The US isn’t what it used to be. It’s definitely not the best place in the world to live for quality of life, on basically any metric.
The requirement of being permanently obligated to pay us taxes on global income, if you have any kind of global mobility, is not worth it when you look at the situation objectively. The US is the only country that requires this, and signing up is voluntarily.
So while US immigration continues to act as though people will jump through any hoop they put up in order to be granted the extreme privilege of being able to live in the country indefinitely, it’s worth realising it’s not the 70s anymore and thats a goal many people are no longer optimizing for. In fact the opposite - the most talented people I know are all planning their lives to not settle long term in the US.
There's a term called "US Person". Many European banks will refuse to open your bank account if you're a "US Person" and require upfront declaration that I'm not a "US Person."
Reason? Because banks don't want to deal with the mandatory annual reporting of the "US Persons" to US government on regular basis.
Their solution? Don't have a "US Person" as your client.
I’m an American living abroad. I know a bit about this. Here’s my experience:
- The USA passed a law called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which mandates that any bank doing business with Americans overseas must report certain information to the USA: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/corporations/foreign-account-...
- When anyone anywhere in the world opens a bank account, the bank asks if you have ever been a “US Person,” and if you have been, then you need to provide documentation about whether you currently are or aren’t (typically showing a USA passport or proof of having renounced USA citizenship)
- For banks that will work with Americans, they have to report basic information back to the USA every year, which includes highlights like your contact information, tax ID, account numbers, end-of-year balance, etc.
- Americans also must self-report this kind of information via the FBAR (Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts, technically FinCEN Form 114), which isn’t too horrible to fill out other than the fact that you file it through FinCEN’s clunky BSA E-Filing system, which still wants you to install Adobe Acrobat Reader like it’s 2010.
- FATCA is primarily annoying to banks because they already have to comply with CRS, the Common Reporting Standard, which is basically an international standard developed by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) where participating countries automatically report each other’s residents’ financial information. The kicker is that the USA never actually joined CRS, so banks have to run a whole separate FATCA process just for a relatively small number of Americans living abroad, which is a big duplication of effort.
This appears to have been downvoted but everything is completely factual in what the parent poster said. I have literally been told by many banks they can't help me due to this.
People said the same when the $100K fee for H1b was introduced, and said that the US won't be able to fill the 85,000 spots. But there were 211,600 applications in the last cycle.
Also, your other 'facts' are incorrect. The US for example has the highest amount of disposable income per family, has a lower tax burden (despite your complaint about it) then almost all developed countries, and there is one more (small) country with global taxation.
Correct - it has significantly shifted the makeup:
1. Master degree holders increased from 57.0% to 71.5%
2. Average wage increased by ~30% (estimated from the massive drop in the number of applications from the lowest category.
3. The balance has shifted from foreign workers to students in the US (F-1 visa), because they are exempt from the $100K fee.
I actually wish HN covered this, as many people were complaining about H1b being abused by abusive software companies bringing in cheap labor. About how hard it is for students studying in America to stay in America, etc.
But now we can't actually discuss a topic without attributing it to a person, so if it's attributed to Trump, all discussions become a shitshow.
The extreme privilege of being forced to pay a major portion of all income you make, regardless of where you earn it, to the us gov indefinitely. And they make it hard for you to apply to do this. Crazy.
> being forced to pay a major portion of all income you make, regardless of where you earn it
If you're a US citizen living abroad you get a Foreign Earned Income Exclusion of $130,000 for 2025 taxes. So if your income was $130k you'd pay zero in US taxes. You potentially also get to deduct housing costs and get a credit for foreign taxes you already paid among other things.
If you're paying a "major portion of your income" as a US citizen living overseas you're probably pretty dang wealthy. Go wipe your tears with your bands of $100 bills.
The FEIE and foreign tax credits are just there to limit the scope of double taxation, and often they can't even do that much. Then you have to consider the cost of compliance, requiring specialist tax advice encompassing two countries; the difficulty of obtaining financial services because of FATCA; the frequent impossibility of saving for retirement because of the way the U.S. treats foreign investment funds (PFIC).
There's a reason no other country on earth tries to do this.
Boo hoo double taxation. Normal people get double, triple, quadruple taxed all the time. I get (at least) double taxed every gallon of gas I pump. I get quadruple taxed just having a roof over my head. My labor gets FICA taxes (a collection of multiple taxes), payroll taxes, federal income taxes, and potentially state income taxes. Your million dollar stock trade hit a few different tax jurisdictions, boo hoo. Miss me with crying about "double taxation" nonsense, it's a phrase rich people use to make poor people feel sorry for them.
> consider the cost of compliance
Oh so sad wealthy people have so many bags of money they can't keep track of them all themselves. Sounds terrible. Maybe they should sell all those assets and give the money away and rid themselves of such hardships. Send me a message, I'll take those struggles off your hand and relieve you of such burdens.
> the frequent impossibility of saving for retirement
You're already clearing more income free and clear from a US tax basis than most US households do. If you find it impossible to save for retirement after making probably far more than $130k (remember, the standard was "a major portion" of your income) then you should really think about how fucked the vast majority of your fellow citizens are.
It's pretty tone deaf complaining about how heavy all these bars of gold are.
> The requirement of being permanently obligated to pay us taxes on global income
Many countries have higher rates than the US and have reciprocal treaties to avoid double taxation. In practice it means many people end up paying zero taxes to the US. Of course it will depend on the country you want to reside in, but then what's the point of seeking out a US passport?
I would say some of the indicators are a little odd.
Some of them are questionable in terms of capturing the spirit of the idea ("violent crime" being the same in the UK and the US is a surprising one to me for example. It's capturing serious assault per 100k, but is then not considering murder as violent crime. You have murder later, but maybe combine / group them?).
Some are confusing because they are not clear politically: everyone wants less violent crime, but I don't know your politics and so have no idea which direction you have weighted net migration and asylum/capita.
To be perfectly clear. The US has a much higher standard of living than the vast majority of countries in the world and people from those countries hope to improve their lives by moving there.
The US has a lower standard of living than basically all OECD countries.
To use a sports analogy, the US is last place on the pro league ladder, while also being first place on the “everyone else” ladder.
I don’t think this captures the full story. The US has a bimodal standard of living reflected as a lower mean relative to other advanced nations.
It can be simultaneously true that immigrants to the U.S. from both advanced and developing nations both experience a higher standard of living than their countries of origin.
Immigrating to the U.S. with an advanced degree in an in-demand field: you likely will experience a higher standard of living.
Immigrating to the U.S. from a developing country without a particularly in-demand career: you likely will experience a higher standard of living.
> Immigrating to the U.S. with an advanced degree in an in-demand field: you likely will experience a higher standard of living.
And yet everyone here in SF has been mugged. Everyone has to deal with the poor air quality, crime, traffic, and a million other factors that impact daily life even when you are rich. Little paid time off, very short maternity leave.
I went back to Australia for the first time in 10 years, and even the guy stacking shelves at a liquor store had 8 weeks of paid leave, owned his own home, had a project car (a big V8), kids going to university, excellent healthcare even if he quits, etc etc.
Ordinary guy, better quality of life than many rich Americans.
> I went back to Australia for the first time in 10 years, and even the guy stacking shelves at a liquor store ... owned his own home
Australia is having the exact same situation with housing as most of the cities in the US right now and Australia lacks the rural population where things are affordable so this seems incredibly unbelievable to me.
Absolutely Australia has a huge housing crunch. No getting around that.
But everyone has healthcare. Everyone has university. Minimum wage is way, way higher than the US. Employee protections are huge (at will employment is criminal). Even the worst jobs have great paid time off and maternity leave.
Overtime is paid, by law. Working 60 hours a week is unheard of.
The US is the best place you _can_ immigrate to (at least until a few days ago) from a lot of different perspectives.
Poor people from the countries you mentioned won't be let into the countries with strong safety nets so, you can compare what it's like to be a poor Swede and a poor American but a poor Venezuelan has a 0% chance of becoming Swedish.
A well off Swede would likely make significantly more money in the US and doesn't really benefit much from the social safety net anyway, aside from healthcare, which, despite the price, is also better in the US.
Anyone in the world who is looking to leave their home country for more opportunity probably has the US high up on the list of places they'd consider going to that they'd actually be able to go to..
Literally how could he possibly know that? He's just saying racist things because he's obviously a racist. Haitian immigrants aren't eating cats or dogs either, we need to stop listening to him as an authority on anything. If Donald Trump is saying something, you should automatically assume it's a lie. Any other course of action isn't reasonable.
The other thing people don’t understand is exponential curves are self similar. The start of an exponential looks like an exponential. People always look at and think ‘well that’s it it’s exponential now, have missed it, can’t sustain’. Nope.
Good example of this is number of submissions to neurips/icml/iclr. In 2017 that curve was exponential.
Whether it’s actually 20% or not doesn’t matter, everyone is aware the signal of the top confs is in freefall.
There are also rings of reviewer fraud going on where groups of people in these niche areas all get assigned their own papers and recommend acceptance and in many cases the AC is part of this as well. Am not saying this is common but it is occurring.
It feels as if every layer of society is in maximum extraction mode and this is just a single example. No one is spending time to carefully and deeply review a paper because they care and they feel on principal that’s the right thing to do. People did used to do this.
The argument is that there is no incentive to carefully review a paper (I agree), however what used to occur is people would do the right thing without explicit incentives. This has totally disappeared.
The concept of the professional has been basically obliterated in our society. Instead we have people doing engineering, science, and doctoring as, just, jobs. Individual contributors of various flavors to be shuffled around by middle management.
Without professions, there are no more professional communities really, no more professional standards to uphold, no reason to get in the way of somebody’s publications.
It is soundly unfair and unjustified to extrapolate the ML community to all professions. What is happening in the ML world is the exception, not the norm, and not some fundamental failing of society.
I don’t think it’s an extrapolation from the ML community into other industries.
This evolution of society is objectively happening - artisanship, care for the work beyond capital gain, and commitment to depth in a focused category - are diminishing and harder to find qualities. I’d probably label it related to capital and material social economics.
It’s perhaps more unfair and unjustified to not recognize this as a real societal issue and claim it only exists in the ML community.
She opens with an example of a bank. She walked in and asked for a debit card. The teller told her to take a seat. 30 minutes later, the teller told her the bank doesn't issue debit cards. Firstly, what kind of bank doesn't issue debit cards, and secondly, what kind of bank takes 30 minutes to figure out whether or not it issues debit cards? And this is just one of many examples of things that society does that have no reason not to work, that should have been selected away long ago if they did not work - that bank should have been bankrupt long ago - but for some reason this is not happening and everything is just getting clogged with bullshit and non-working solutions.
It's because people are commodities now. Human resources exists to manage the shuffle between warm bodies.
It's back to OP's point. There's no such thing as professions now. Just jobs. We put them on and off like hats. With that churn comes lack of institutional knowledge and a rule set handed down from the C Suite for front line employees completely detached from the front line work.
But even given that, how is it that everything doesn't work very well?
The normal functioning of markets would be that badly-working things are slowly driven out, while well-working things grow and replace them. Even without any reference to financial markets, this is simply what you expect to happen when people have a variety of things to choose from.
I could hypothesize that markets have evolved to the point where it's impossible for new things to grow unless they are already shit. Perhaps because everyone's too busy working for the shit things (which is partly because the government keeps printing money to the previously successful things in order to prevent the economy collapsing and therefore landlords got to charge exorbitant rent) or perhaps because they just don't have any money because of the above, and can only afford the cheap shit things (but a lot of the shit things are expensive?) or perhaps because people are afraid to start new things because they're afraid of the government (I've observed that not infrequently on HN, also something something testosterone microplastics) or perhaps because advertising effectiveness has reached the point where new things never become discoverable and stay crowded out as old things ramp up advertisement to compensate or perhaps we're just all depressed (because of the housing market probably).
Things might be shit in interesting and scary new ways, but there is no such thing as "the good ole days". Our mind wants to believe that things could go back to "how they used to be", "when it was better" but it's a fantasy.
It's an inability to face the cognitive dissonance and accept things as they are -- which is different than what we wanted! Boo hoo.
We all do this constantly everyday, some more than others :)
That said, humans are quite good at getting by even when things are shit. We've been doing it for untold eons.
Perhaps the only thing more impressive is how good we are at complaining about it all! Heh.
It's a poor extrapolation. The issues with the ML community have more to do with the exponential growth of the "AI" industry, the resulting flow of capital, and the outsized role these conferences provide for establishing a researchers value to the industry. These conditions are fairly unique.
I would propose that the evolution you speak of is more related to our technology (and I am not just saying AI, far from it) and how it is now possible to perform the very minimum requirements of a task with little effort.
I don’t disagree that technology is allowing a new low bar for minimal allowable effort. This is true in a world where the same technology could enable one to deliver amazing things.
I’m speaking more generally and I think you describe the exact problem in your clarification which boils down to “people are chasing money and doing whatever it takes in ML, where the money currently is”. I was stopping at the fact that “people […] chasing money and doing whatever it takes” has become the general personal pursuit, quality/depth/care be damned.
If the Zucc has a weird day he starts dropping 10-100M salary packages in order to poach AI researchers. No wonder the game is getting rigged up the butthole.
to some degree this is a "market correction" on the inherent value of these papers. There's way too many low-value papers that are being published purely for career advancement and CV padding reasons. Hard to get peer reviewers to care about those.
> spending time to carefully and deeply review a paper because they care and they feel on principal that’s the right thing to do
Generally agree, although several parts of that issue.
One of the first was covered by a paper back in 2023 that speaks to the issue about maximum extraction mode. [1] Fairness, honesty, and loyalty are usually rewarded with exploitation. If you spend time to carefully and deeply review the paper, then that ironically marks you as someone that can be exploited. You're implicitly marked as someone who will make personal sacrifices for the academic community and allow even more awful behavior to be piled on top of you. Unless they're caught with something especially egregious, the people that don't, get promoted, spend less time on reviews, and get further rewards.
The academic community has talked about this a bunch for years. Editors / reviewers that don't paid, or get minimal payment, and sacrifice large amounts of their personal time effectively volunteering, while authors pay $1000's for each paper submitted, and then journals charge $10,000's for each subscription. It's been talked about for decades, and yet in all that time, very little has actually occurred to change the situation.
Another part on top of the "deeply reviewing papers" is that the sheer volume has massively increased (which has been an issue in a bunch of industries, sci-fi compilation Clarkesworld broke for quite a while in 2023 for similar reasons [2]). In the land of "type a sentence, and get a free academic paper" the extremely prolific are pouring out a paper a month, sometimes greater amounts. In areas like clinical medicine, hyper-prolific publishing has hit 70+ papers a year rates. [3] ~1.5 papers a week. Every few days somebody cranks out yet another paper that needs to be reviewed. In the article linked, one author had 140 articles to a single journal alone. Almost 3 times a week, all year long, you've got a paper claiming research worthy of publishing you need to review.
One that I have less direct, citeable proof for, yet am rather suspicious of, is that theft has also dramatically increased with a huge surge in invasive monitoring and snooping. If my TV changes what I'm watching, and what's recommended, because I typed a text message to somebody, it seems likely that a lot of academia is also dealing with massive intellectual theft issues. This then heavily prioritizes pouring out material as quickly as possible, with as little effort as possible, to get the equivalent of first post and maximal posts, before it can be scraped, exfiltrated, and published by somebody else.
Finally, a lot of the reward and incentive has become metric chasing. Publish or Perish [4] and the Replication Crisis [5] are relatively well known ideas. Citation is a proxy of the impact of a paper, tenure and advancement is heavily related to quantity of publications and citations, and researchers would prefer to be cited more. And weirdly, if it does not work, and it's junk work, in a theme with the above, then it has been suggested nonreplicable publications are cited more than replicable ones [6]. In the linked paper, the view is that when "interesting" findings are published, they get more views, more media, more citations, and lower review standards get applied. And afterward there's very little social punishment for proving the results are false and not replicable (or reward for those illustrating lack of reproducability). Notably, the paper actually got a counterpoint stating that in psychology at least, lack of replication eventually predicts citation decline [7] (cited by 10), while the original actually got its authors ~250 citations, and a bunch of media mentions.
That’s a lot of money on tap, 99.99% of US organizations have less than $1Bn in reserves.
Even among educational institutions there’s a 19+k private schools and 5,300 universities in the US. The vast majority of them don’t operate anywhere close to that scale.
Consider adding for or five more 9s to that. There are 50+ million corporations in the county, and then you need to add all the churches, clubs and nonprofits.
My 4 nines + your 4 or 5 nines = 1 in 100 million to 1 in 1 billion.
Even adding all the churches, clubs, and nonprofits I don’t think it’s that rare. The Mormon church for example has ~293 billion in assets. Even the Church of Scientology is apparently worth ~2 billion.
Maybe 1 in 10 million? What do you think the numerator in denominator are here? I'm guessing less than a hundred organizations with a billion dollars in reserve.
There are less than 2,000 us companies with a billion dollar market cap, out of ~40 million companies.
I expect the reserves would be a substantially less than that. Maybe somewhere in the ballpark of low triple digit organizations with a billion+ dollar reserve. Maybe 200 nationally?
IMO, it’s going to be in the thousands to 10’s of thousands. Depending on what organizations you exclude and if you’re considering total assets vs net assets vs liquid assets etc.
There’s a surprising number of individual buildings worth 1+ billion each of which are going to be their own org. Add pensions, trusts, nuclear reactors, large dams, government organizations, etc.
Sure, if we assume that the total budget for the 17 national labs is $14B, that would imply that the average lab is a bit less than $1B/year to run. Hence $40B can run an "average" lab for around 50 years. Or am I missing your point?
I don’t think people understand the point sutton was making; he’s saying that general, simple systems that get better with scale tend to outperform hand engineered systems that don’t. It’s a kind of subtle point that’s implicitly saying hand engineering inhibits scale because it inhibits generality. He is not saying anything about the rate, doesn’t claim llms/gd are the best system, in fact I’d guess he thinks there’s likely an even more general approach that would be better. It’s comparing two classes of approaches not commenting on the merits of particular systems.
It occurs to me that the bitter lesson is so often repeated because it involves a slippery slope or moot-and-castle argument. IE, the meaning people assign to the bitter lesson ranges between all the following:
General-purpose-algorithms-that-scale will beat algorithms that aren't those
The most simple general purpose, scaling algorithm will win, at least over time
> I don’t think people understand the point sutton was making; he’s saying that general, simple systems that get better with scale tend to outperform hand engineered systems that don’t
This is your reading of Sutton. When I read his original post, I don't extract this level of nuance. The very fact that he calls it a "lesson" rather than something else, such as a "tendency", suggests Sutton may not hold the idea lightly*. In other words, it might have become more than a testable theory; it might have become a narrative.
* Holding an idea lightly is usually good thing in my book. Very few ideas are foundational.
Yep this article is self centered and perfectly represents the type of ego Sutton was referencing. Maybe in a year or two general methods will improve the author's workflow significantly once again (eg. better models) and they would still add a bit of human logic on top and claim victory.
The point about training data stands. We usually only think of scaling compute, but we need to scale data as well, maybe even faster than compute. But we exhausted the source of high quality organic text, and it doesn't grow exponentially fast.
I think at the moment the best source of data is the chat log, with 1B users and over 1T daily tokens over all LLMs. These chat logs are at the intersection of human interests and LLM execution errors, they are on-policy for the model, right what they need to improve the next iteration.
Article doesn’t say jobs aren’t about to be evicerated, says this is already happening and it’s due to capitalism, a lack of consumer protections and we require more government regulation. This never made any sense to me because we don’t have to guess how this would go - the experiment is being run in Europe right now.
Also the core of the argument is wrong, ai is clearly displacing jobs this is happening today.
The reason for this is it’s horrifying to consider that things like the Ukrainian war didn’t have to happen. It provides a huge amount of phycological relief to view these events as inevitable. I actually don’t think as humans are even able to conceptualise/internalise suffering on those scales as individuals. I can’t at least.
And then ultimately if you believe we have democracies in the west it means we are all individually culpable as well. It’s just a line of logic that becomes extremely distressing and so there’s a huge, natural and probably healthy bias away from thinking like that.
I think the better analogy is if you had someone with a superhuman, but not perfect memory read a bunch of stuff, then you were allowed to talk to the person about the things they’d read, does that violate copyright? I’d say clearly no.
Then what if their memory is so good, they repeat entire sections verbatim when asked. Does that violate it? I’d say it’s grey.
But that’s a very specific case - reproducing large chunks of owned work is something that can be quite easily detected and prevented and I’m almost certain the frontier labs are already going this.
So I think it’s just very not clear - the reality is this is a novel situation, the job of the courts is now to basically decide what’s allowed and what’s not. But the rational shouldn’t be ‘this can’t be fair use it’s just compression’. Because it’s clearly something fundamentally different and existing laws just aren’t applicable imo
That's not a great analogy. A person is expected to use their discretion, and can be held legally liable for their actions. A machine is not, and cannot.
> Then what if their memory is so good, they repeat entire sections verbatim when asked. Does that violate it? I’d say it’s grey.
That's an unambiguous "yes". Performing a copyrighted play or piece of music without the rights to do so is universally considered a copyright violation, even if the performers are performing from memory. It's still a copyright violation if they don't remember their parts perfectly and have to ad-lib sometimes, or if they don't perform the entire work from start to finish.
Completely agree and think it’s a great summary. To summarize very succinctly; you’re chasing a moving target where the target changes based on how you move. There’s no ground truth to zero in on in value-based RL. You minimise a difference in which both sides of the equation have your APPROXIMATION in them.
I don’t think it’s hopeless though, I actually think RL is very close to working because what it lacked this whole time was a reliable world model/forward dynamics function (because then you don’t have to explore, you can plan). And now we’ve got that.
The requirement of being permanently obligated to pay us taxes on global income, if you have any kind of global mobility, is not worth it when you look at the situation objectively. The US is the only country that requires this, and signing up is voluntarily.
So while US immigration continues to act as though people will jump through any hoop they put up in order to be granted the extreme privilege of being able to live in the country indefinitely, it’s worth realising it’s not the 70s anymore and thats a goal many people are no longer optimizing for. In fact the opposite - the most talented people I know are all planning their lives to not settle long term in the US.
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