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NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

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Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#491

Post by rcpt »

lossolo wrote: post #452
zhivota wrote: post #295

I worked at two National Laboratories, Argonne and Idaho, on NSF funded internship grants. The second one turned into a full time job, again on an NSF grant. The first one was on supercomputing, writing proof of concept code for a new supercomputing operating system (ZeptoOS). The second was on the automated stitching of imagery from UAVs for military applications (at a time when this was not commoditized at all, we…

> I don't know how to describe what's happening here, but it's really, really stupid. It's just a cynical game to get the highest tax cuts for their buddies and sponsors. https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/05/08/congress/jo...

There are no tax cuts because of this. The money saved is a rounding error in the federal budget.

This is an ideological purge.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#492

Post by lmeyerov »

moralestapia wrote: post #405
zhivota wrote: post #295

I worked at two National Laboratories, Argonne and Idaho, on NSF funded internship grants. The second one turned into a full time job, again on an NSF grant. The first one was on supercomputing, writing proof of concept code for a new supercomputing operating system (ZeptoOS). The second was on the automated stitching of imagery from UAVs for military applications (at a time when this was not commoditized at all, we…

[flagged]

I started a company that makes a bunch of many every year based off of NSF research, and Nvidia is making even more based on our work that spun out. I'm not a unique story, yet they cut half the NSF budget and half the NSF-funded STEM grad students (NSF GRFP, ...).

So no, whatever the NSF was doing, we should be encouraging more of it, not half of it. NSF/NIH are much more valuable investments than billionaire tax cuts as they're some of the most valuable things humanity can be doing in general, dollar-for-dollar.

I try to avoid Left/Right topics, but as others point out, this one is more like Russian Talking Points for US Special Interest Groups, and beyond being anti-american, is anti-human.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#493

Post by hackyhacky »

lossolo wrote: post #452
zhivota wrote: post #295

I worked at two National Laboratories, Argonne and Idaho, on NSF funded internship grants. The second one turned into a full time job, again on an NSF grant. The first one was on supercomputing, writing proof of concept code for a new supercomputing operating system (ZeptoOS). The second was on the automated stitching of imagery from UAVs for military applications (at a time when this was not commoditized at all, we…

> I don't know how to describe what's happening here, but it's really, really stupid. It's just a cynical game to get the highest tax cuts for their buddies and sponsors. https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/05/08/congress/jo...

> It's just a cynical game to get the highest tax cuts for their buddies and sponsors.

Not at all. We mustn't forget that it's also a cynical punishment for universities who consistently vote for the wrong person.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#494

Post by unethical_ban »

moralestapia wrote: post #405
zhivota wrote: post #295

I worked at two National Laboratories, Argonne and Idaho, on NSF funded internship grants. The second one turned into a full time job, again on an NSF grant. The first one was on supercomputing, writing proof of concept code for a new supercomputing operating system (ZeptoOS). The second was on the automated stitching of imagery from UAVs for military applications (at a time when this was not commoditized at all, we…

[flagged]

Don't cry because [the United States has decided to turn its back on science and research and foreign aid], smile because we were great once :)

You didn't say "I'm glad you had those things". And if that's what you meant, then you are listening to this person's story as some personal tale of nostalgia instead of a reflection on what is being broken in our country.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#495

Post by unethical_ban »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #315
netsharc wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it possible that you still see the chance that the actions are being done in "good faith"? In my opinion you'd have to construct a lot of "visual barriers" in order to not see the "full picture" of what kind of people the current regime is made of, and what their motivations would be... You'd have to be looking away, because looking at it would mean admitting you've been wrong.

[flagged]

If it isn't happening in good faith, then you can't call it a "reorg". That's like shooting something in the head and saying you "reorganized" their brain matter.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#496

Post by kevinventullo »

sneak wrote: post #461
kevinventullo wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn’t anti-intellectual to say that most of what the US federal government does would be better performed by private industry. The problem is that industry is inherently narrowly focused in short-to-medium term profitability, and cannot be relied on to carry out work which benefits society as a whole, including many conventionally “intellectual” pursuits such as: educating the populace, or fundamental research wit…

Some industries are. Many industries do not. Pharmaceutical companies and aerospace companies are frequently investing in long term projects.

Long-term projects with a fairly well-paved path to monetization. If industry was willing to invest in things like pure mathematics, or deep space astronomy, or just generally subsidizing smart people to investigate things they think are interesting, we wouldn’t need the NSF.

The point is that the efficiency of the private sector is a Faustian bargain: it comes at the cost of expecting an ROI for the investigators.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#497

Post by anigbrowl »

bpodgursky wrote: post #258
mikeyouse wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social security is entirely self funded, has a large surplus in the form of the SS Trust Fund (that’s being spent down) and has contributed $0 to the deficit or debt. You should really learn the basic facts about something like that if you’re going to support cuts to the program.

The SS Trust Fund is numbers on a spreadsheet. It doesn't matter. It's gone and spent. The question is about real actual resource distribution. SS is drawing more resources from young people than it is giving back. That's an actual problem, no matter how many tabs you add to your excel spreadsheet.

Maybe you should have organized your argument at the outset instead of leading with baity statements and then trying to leverage the attention for your 'real' argument. I am sick to death of this sort of manipulative discourse. It's bullshit and wastes everyone else's time.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#498

Post by bitmasher9 »

zhivota wrote: post #295

I worked at two National Laboratories, Argonne and Idaho, on NSF funded internship grants. The second one turned into a full time job, again on an NSF grant. The first one was on supercomputing, writing proof of concept code for a new supercomputing operating system (ZeptoOS). The second was on the automated stitching of imagery from UAVs for military applications (at a time when this was not commoditized at all, we…

The upcoming generation will be plenty happy with factory jobs instead of jobs in supercomputing or science.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#499

Post by monero-xmr »

standardUser wrote: post #444
asdsadasdasd123 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every DEI program I've been involved in has had target quotas which put pressure on hiring managers to reach those quotas, but still "hire on merit". And then they hire a viz minority engineer who thinks translating a js file to python means renaming the file extension.

You are either lying about hard-number racial/gender quotas or you were working for companies that were flagrantly breaking the law. Did you whistle blow? You see, it doesn't add up, because usually when a company breaks the law so blatantly, it does so in crafty, shady ways intended to make more money, not in an attempt to create diversity that does nothing for the bottom line while also threatening the very existen…

The gaslighting here post-Trump is insane. I’m not going to pretend that “no white or Asian males” wasn’t standard policy during the DEI hysteria. Pretending DEI was “just all about merit!” is so absurdly revisionist. Pleaseeee

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#500

Post by absolutelastone »

regularization wrote: post #425
ponow wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ironic that the much more significant ultimate success of deep learning happened despite a lack of government funding, if Hinton is to be believed. The 90s were a neural net winter, and success required faster computation, a private success. I lose zero sleep at the prospect that there would be zero government robotics research funding. If the advantages are there, profit seekers will find a way. We must stop de…

Hinton and his students studied for years on US (and then Canadian) government grants. The year Alexnet came out, Nvidia was awarded tens of millions by DARPA for Project Osprey. It's an odd historical revisionism where from Fairchild to the Internet to the web to AI, government grants and government spending are washed out of the picture. The government funded AI research for decades.

I think their point is the billions in private investment which preceded those millions.

I think this is a common issue in computer science, where credit is given to sexy "software applications" like AI when the real advances were in the hardware that enabled them, which everyone just views as an uninteresting commodity.

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