to-acquire experience, etc. over a D-average new grad without internships from Georgia or something.
Anyone here can go to https://h1bgrader.com/, find their favorite tech company or two and see the entire list of positions they needed H-1B for, as well as the salaries.
Web developers, data analysts, project managers, sales analysts, support engineers - these are not highly-skilled roles that just can't be satisfied by the US market.
I think the idea of shaming people for being successful conquerers is ironically very western. Ask what the Mongols think about their conquests or the Han or what the Turks think about the Ottomans or the Russians about their history…
I don't know what you imagine perceptions of the British empire to be but most people don't think the UK sent 10000 ships to India to zerg rush the existing power structures.
Not to that extreme, but I do not think people realise the extent to which the empire relied on local support and structures.
I recently read the second volume (Seven Years in Ceylon) of Leonard Woolf's autobiography and he talks about how an entire country was British run with no military outside a small number in the capital city (and many of the provinces were remote, requiring days of difficult travel back them). There were small numbers (single figures in some) of civil servants in each province, but entire districts were run by a single official.
He mentioned native allies at several points actually, though he doesn’t emphasise them and their purported numbers are still like 100x lower than the forces they are facing.
> And that they overemphasize planning and tactics and downplay being at the right place at the right time through no foresight of their own.
Mentioned by the author
> Another point is that the failed conquistadors are given little consideration.
Also addressed by the article.
> That book explicitly says that it is not a racist or chauvinistic history of how Europe became so successful. But critics claim that it still manages to be chauvinistic in how it wrongly claims that the conquistadors vanquished their enemies while being comically outnumbered.
I feel modern academia (and also Guns Germs and Steel FWIW) desperately try to do the opposite these days - to claim that the natives where not militarily, technologically or logistically inferior to Europeans despite getting conquered by Europeans in what look like very lopsided battles. I feel that is just as dishonest as the opposite. Nobody does this to the Mongols or Huns or whatever. Their superiority is accepted at face value.
> He mentioned native allies at several points actually, though he doesn’t emphasise them
I also quoted the author about allies: “Discounting their native allies, they were probably outnumbered ...”
So that qualifies as mentioning native allies. It mentions the allies as being so inconsequential that they can be discounted when considering the forces they were up against.
> and their purported numbers are still like 100x lower than the forces they are facing.
Source?
> Also addressed by the article.
That part of my comment was not about the article.
> I feel modern academia (and also Guns Germs and Steel FWIW) desperately try to do the opposite these days - to claim that the natives where not militarily, technologically or logistically inferior to Europeans despite getting conquered by Europeans in what look like very lopsided battles.
First of all popular understanding (which is what I was talking about) seems to like narratives of dominating conquest. That goes both for Mongols and conquistadors.
Secondly they have arguments for their theories. That they are “desperate” speaks to their motivation and not the end result of their theories. So you would have to engage with their counter-arguments instead of falling back on saying that it looked lopsided. (Are you critiquing their history or their motivations? Different things.)
> I feel that is just as dishonest as the opposite. Nobody does this to the Mongols or Huns or whatever. Their superiority is accepted at face value.
I would hope that historians try their best to figure out why the Mongols or the Ottomans and whoever won, using a variety of approaches, arriving at the most empirically solid theory whether that is tech/logistical superiority or whatever else. But that is not known to me.
> That's partly because inequality doesn't fit into their models.
Well Piketty being wrong doesn't fit in many people's models either. Economists routinely do talk about inequality and I think it's intellectually dishonest to paint the whole field as wrong just because some parts of it don't agree with your pet theory.
AFAIK a lot of these ideas are not new (the JSON thing was done with OS models before) and OpenAI is possibly the hottest startup with the most funding this decade (maybe even past two decades?), so I think this is actually all within expectations.
Their web UI was a glitchy mess for over a year. Rollouts of just data is staggered and often delayed. They still can’t adhere to a JSON schema accurately, even though others have figured this out ages ago. There are global outages regularly. Etc…
I’m impressed by some aspects of their rapid growth, but these are financial achievements (credit due Sam) more than technical ones.
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
Not sure why you are being downvoted. You are generally right. Most of their new product rollouts were acoompanied with huge production instabilities for paying customers. Only in the most recent ones did they manage that better.
> They still can’t adhere to a JSON schema accurately
Strict mode for structured output fixes at least this though.
> OpenAI is possibly the hottest startup with the most funding this decade (maybe even past two decades?)
It depends on how you define startup but I don't think they will surpass Uber, ByteDance, or SpaceX until this next rumored funding round.
I'm excluding companies that have raised funding post IPO since that's an obvious cutoff for startups. The other cuttof being break even, in which case Uber has raised well over $20 billion.
> Since AI vision is not yet good enough, it’s possible that one reason the AIs do relatively poorly on this new test is because the verbal descriptions of the questions are not written as well as they could be, and further research could include multiple wordings of the questions, written by different people, to get a sense of how sensitive the AIs are to how the questions are described.
A more parsimonious theory might be that it had the other IQ test in its training set.
Still, even at that it's an impressive result; it having an actual IQ if about 100 would already be pretty substantial.
