smspillaz

December 15, 2025 Canada enacted "Bill C-3", granting citizenship to people born before Dec. 15, 2025 with ANY level of Canadian ancestry they can document. (It used to be a "first generation limit")

This is misleading.

Outside the first generation, the Canadian parent must have spent 3 years cumulatively in Canada prior to the birth, otherwise the child will not be a citizen. That's not a threshold you're likely to meet with a few holiday trips here and there.

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne...

But they do meaningfully try to address this.

Almost every country in the west is tightening it's system. In the UK claiming ILR will take a significantly longer period of lawful residence, and a shorter time will require you to meet a high income threshold. It is nearly impossible to get PR in Canada now unless you are fluent in both English and French and have a PhD or several years of canadian work experience. The bar has also gone up in Australia too.

The reason why this doesn't seem to move the needle on the anti-immigration vote is because the folks on that side can always just move the goalposts and be the "true" anti-immigrant party. I believe these days Reform UK wants cancel all ILRs and start actively deporting long term residents who don't meet an ever raising bar. Its madness.

I'm a bit late to the thread, but I'll play the game this year (24.12.2026). I don't want any of these to happen, but unfortunately I think they might:

- US starts a digital services trade war with the EU. It starts out with tariffs on digital services provided to the USA. EU responds in kind. Google Cloud, AWS and Azure lose a lot of clients over this, but they mitigate the damage by restructuring their business to avoid the tariffs. The tariffs don't achieve any policy change in the EU and eventually settle on a tolerable level.

- Significantly more restrictions and tightening on the US Visa Waiver Programme, with a small chance that it is rescinded altogether. VWP beneficiary countries threaten to retaliate in kind, but never do, because US tourism is too valuable.

- China continues to overtake the USA in growth in tech and digital services related exports. FVEY gets very nervous about this, but in practice nothing is done because of strong consumer demand.

- Coreweave faces solvency issues and numerous AI companies fundraising are forced to do their next raise at a down round.

- AI job loss is revealed to not actually be real. The cause of unemployment really is finally realized to be economic uncertainty caused by high inflation, interest rates and international trade policy uncertainty. Potential digital services tariffs and AI boom collapse make the situation much worse.

- Significantly more momentum behind the HIRE Act, with a small chance that it passes. If it does, tech giants close their EU/UK/Canada/Australia offices and move the roles to India.

- Russia / Ukraine "peace deal" is signed, but will be broken by Russia based on some false flag. Russia's invasion and occupation of Ukraine unfortunately continues, but doesn't progress.

- MAGA aligned actors interfere in the election of another country.

- USA conducts a "special operation" in Venezuela.

- Weaponized AI generated disinformation and fake audio/video/images starts to become more common. A major news story will break based on AI generated disinformation. It will be disproven quickly, but not before it has had a chance to spread.

  Location: Helsinki, Finland
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Temporarily. Immigration will be easier in US (TN)/Canada /Australia. Not an EU national (yet).
  Technologies: Deep learning, though I'm seeking something very specific, see below.
  Résumé/CV: https://sspilsbury.com/hire
  Email: s@polysquare.org

Some papers I'm a first author of include:

- Compositional Generalization in Grounded Language Learning via Induced Model Sparsity (https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-srw.19/)

- Meta-learning from demonstrations improves Compositional Generalization (https://openreview.net/forum?id=hb3Et9tJSC9).

Some open research problems which might be relevant to what you are working on:

- Much improved sample efficiency for language-interactive robots or agents (don't need to train every single combination of different aspects)

- Compositional path synthesis

- Compositional particle or protein synthesis (eg, composing two separate subgraphs into a single graph by way of following some learned rules)

- Understanding why transformers can and can't do different kinds of compositional generalization

- Improved sample efficiency and generalization on many different language tasks in different language domains (for example, grammatical error correction, machine translation, semantic parsing, entity and relationship extraction).

One hard requirement is that we must be able to publish the research results of my internship such that it can be included in my thesis.

You need to pay taxes where you reside.

The key term here is "reside". We'll get back to this in a bit.

Professional athletes pay taxes to every state where they play a game.

You are confusing tax-at-source with residence based taxation. Which is fair enough because many countries try to do both.

For the purposes of these next few paragraphs, lets say that country X is your country of residence for tax purposes and country Y is where you happen to be performing some work temporarily.

Source-based taxation means that if you are paid from a source in country X (or the income you make has a sufficiently strong connection to country X), then you pay tax to country X on that income. Typically the tax is withheld by the payor as opposed to the payee needing to file a tax return. This is what applies to your example of professional sportspeople. There's a very clear link - you play the sport in country X, you get paid by the competition in country X and you pay some tax to country X. This income might also be taxable in your country of residence, but that's a different issue where tax treaties and paid-foreign-tax deductions come into play.

With remote work for a foreign employer getting paid into a foreign bank account where the work doesn't have much connection to the country, the link is less clear. For short stays, many countries will not consider this to be locally sourced income. See this example from the Australian Tax Office which answers this very question (https://www.ato.gov.au/General/COVID-19/Support-for-individu...). Note that in this case, you are still only paying tax on locally sourced income and not worldwide income.

Then there is the question of "tax residence". Different countries have different rules about this and residence is not "exclusive" (so you can be multiple-resident if you're unfortunate in how you set up your affairs). Tax residence in most places happens after a fixed period of stay in the country (typically 183 days) and/or if you have "residence ties" to that country. "residence ties" is typically a multi-factor balancing test, which includes things like owning real estate, supporting a spouse and dependents who continue to live in that country, having a fixed address in that country, having your essential social connections (club memberships, service subscriptions etc) run out of that country, nationality etc. Short non-successive trips to a country don't usually create residence ties. Most countries follow this model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_taxation#Source_...). Then there's Eritrea, Hungary, Myanmar, Tajikistan, the United States for which citizenship automatically counts as tax residence, but usually there's offsetting procedures and tax treaties to avoid double taxation even if there might be double filing.

Then there's the "working on a tourist visa" question. This is unfortunately a significantly more murky area, especially when it comes to remote work. A good rule of thumb is that coming to a country for the purpose of remote work and not for the purposes permitted under a tourist visa or visa waiver is possibly over the line, but replying to some emails, attending a few meetings via call, fixing a bug here or there while you're mainly on holiday is likely to be fine. Of course the safest bet is not to do any work at all, but if we were to apply some common sense here, it would be absurd that you get an entry ban for the apparent crime of replying to an urgent email from your boss or colleague while on holiday.

Then there's the question of payroll taxes and unemployment/health insurance contributions to be paid by your employer. I don't know very much about this, but I think a starting point in the analysis would have to be whether your foreign corporate employer is subject to any sort of personal or tax jurisdiction by the country that you're in at all. Maybe someone else will fill in on this one.

now we have even less freedom of speech inside the country.

Did anybody read this part?

I see a lot of comments along the lines of "well we're at war with you" or "you'll get your access back once Ukraine stops being bombed", with the justification that anyone living in Russia has the duty to "rise up" and stop the war locally. To be these responses seem thoroughly un-nuanced and flippant. Its absolutely true that to stop the war, you need to get rid of Putin, but its not clear that there's a connection between dropping clients and getting rid of Putin. In fact this is probably counterproductive and strengthen's Putin's grip on the population even further.

The usual mechanism given is "if we annoy the people enough, they'll rise up on the streets and demand change". First, this assumes that if you annoy people, they'll transfer their anger to the regime. This is only true for a subgroup of affected people; the rest will just be angry at the sanctioning party and direct their anger through the regime into even stronger pro-war support. But for the people who might be motivated to protest, its not clear whether or not their actions will be effective. Because we're talking about a dictatorship, individual action carries both high personal risk and is unlikely to be very effective. There are exceptions to this rule, for example, Marina Ovsyannikova, but ordinary people going to the streets and holding up signs is only likely to end up with more people in jail (and potentially more people conscripted into the army). There is also the objection that mass-protest will make a difference, which, perhaps it will, but that requires co-ordination and a critical mass.

The second thing to say here (relevant to what I quoted from OP) is that Mailchimp is infrastructure which is in use by the local resistance. By blanket cutting-off Russia, you're also hindering the local resistance as well. If one wants to take a principled stand, its probably fine to cut off regular businesses that have nothing to do with it (with the caveat that you might just make them angry at you), but throwing out the baby with the bathwater and cutting off the local resistance is just completely counterproductive. Due to the inability to make payments outside the country, their only options for replacement infrastructure are local, which are more likely to be under state influence and censorship. So now their only options are to shut down and stop organizing the resistance to the regime, or engage in self-censorship, which might as well just be shutting down.

From the looks of it, they're leveraging a fork of a library I ported from Compiz a few years ago (called libanimation). I'm quite happy to see this, as I thought it was a dead end and wouldn't get any users, but it looks like its been very useful to this project and I'd be interested to see where the development is continuing so that I can help them out.

Hey, thanks for pointing this out. I've added it to my list here: https://github.com/smspillaz/intuitive-math/issues/7

Thanks!

One annoyance is that the graphs don't render if they're slightly off-screen (and they render slowly/fade-in or something) so it can be somewhat annoying to scroll back/forth between graphic examples.

Yeah. This was an engineering tradeoff - there's a limit on the number of WebGL contexts (15 for Firefox, for instance) that can be running at any time so I had to turn off rendering of the visualizations when offscreen.

If anyone knows a better way to approach this, please let me know!

Hey, thanks for the feedback!

There are a few grammatical errors (missing word, missing comma) that are forgivable but I find that any imprecision in language is a big detriment for a student trying to understand an explanation. I tend to get hung up on those since, not knowing the material, I can't resolve ambiguities with context. Since subtleties are important in math it would be worthwhile to go over the explanations again with a fine-toothed comb to ensure there are no typos or amphiboly.

Yeah, this is a pet peeve of mine for sure. I am not very precise when it comes to written prose.

I was thinking of airtasking out a grammar check, since I'm pretty awful at catching my own mistakes here. I might just do that.

The visuals aren't always clear. For example, volumes don't show edges so it's hard to make out that you're seeing a volume rather than an irregular area (and which volume you're seeing). Also I think a caption to each image could be useful, to describe how the shape demonstrates the concept. Something like "this visual represents a shear transformation of the matrix described above", just to be really explicit and clear.

Great idea. I've added it to my list at https://github.com/smspillaz/intuitive-math/issues/8

Indeed. I think one of the thing I wanted to focus on as well in this series was explaining exactly where a lot of the formulas came from. It was a great learning experience, since a lot of what I was taught was basically as you said "here is the formula for the determinant and oh look, NxN determinants can be worked out in such and such a way if you just apply this algorithm". It was super useful to decompose why that algorithm works from a visual perspective. Same thing with surface integrals.

Thank you! This was exactly my motivation in making it, so I'm glad it helped you!

It probably could be, as long as I figure out how to get code splitting to work with it being a static site. Shouldn't be too hard. I imagine its just a case of pre-rendering all the routes and then uploading the whole thing to an S3 bucket.

Yes, absolutely.

I'm receiving lots of great links in the comments here, so it'd be great to cross link similar resources on this page too.

Actually, I think the issue here now that I think of it is that we do media query detection in on the React side to figure out which components to render. Really, we should just render a single component and have CSS to cover both cases.

Other sites do this, so it should be possible, though it would require me to change the react component that renders the sidebar (I'm using Atlaskit, but that doesn't have support for mobile responsive rendering, sadly).

This seems interesting, but I feel like it would be way more useful if you could drag to rotate however you want, instead of waiting for the animation to get sort of close to the viewpoint you're interested in.

Great feedback! I had been thinking of doing something like this but I was waiting on actual readers to mention it. I'll see if I can get to it this weekend.

I really like the visual representation of elementary row operations, but the intersection of the three planes is off their edges, so isn't actually shown.

Yeah, good point. In the last visualization we have a vector pointing to the intersection, perhaps a similar sort of thing can be leveraged there.

I found a bug (Chrome 65.0.3325.181, Windows): The scroll position is kept when you switch sections, so you have to manually scroll up to the top.

Thanks for the report! I think someone else mentioned this already and I filed a ticket on the github repository.

Oh interesting. What phone are you using? It should enter a mobile-friendly kind of view, but I haven't implemented that on the server side renderer yet.

Indeed - this is one of the main motivations I had for creating this. 3b1b is great, but I much prefer reading than watching.

Yeah, for some reason I saw 60,000(!) requests on lambda all at the same time so I guess it had a bit of trouble scaling up. A scraper or Googlebot perhaps? Should be all fine now.

Super cool, I didn't know that existed. Clearly someone else has had the problem I experienced too. I'll have to add that with a list of other useful resources on the site.

It is! I'll fix it later tonight.

Thanks for the feedback! I was a little worried that the explanations would fall back too much on formal properties, so I guess I've got a bit more work to do on the visualization side of things.

I actually got my inspiration to do this from the 3b1b videos. And I agree, they are very fine educational materials.

The gap which I'm trying to fill here is that 3b1b goes over the higher level intuitions but tends to skip over some of the details at times (which is fair enough, they're a pain to demonstrate through video and animation). The idea I had here was to have worked examples as well.

I support open borders and this is one of the points that I've grappled with for quite some time. I'm not convinced that the decision to move from developing country to a developed one is made purely on economic grounds. Permanently relocating your life is not an easy task. You pretty much have to give up all your social capital, all your community ties (which means that you could face ostracisation back in your birthplace), learn a new language, learn new cultural norms, spend significant funds on travel and relocation costs costs and whatever savings you have left will lose a decent chunk of their value due to exchange rate conversion. You also have no networks to exercise in finding employment in your new home and finding accommodation without any kind of reference is going to be difficult.

In that sense, the risk to oneself is so great that only a privileged few in developing countries who wanted to relocate would actually have the resources to overcome them. So for many people, relocating might legally be a choice, but it would be practically impossible.

Realistically, migration is only an option for you if you (1) have a job offer from a company based in the place you intend to migrate, (2) have sufficient funds + skills to cover yourself until you can find a job, (3) have family who can support you and lend you their networks until you can find employment, (4) have sufficient funds to start your own business. Incidentally, those criteria also form categories of US visas (H1-B/TN-1/E-3/L-1, O-1, Family Reunion, EB-5), though, they impose more stringent requirements than economics would.

No, you're not alone. There's actually an entire page maintained by a few economists on the case for open borders: http://openborders.info

A ballot paper that doesn't clearly indicate preference order or identifies the voter is counted as "informal" and removed from the pool [0].

I don't believe it is an offence to vote informally but even if it was the anonyminity of the ballot woult make it impossible to enforce.

In the last Federal Election the overall informal vote share was about 5.92%. In some electorates it was above 10% [1].

The AEC doesn't distinguish between votes that were intentionally invalid and votes that were unintentionally invalid. I used to work as an electoral officer and in my experience the latter usually far outweighed the former. I saw very few if any ballots that were totally blank, about 10-15 where the person tried to make a statement of some sort and the rest were people who did not understand the instructions and number every box.

As far as I can tell, elections in Australia are seen as something you don't really ignore despite your individual disdain for politics.

[0] http://www.aec.gov.au/voting/informal_voting/

[1] http://www.aec.gov.au/voting/informal_voting/division.htm

I like how the map shows the walking route as down 6th street.

What's the name of the project that you're working on?

edit: Looks like we'll never know ...

I actually created an account since I think I'm the younger version of you and I think your experience could help me. I'm in my final year of an undergraduate law degree, but I've worked in various programming jobs during my studies.

Did you go into a law firm right away after you finished studying? Or did you do some more contract work on the side first? How did you frame your experience in programming as useful to the firm that you worked at? How does it help you now?

I guess I'm asking because I'm somewhat at a crossroads with what to do with my life. I'm certainly feeling the current from law school trying to push me into firm work, but I'm not sure if I'm ready for that yet. I always wanted to do a startup around an idea I've been working on for a few years now and maybe travel around and pick up a few languages.

The type of work you do sounds really appealing to me, but I don't know if I can launch into it right away out of my studies.