hdivider

The strategy for many folks will likely be to wait it out until the next administration when hopefully some amount of sanity returns.

The question buried in much of the detail: there is an indication this doesn't apply for H1B's and similar who work in the national interest or provide economic benefit (presumably substantial). Perhaps this allows an opening for at least some people.

Perhaps the people initiating this -- that is to say, almost universally either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants to the US -- would prefer something like the following version:

With silent lips. "Keep your poor, your tired, your teeming masses, too!

We’ve rewritten the laws, reframed the view,

To raise a middle finger straight at you.

Send your huddled refuse back to your own shore,

I lift my lamp beside the dead-bolted door!"

I think the main concern would be escalation, e.g. Netanyahu feeling emboldened to use his weapons too. And of course Putin, to try to shock Ukrainian forces and population (good luck).

Alliances might get reshuffled as everyone realizes they need to reassess their nuclear defense and deterrence. It would fundamentally change the nature of modern warfare, not for the better. Let us hope this never happens.

Let me articulate the thing which I believe is on many people's minds:

What is the chance the president will order a nuclear strike on Iran as this war proceeds?

We would hope the odds are vanishingly small, because doing so would be profoundly disadvantageous. But the same was true for initiating this war in the first place. The logic -- such as it is -- of some people in power may lead them to conclude once more that shock and awe can succeed. We've already struck the country with powerful conventional weapons at scale and it has not led to a weakening of Iranian resolve.

All the above said, my personal hope of course is this will never happen. I'm curious what other folks think however.

Even if clearly one side is correct without any doubt whatsoever, beyond any question? Such as 2+2=4 -- we should accept a situation where some people insist this is not true? It seems irrational.

I agree entirely. HN tends to be incredibly nitpicky and dystopian. I think it's because so many HNers work in dystopian software-only companies, not doing much in the physical world, away from the algorithms.

Incredible technological innovation is on the horizon. That's why we are not doomed this century. We can make it.

*hits 'reply', knowing there will be nitpicky comments because of course on HN these days, no positive point shall be left standing.

This is far bigger than people think.

So much advanced equipment is just sitting there in labs, waiting for humans to finally go and make experiments. Which they eventually get round to, sort of, when they can secure funding and when the grad student isn't ill or making mistakes or framing the problem the wrong way.

AI-driven labs can iterate 'good enough' hypotheses way faster than human R&D systems. Automated labs are going to be a major source of discovery.

Yes, precisely. And then as I anticipated, the "it works for me" stories, even here in this thread. Wish we could get past this steady-state in the Linux ecosystem.

Imagine a Linux distro largely displaced Windows and Mac simply due to usability, security, reliability, and the fact that there's no monstrous corporation pulling the strings. That would be awesome.

I really hope you're right. The challenge with Linux still seems to be practicalities -- like in particular, does Zoom run well on most distributions?

Reports seem to be of system crashes and degraded performance. I imagine there are lots of 'it works for me' stories, but think: for Linux to eat into Windows user market share (which I would greatly support), critical things like Zoom have to work at least as reliably as on Windows. For nontechnical users who would never figure out which incantations to type into the terminal to fix it -- because they have their next meeting in 15 minutes.

Here's a standard-structure, VC-funded, exit-oriented startup to consider: make video calls reliable. As in, you provide a guarantee and pay the customer if the call didn't work.

Wired headphones could be one part of the solution. They're just far more reliable (if they don't break, which they will). But if the reliability of video calls can be improved so that it's literally as reliable as talking to someone next to you in a quiet room, I bet lots of people would pay for it. There is so much latent frustration about unreliable calls, even with the best setup, even in NASA, in DoD, corporations, zoom and other platforms fail to perform reliably in so many cases.

I saw "cleanroom as a service" and thought great! Don't need to build a facility to do materials science or photonics or certain aerospace R&D...but nope, not that kind of cleanroom. :)

It's curious to me why we have no theory of intelligence. By which I mean an actual hard and verified theory, as in physics for gravity, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics.

Intelligence is simply not well-understood at a mathematical level. Like medieval engineers, we rely so heavily on experimentation in AI. We have no idea how far away from the human level we actually are. Or how far above the human level we can get. Or what, if anything, the limits of intelligence are.

This is a good counter in my view to the singularity argument:

https://timdettmers.com/2025/12/10/why-agi-will-not-happen/

I think if we obtain relevant-scale quantum computers, and/or other compute paradigms, we might get a limited intelligence explosion -- for a while. Because computation is physical, with all the limits thereof. The physics of pushing electrons through wires is not as nonlinear in gain as it used to be. Getting this across to people who only think in terms of the abstract digital world and not the non-digital world of actual physics is always challenging, however.

Wait till the Chinese land on the Moon first in this new space race. There will be a Sputnik moment, massive additional investment, and this will inevitably impact sci-fi. Just like in the previous space race, we had to fall quite a bit behind first before we wake up -- and then, we go all-out.

I also don't agree with the general dystopian or cynical view quite prevalent here on HN these days, frankly. It's always been so, but it seems to have gotten darker, such that I think a lot of old-timers like me pretty much avoid HN these days. It's not all bleak, especially when you get away from these screens and out into the real world. Looking outward, rather than inward, can lead to the kind of desire for discovery and progress which underpinned the Apollo era. The world out there is in extreme disarray too -- but to an optimist, it presents opportunity to do good.

Yes to both I'd say. The south polar region will be contested because of the presence of water-ice and abundant sunlight.

I agree there is a lot of chaos over there, and numerous challenges. But I don't see China collapsing anytime soon, nothing like the Soviet Union. It's going to be a long-term space race.

This space race is different for one core reason: China is more stable than the Soviet Union was in the 1960s.

If we beat the Chinese somehow, I don't think they'll just dismantle their space program and focus on Earth. They'll keep going, and they have the economic base to expand their program.

I think we're seeing the beginning of a new kind of space race. It's likely to be much longer term and grander in scale over time, as we compete for the best spots on the Moon and the first human landing on Mars in the decades to come.

Even that would be quite niche for OpenAI. They raised far too much capital, and now have to deliver on AGI, fast. Or an ultra-high-growth segment, which has not materialized.

The reason? I can give you the full source for Sam Altman:

while(alive) { RaiseCapital() }

That is the full extent of Altman. :)

This always reminds me of a fragment of lost tragic ancient Greek verse, quoted only in Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric:

Often, when the gods bring great prosperity as a gift for men

They do so not out of goodwill towards them

But so that their ruin may be more conspicuous.

Here's what I don't understand.

Developers who get excited by agentic development put out posts like this. (I get excited too.)

Other developers tend to point out objections in terms of maintainability, scalability, overly complicated solutions, and so on. All of which are valid.

However, this part of AI evolves very quickly. So given these are known problems, why shouldn't we expect rapid improvements in agentic AI systems for software development, to the point where software developers who stick with the old paradigm will indeed be eroded in time? I'm genuinely curious because clearly the speed of advancement is significant.

In short: yes. It can be done. Clean, almost limitless energy, funded in a way to provide effectively free electricity for ordinary people. Restrictions would have to be in place to prevent true excess, but regulations already handle such matters in other areas.

The ambient vibe of our time, and here on HN, is often really pessimistic. I don't believe such pessimism is realistic. Commercial grade fusion power will come, and we should push very hard to make it happen. It will change the equations at the core of the economy and open up whole new paths for technology -- far beyond the pure digital.

Excellent thank you. This helps an extraordinary person in need who currently can't afford legal services.

To everyone else: I've worked with Peter before and he's the real deal, and a pleasure to work with.

Hi Peter,

Asking for someone else: is the NIW category still backlogged? If the goal is to get a green card within the STEM-OPT extension timeline of 2 years, for someone who has very high achievements that fit either NIW or EB1A categories, which of these is likely a better option? I'm hearing some rumors that NIW can happen faster these days.

Thanks!

I think it's partly because we all just have way too much to do. Every day. All day. And the harder you work, it seems the more you have to do. On top of cognitive processing of all the ambient events in our time, which is a heavy load just by itself.

Most of the time, AI tools promise to be timesavers. So it's natural many folks look for shortcuts. We're simply overloaded, partly due to current situations generated by existing machine learning tools deployed elsewhere in the system.

A step in the right direction.

Wish the UK would have their version of the SBIR/STTR program too -- and open to all, not just Oxbridge and other elites. Mandatory small business set-asides, especially for large defense procurement, has outsized effects on innovation.

Are you seeing any changes in the difficulty of the EB1A, or is it about the same as in the previous administration?

Are marriage-based green card applications still being processed at some pace when the petitioner's spouse is also a green card holder? I hear these days this category is ultra slow with no option to expedite.

If so, yes indeed, fair point by him/her. It's up to ordinary folks like us to push against unfair tech transfer because yes, federal labs and research institutions would otherwise provide the incumbents an extreme advantage.

Having been in this world though, I didn't see a reluctance in federal labs to work with capable entrepreneurs with companies at any level of scale. From startup to OpenAI to defense primes, they're open to all. So part of the challenge here is simply engaging capable entrepreneurs to go license tech from federal labs, and go create competitors for the greedy VC-funded or defense prime incumbents.

I fail to understand the sentiment here.

This is the intention of tech transfer. To have private-sector entities commercialize the R&D.

What is the alternative? National labs and universities can't commercialize in the same way, including due to legal restrictions at the state and sometimes federal level.

As long as the process and tech transfer agreements are fair and transparent -- and not concentrated in say OpenAI or with underhanded kickbacks to government -- commercialization will benefit productive applications of AI. All the software we're using right now to communicate sits on top of previous, successful, federally-funded tech transfer efforts which were then commercialized. This is how the system works, how we got to this level.

DARPA is high risk.

ARPA-E is high risk.

ARPA-H is high risk.

Much of NSF is high risk, like NSF Engines, NSF Future Manufacturing, NSF Convergence Accelerators.

DoD SBIR/STTR is high risk. (Confirm it for yourself and look at this month's topics in https://www.dodsbirsttr.mil/topics-app/.)

AFWERX is high risk.

SpaceWERX is high risk.

DIU is high risk.

NASA SBIR is high risk.

NASA NIAC is ultra-high risk.

DoD Office of Strategic Capital is high risk, the kind of risk no investors would fund.

Investors scrutinize pitch decks and then do hard company due diligence which frequently falls through. And conversations die-off with no obligation to provide feedback, unlike in government. And investors will not fund true R&D. They fund scale.

So no, your statement does not hold.

Yes indeed, what a travesty. :) Or they may study misinformation, another affront to civilization itself, because of course we know exactly how it works in this ultra-fast AI era with several competing superpowers.