There's always a tradeoff between eating crops that will make you sick and kill you when you are 60 vs not eating enough nutritious food that will kill you when you are 40.
Most people who work in tech are not eligible for O1 or EB-1. F1 is a student visa, J1 requires you to go back after finishing your stuff. L1 can actually work but needs to be converted to either H1b, O1 or EB1 at some point soonish.
Plenty of people in tech work on O1 and EB1.
F1 is probably the biggest feeder pool for H1.
J1 does not always require coming back, it requires return only when funded by US government program, and return requirement can otherwise can be waived, esp if J1 is unfinished
> it requires return only when funded by US government program
Not true, I had J1 visas without US government program intervention and I still had the home requirement. Since there wasn't any US government intervention I was able to get a waiver for the home requirement, but it took a couple of months.
We have now sovereign CPUs but we are struggling to get HPC ones. They will be there soon though in 5-6 years. RAM is already possible for Europe to manufacture if they can get the fab. Supply chain remains a question mark for the raw materials. Software stack is almost there.
In effect, I would say we are around 60% there. The most important thing actually missing is Fabs. Everything else I see a straightforward path with money and time.
There is a big structural problem in Europe with these sort of initiatives: people receive grants for attacking identified problems; if you actually solve the problem then you have to find a new problem for your next grant, so it's best to not actually solve the problem but claim your next proposal will.
Combine that by not actually wanting to reward people properly when problems are solved and you have the root of why eurotech has totally stagnated.
I would turn it differently. The grants are awarded but they come with requirements that are impossible to satisfy without severely degrading the quality of the product.
1. Most grants are one-off before the EU moves onto new fields of grants. Therefore, there is no way to build a deep expertise in a field for one particular center.
2. Most procurement are very top-down 1990s manner. This is no way to build infrastructure (by mandate). You need to fund competing proposals and then select good things from each of them. Instead, EU has this propensity to award only one single grant, which means every single big org that will be affected by this grant is on the proposal (probably), which then means that there is no room for opinionated stuff.
3. Most EuroHPC funding is national co-funding based, which means same proposal needs to be submitted 1 + x times where x is the number of countries in the proposal. Due to requirements of EuroHPC, x > 3. So, 4 proposals, 4 negotiation for any single idea. It is such a mess.
This in addition to bureaucracy where there is no dynamism in contract negotiations. There is no flexibility in rules. The EuroHPC and every single govt would be okay with projects failing rather than allowing for a small monetary rule change which allows the project to succeed. (This is not even about getting more money but transferring money from one bucket to another in the same project).
I can go on, but these are structural problems why HPC in Europe stagnates every day.
Without those people being trained at the level of grad school in workforce, you would not have enough people to even maintain a good checklist for F35. The program will go down within a year.
Grad schools do more than research, they train people for these industries, for the shop floor.
I'm probably one of the few people who prefer Linux+KDE stack over macbook software ecosystem. But hardware wise, macbooks are just blowing other laptops out of water after M3-M4.
It's not that mac have become much better but that the rest of the lapto pindustry has just gone to shit:
1. Windows pulling more and more shenanigans
2. Normal laptop hardware becoming as pricey as Mac. I could get much better performance as a Linux user from a 1000 Euro laptop that Mac had no alternative for under 2000 Euros. But today, worse performance Linux/Windows laptops are more expensive than Mac.
3. Linux has become much better but the hardware support for laptop is still being bottlenecked by all money going to Windows support. Also, linux has a application ecosystem problem.
I love linux and use it as much as possible. I had a Macbook in 2015-2023 but I preferred linux laptops then. But this year, I had to switch to a new laptop and got a Mac and it is definitely much better than anything on the market just hardware wise.
Indeed there aren’t many of us, but macOS is easily the worst part of the Mac experience, and worryingly it’s getting comparatively worse vs kde or even gnome each year. ‘It’s POSIX’ doesn’t cut it when I deploy to Linux and I work in containers all day anyway (and wsl is better than macOS at this, too, but the rest of windows went downhill real bad recently).
The problem is even before the rampocalypse it just wasn’t possible to get hardware of MacBook quality at any price unless it was an Apple box and nowadays Macs are downright cheap.
Thats my problem. I only tolerate macOS, because of the hardware & battery life. WSL is a better *nix dev env than macOS, at least its real Linux, but like you said, the rest of windows sucks still.
I just want a macbook pro, but Linux. I want the performance, thermals, silence, fantastic screen, touchpad, speakers, etc. I refused to give anything up the mac hardware offers, and the PC OEM industry has just chosen, time and time again, to not bother to compete.
Hopefully these new Nvidia laptops will run Linux, that surface ultra is the first time I feel like a laptop on the other side of the fence will finally offer hardware parity.
I’m not saying I want tinkering. I’m saying the macOS desktop environment is worse than kde or gnome for work. I definitely don’t include the setting up the box part in that, macOS on Mac is hard to beat here.
Is WSL better for running containers? I find macos really annoying when dealing with containers, especially first setup.
It is baffling to me how many backend devs who work with containers all day don't understand that using containers on mac (and windows) requires a full-blown virtual machine. While in linux you just run them.
Ah right, WSL is already a linux VM so there is no need to run docker inside a VM again. I suppose one can do all dev work in macos inside a VM too which would achieve similar results, but I never seen anyone do that.
FWIW I run real linux VMs on my Mac with Lima. Only limitation is that it can’t use the GPU. Otherwise works great for me. Is WSL functionally equivalent?
I think the laptop hardware pre Apple M chips was just terrible and has pretty much stayed that way. There’s a reason why Apple moved away from Intel.
Before M chips an Apple Intel laptop was just a shiny wrapper for a PC laptop experience: fans turn on to full blast all the time, battery lasts <3 hours under any regular usage beyond just browsing (say having an IDE open, and frequently switching between apps). Laptop would get hot to the point where you need padding if you keep it on a lap so you’re not boiling yourself. Made for a good leg warmer during the winter though haha.
With an Apple M4 laptop, the only time I’ve heard the fan turn on is when I almost 100% filled the memory with some local LLM model. I can’t recall any other times. Battery life is finally as advertised, can last many hours, laptop is consistently fast, never gets hot and any CPU throttling is not perceptible under medium to high CPU usage.
Apart from the GUI environment, the Mac is a Unix and I find it hard to notice much difference between it and a Linux. I use MacPorts on my Macs and there is no drama with command line tools.
On my work Mac I don’t have sudo and I still could install MacPorts with zero issues.
MacPorts provides GNU equivalents to the native BSD ones. You can always check if there is a `gsed` binary and use it (or check the OS, but checking direct behavior is always best).
I used Linux for a long time. I still prefer it. But I can’t justify the extra work. Last time I tried to move back to Linux, I spent far too long admiring the machine. This was only 5 years ago.
AI agents are incredibly useful in this regard. Omarchy even releases some skills, so anything you want to configure is just a matter of asking the agent to do it.
Of course, it would've been better not to need it in the first place. However the experience is much better now (and Omarchy is great!)
Agreed. I've setup many VPS servers. I've configured both Apache and NGINX by hand. It's the sort of thing that I only do sometimes, therefore I have to look up docs each time.
This year, I wanted to run an experiment that was extremely low stakes. I had CC ssh into a VPS and do everything for me. It worked.
Did it have any security gaps? I don't know, I didn't audit. It didn't matter. It was a personal project that had no personal data to risk and the project lasted ~1month (I'd actually audit if I was keeping it). I saw no signs that my server became a bot, fwiw.
I've had agents figure out git repos that were interesting to me but not worth putting in effort on my own. Not things I depend on, just things that I otherwise wouldn't have tested. It's too bad the subsidized pricing is coming to an end. There's a lot that I wouldn't have bothered doing myself that was cheap to have an agent do that won't be worth it again. I'll try out a fraction of the stuff by hand like before and that's fine, but it was a fun ~six months.
The M3 Ultra is no slouch. It sits at the top with best processors on both single-core and multi-core x64 processors.
Meanwhile my mini PC with a Ryzen 7 8845HS processor, which is nowhere near an M3 Ultra, feels much snappier using it as a day to day desktop in both Linux and Windows. I think this speaks more to the sluggishness of the macOS experience rather than hardware performance.
But, then I start doing something data/gpu/local LLM intensive and my M3 Max shines.
Today's data center GPUs are essentially overclocked, and so at limit of how much the chip materials can physically handle, and therefore degrade over time. For example, GH200s operate at 1W/superchip but the actual safe power is somewhere around 650W which will allow them to function for a decade or more. But that leads to around 15% slowdown and that is unacceptable in today's competition. So current GPUs are destined to be depreciating assets.
In future, we might have fixed cost GPUs but not today.
I would presume the reason they are overclocked is because they are trying to make up for the shortage. In time, the shortage of computing components will be remedied, and tokens produced at lower power pulls will be cheaper.
It's not strange at all. It is all about power. At that time, power was obtained by opposing P2P and opposing piracy. Today power is obtained by piracy so they do piracy.
> They ordered in every single competing dock they could find, from that era's products, and found that every last one was garbage in some way or other, usually fatally so.
It is so hard to believe that when more than 1000 employees at my employers are also using at least one dock (Dell and Thinkpad both) and using them very well.
In 2017 or so the standard Surface docks were rough. I think we had at least a 60% failure rate, though for the CEO who demanded a surface we swapped his issue dock with the one he had the week prior. And it would work for X weeks until failing to display to external monitors. Then we'd swap it out for the one from X weeks back and continue the cycle. Maybe change the power brick out.
Today I swap the power brick on my Dell thunderbolt dock when it acts up. Given the hours of use and how many times it's been plugged/unplugged from various laptops/etc (it worked great off an AMD desktop PC with thunderbolt on the rear I/O), I think my employer should buy me a knew one out of respect.
We are talking about a situation some years past. I member there were USB docks that if you had them attached to external power and ethernet, but not a laptop, they'd instant-kill the network by sending garbage frames that would cause switches to fault off.
Only around 2024-ish the situation with USB and TB docks seemed to stabilize.
I had a CalDigit TB dock -- maybe 2021-ish? -- that every time I unplugged my MacBook would take my internet offline. I thought I was insane. How is that even possible? But I finally gave up and returned it.
I have a brand new TV where if I plug the HDMI into my M4 MBP, MacOS ceases to have any functioning WiFi capability. Unplug the HDMI and internet returns instantly.
That's probably because your TV has support for Ethernet over HDMI enabled. Run ifconfig to check if there's a new (and, possibly, default-routed) interface when you plug that TV in.
Holy shit. Is this the mythical TV that actually supports Ethernet over HDMI? The fact that this feature is advertised no every HDMI cable and yet supported by approximately no hardware in the real world has been a source of amusement and mild sadness to me for the last decade or so.
I'd actually really like a TV that properly supports it because the idea of having one ethernet cable running to my TV and then everything else also getting a wired connection via the HDMI cable its already attached to pleases me, in the same way that a single USB-C cable on my desk giving my laptop access to ethernet, monitors, USB peripherals, and power pleases me.
> I'd actually really like a TV that properly supports it because the idea of having one ethernet cable running to my TV and then everything else also getting a wired connection via the HDMI cable its already attached to pleases me
I'd more be afraid than happy if a TV were to support that (and even more if laptops would use it to bridge a TV to the home network), simply because a TV that has internet access in any kind will download ads and nagware and upload viewership statistics in return.
Modern TVs truly have become like 1984 - there is no way a 4k 60-inch TV at 340€ is anywhere close to profitable on its own without milking the user's data for all it is worth. The actual cost of a TV is more like 900€+ if you go by the prices for "digital signage" TVs.
I paid well over $2k for a TV and years later started getting ads. Inspected the traffic and it connects to at least a dozen different Samsung domains on startup and then periodically. I took it off the network permanently and now I no longer own any TVs.
Ok, let me revise my statement. In a future where we've done something about the rampant unregulated capitalism that is gradually making everything unusable I'd love to have devices use HDMI to connect to the network via my TV.
I remember getting my first CalDigit TB dock and being excited - everyone seemed to love them. I expected it to largely Just Work.
That thing Didn't Work more than it Worked, but options were slim. Eventually it fully died about 14 months in. I didn't even bother checking to see what the warranty terms were. TS3 Plus, back in 17 or 18. What a piece of shit.
Sounds like it's a good thing I didn't bother trying again in the early 2020s and only recently bought a new dock.
Very similar story here. Went through two Caldigit TB hubs most recently a TB4. Soooo many issues. The same Ethernet issue described above, a failure to provide the rated PD power, and the TB linked monitor connection was dodgy af. A very expensive lesson. Add to this the confusing (and deceptive) jumble of TB cable standards. I have so many supposed TB3,4 and 5 rated cables I could probably circle my house. You have to hand Apple one thing and that’s the consistency of their hardware due to tight control of the stack and supply chain. You get far fewer of these sorts of issues.
I have a TS3+ that broke about 18 months in. I talked to support, set up a repair, and before I could send it the dock unbroke and had worked since. Truly mysterious and left me with a sense of unease with that thing given the cost.
My Caldigit TS4 dock is so close to being perfect except for my secondary monitor turning on maybe 50% of the time if I connect it to the dock via USB-C, I've given up and now have USB-C from the secondary monitor going straight to my laptop but let me be entirely clear in saying I hate that I have to do that.
Yes!! The Dell WD19 was notorious for that. My wife’s company used those - we couldn’t leave her WFH dock connected to our home network because of the wild broadcast storms causing our core switch to stop processing frames from her home office desktop switch. My org used HP Dock G5 units which behaved much better (besides the occasional firmware update killing video output until a power cycle, and inconsistent MAC address pass through between hardware revisions).
Yes, this would have been around 2015. (When I said "Surface Book" I meant the original!)
Docks were bad, bad products in those days. They were no longer the dedicated bulky-but-reliable things of years past, or the modern finally-debugged dongles we've got now.
This was Intel's Alpine Ridge and it was hell. (At least, I think that was the one. Certainly, it was hell!)
> They were no longer the dedicated bulky-but-reliable things of years past
The old bulky-but-reliable things often enough didn't contain much electronics - it was often enough the raw interfaces exposed directly on these multi-pin connectors. Simple, stupid and reliable as long as no electrically conductive dirt was around.
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