sseagull

My big question is where is that money going to go?

On the surface, I don't mind the program. However, the implementation is likely to be terrible as we have seen so far. The various agencies tasked with implementing this have already been gutted and are dysfunctional. There is widespread belief that the Genesis mission is just a grift to get government money away from academia and into already-wealthy businesses, and that the call for proposals was a way to mine for ideas that could be stolen.

I was one of the thousands of proposals submitted to the program, which we didn't hear anything about after submission. If the rumors are true, there will only be a pittance of awards this round. So yeah, I'm skeptical that this money will actually end up in the hands of actual scientists.

Congress does mandate things, but then never enforces it.

See https://www.science.org/content/article/exclusive-nsf-slashe...

(Long story short, the administration is slashing the budgets of various NSF divisions to make room X-Labs, despite the Congressional budget stating that is not allowed)

but is anyone actually willing to do anything about it?

They did. They elected Trump.

no major populist uprising against the dismantling of the institution of the presidency

Some people view the president as the only directly-elected person powerful enough to fight for them in dismantling the rest of a government that isn't working (or even actively working against them). So they implicitly want a strong president.

This only goes as far as the president agrees with them of course.

https://archive.is/Pk5EI

I remember having a computer and reading about how the CPU (486) could address up to 4 GB of memory. I thought that was maybe a mistake, since even my hard drive was maybe 100 MB, and I had 16 MB of memory IIRC.

I figured maybe they meant hard drive space (which I could kind of imagine being that large).

I don’t know how much it has ever been true, but it feels like today’s wealthy, especially in tech, have completely abandoned “noblesse oblige” - fulfilling social responsibilities that their wealth should bring them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_oblige

Archive Link: https://archive.is/mNP7v

The tension of feeling the actual need to use AI, but internalizing blame and guilt, is something I've noticed in my students and colleagues as well.

Obligatory XKCD

https://xkcd.com/1494/

“There is Mr. Geborand, buying a bit of paradise for one penny.”

(from Les Misérables)

I only use the Home Depot website, and it shows the location for me. Maybe it’s regional or something

Oh I’m sure we could commiserate about that. I think we work in vaguely the same area.

Unfortunately, getting money from industry isn’t much easier in my opinion.

We have some software projects we want to spin out into a small business or non-profit (because federal funding…), but industry is absolutely cold right now. Had a few very promising partners lined up, but it all evaporated last spring. Between tariffs, AI spending, and now oil, everyone is reluctant to spend.

The chaos is affecting pretty much all areas of science, not just the controversial ones. I work in non-controversial, pretty run-of-the-mill chemistry research and the attacks on the NSF have certainly impacted our funding situation. Very long delays in proposal review, complete pivoting to AI, etc. I have co-workers panicking over the green card changes. And the overall morale is pretty grim everywhere.

Edit: don’t forget how he’s forcing NSF headquarters to move. All the NSF, not just the “bad” research.

Almost everyone has entertained the idea of leaving the US for more stability, which is required for research.

The McNamara fallacy. One of my favorite fallacies vaguely related to Goodhart’s Law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

he said "you may have the right of way, but you'll still be dead if one hits you"

  Here lies the body
    Of William Jay,
  Who died maintaining
    His right of way.
  He was in the right
    As he sped along,
  But he’s just as dead
    As if he’d been wrong.

https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/18230

I thought the same thing. Just a few years ago, everyone here was proclaiming Poetry was great, the python ecosystem was finally tamed, pip/conda/setuptools was dead, and every project and developer needs to adopt it.

Now it’s just a has-been. The churn in python is incredible.

Over the long term, yes. However, universities like Buffalo might have some peculiarities. They are overall run by the state government, and professors/students/staff are state employees. In addition, the money that pays their salary often comes from the federal government (NSF, DOE, NIH) which comes with their own restrictions and regulations beyond typical accounting practices.

So things like reimbursements are handled by a university trying to implement a state government's interpretation of both granting agencies desires and federal and state laws/regulations.

My university seems to be going crazy with rules lately. My hypothesis is that the state, and by extension the university, wants to button down everything so as not draw attention of the federal government (given who is in charge). It's taking already stressed professors (funding cuts, etc) and piling on more stress.

This is one of the Five Dysfunctions of a Team (fear of conflict, caused by absence of trust).

Highly recommend the book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Dysfunctions_of_a_Tea...

I’ve been working on splitting an idea out from government-funded academia into an industry-supported non-profit. Universities kind of like that, and industries (at least in my scientific domain) are fairly receptive to consortium-type arrangements.

Of course, industry is pretty gun-shy right now too, due to the general economic conditions and AI sucking all the investment out of everything else. So it’s not going according to plan.

a commuter plane where the wings iced up a bit and the airplane stalled. The crew kept trying to pull the nose up, all the way to the ground.

There’s probably a lot that match, but sounds like Colgan Air 3407 in 2009 (the last major commercial airline crash in the US before the mid-air collision earlier this year in DC)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407

I went there and saw two hairs, and yeah thought it was a nice funny touch.

I then went back to HN and turns out one of the hairs was real and I needed to clean my laptop screen :)

That’s starting to change though

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-31/meta-xai-...

(Archive link: https://archive.ph/NBNEu)

OpenAI "spent" more on sales/marketing and equity compensation than that:

"Other significant costs included $2 billion spent on sales and marketing, nearly doubling what OpenAI spent on sales and marketing in all of 2024. Though not a cash expense, OpenAI also spent nearly $2.5 billion on stock-based equity compensation in the first six months of 2025"

("spent" because the equity is not cash-based)

From https://archive.is/vIrUZ

I’ve always found the pioneer, settler, town planner model to be a great way of thinking about this. Successful, long-term projects or organizations eventually can use all 3 types.

Maybe vibe coding replaces some pioneering work, but that still leaves a lot for settlers to do.

(I admit I’m generally in the settler category)

https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-to...

This made an impression on me:

https://www.spend-elon-fortune.com/

Buying all this stuff that seems expensive, but then seeing that it barely makes a dent in a truly wealthy person’s fortune.

Of course, he wants even more…

I'm somewhat split on this issue.

We already do have different kinds of organizations. We have "research universities" (R1 or R2) that give out PhDs and are somewhat like you describe. And then we have Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs) that focus more on education.

The risk you can run into is that dedicated education institutions can fall behind current trends, especially in fast-moving areas like tech. Sometimes the best educators are those that "practice what they preach", and you begin to lose that if you stick them in classrooms all day.

On the other hand, some of the best researchers are terrible teachers, especially those who don't really care about it and just want to focus on bringing in funding.

I think the split you have could work, however there must be a lot of incentive for cross-pollination of some sort, or else the teaching side isn't preparing students enough for the research (or industry) side.

I think the key part is "spirit" of the 1st amendment.

A better way to put it is that even if the 1st amendment doesn't apply, it's still against the ideal of "free speech"

You can still buy the console that can read physical games and buy the physical games and never plug it on the internet, right?

I'm not positive this is possible. I seem to remember times when trying to play a newer game on the Switch required a system update, even though I had the physical card. I might be misremembering, though.

Spot on, but this in particular

people tend to not live near parents anymore so they lose free childcare

For some reason I don't see this mentioned as often, but I've always felt it a significant root cause (among many of course).

Childcare is really expensive, but it used to be "free". I grew up with grandparents/aunts/uncles/older cousins available to baby sit me. But now very much of my cohort have moved away from our home region for better jobs. My nearest family is a 4 hour drive away.

Combine this with a strong individuality streak (less reliance on neighbors and community) and you have to turn to very expensive childcare.

Raising children without that support is very daunting, at least to me.

As a high school teacher would say:

“The good Lord gave you two eyes, two ears, but only one mouth”

Not in Rust, but I've seen it with Python in scientific computing. Someone needs to do some minor matrix math, so they install numpy. Numpy isn't so bad, but if installing it via conda it pulls in MKL, which sits at 171MB right now (although I have memories of it being bigger in the past). It also pulls in intel-openmp, which is 17MB.

Just so you can multiply matrices or something.