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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

#551

Post by Frost1x »

absolutelastone wrote: post #500
regularization wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if it deals more with the approachability of software applications. If I even begin to think I’d compete with NVIDIA delivering similar hardware, I’d very quickly realize I was an idiot. Meanwhile as a single individual, there is still a reasonable amount of commercial markets of software I really do have some chance at tackling or competing against. As software complexity rises it’s becoming far less tractable than it was in say the 90s but there are still areas individuals and small sums of capital can enter. I think that makes the sector alluring in general.

Hardware is just in general capital intensive, not even including all the intellectual capital needed. So it’s not that it’s uninteresting or even a commodity to me, it’s just a stone wall that whatever is there is there and that’s it in my mind.

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

#552

Post by donnachangstein »

schmidtleonard wrote: post #543
donnachangstein wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the whole program may have cost the government maybe $10k total. Your numbers are off by an order of magnitude. There is no government program in existence that costs $10k total, you are almost assuredly ignoring overhead and all other costs. It's like calling a contractor to repair something, then crying foul when he charges $350 because you found the part on Amazon for $15. But let's assume it was $10k. >…

Money "wasted" by the NSF is far better spent than money wasted in, say, the Google Graveyard or any other monument to private malinvestment. This is because science has a value capture problem by design, making it systematically uninvestable by the private market, making opportunities plentiful -- and making it an archetypal example of a place where government investment has a role to play, because we can capture va…

This is an opportunity for private industry to step up and step in, while drastically reducing the size of government.

I hear the Juicero had an outstanding power supply.

For all the waste, some folks probably learned a lot about power electronics.

It seems odd to me that of all places, a forum run by a VC outfit, thinks a government jobs program to churn STEM grads with nonsense projects is the way to go.

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

#553

Post by Henchman21 »

donnachangstein wrote: post #545
beachy wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the American experience that decisions are made at the executive level based on faulty intelligence, while people working at the coal face such as yourself have a much better understanding of what's really going on. Case in point the Vietnam war, which cost thousands of lives because decisions were based on statistics from the field which had been heavily manipulated as they percolated upwards. Right now, just a…

[flagged]

These tariffs are designed to destroy the American economy and primacy on the world stage.

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

#554

Post by bitmasher9 »

Frost1x wrote: post #534
bitmasher9 wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I know you’re being facetious, but I think there’s some nugget buried in this sarcasm. One issue with our ever increasingly intellectual focused economy is that it leaves behind people who may just not be cut out for these such careers. I’m not against having these economies (I too used to work in supercomputing, with national labs), they’re very necessary, but we need to find a way for people who might not fit very…

I have a bit of a bias in advocating more for enabling excellence than accommodating average. I will concede we have done a terrible job at sharing the harvest, but it’s often the excellent that are responsible for our harvest being so plentiful to begin with.

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

#555

Post by beachy »

donnachangstein wrote: post #545
beachy wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the American experience that decisions are made at the executive level based on faulty intelligence, while people working at the coal face such as yourself have a much better understanding of what's really going on. Case in point the Vietnam war, which cost thousands of lives because decisions were based on statistics from the field which had been heavily manipulated as they percolated upwards. Right now, just a…

[flagged]

> If you don't like it: learn to wire wrap

Actually I know how to wire wrap. I last did it 40 years ago. Technology's moved on.

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

#556

Post by stefan_ »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #490
coliveira wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China will try but their credibility is low, which is the US's only saving grace This is your incorrect perception. The credibility of China around the world (outside the US) as a technology leader is already higher than the US. The current government is only cementing this perception.

I was talking about scientific research and specifically academic institutions. China only has a half-dozen of top academic institutions with high credibility: Peking U, Tsinghua U, Fudan U, Zhejiang U, and _maybe_ one or two others (Renmin U in some fields). There a number of mid-level unis, and the rest are low credibility (for lots of reasons). By comparison, the US has 100+ (you could even argue 200+) well respec…

I think you are missing a bunch, and the average one of those probably has 10x the grad students of a US one, working on in average ten times as important things.

(And then frankly half the papers from these vaunted US institutions have author lists that could equally be from Wuhan or Peking university, and a bunch of those will inevitably return to professorships in their native country, not like anyone is funding professors in the US)

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

#557

Post by coliveira »

standardUser wrote: post #450
coliveira wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I disagree with this perception that Trump is a "Russian asset", whatever this means, I agree that his whole goal in the second term is to punish the people who opposed him in the first term. He'll do everything he can to make their lives miserable for the foreseeable future, and he doesn't care if this will destroy the country.

"Russian asset" implies that the Russian government has compromising information on Donald Trump, or otherwise has leverage over him, which enables them to exert some level of control over his actions. People often point to the fact that, though Trump loudly and frequently criticizes our closest military and economic allies, he seems completely incapable of saying a single negative thing about Russia or Putin. As wel…

The fact that someone agrees with Russia's position doesn't immediately prove that he's an asset owned by them. All you said could be explained if he thinks that peace with Russia would be much better for the US than NATO expansionism, since it would reduce the tremendous cost of maintaining a war machine, put less money on the pockets of the war industry, and increase the opportunities for someone like him who wants to invest in real estate abroad.

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

#558

Post by fakedang »

Frost1x wrote: post #534
bitmasher9 wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I know you’re being facetious, but I think there’s some nugget buried in this sarcasm. One issue with our ever increasingly intellectual focused economy is that it leaves behind people who may just not be cut out for these such careers. I’m not against having these economies (I too used to work in supercomputing, with national labs), they’re very necessary, but we need to find a way for people who might not fit very…

Well they ought to learn to code /s

Or try out braindead jobs like HR /s

Jibs aside, the key issue is that a lot of folks just seem to stop learning after a certain point, even if it's their chosen occupation since decades. And it's not just limited to the factory workers themselves - how many of us have met a stubborn doctor unwilling to try out a new treatment mode, or a senior banker too stubborn to learn basic Excel functions. While those folks enjoy secure jobs regardless of their proficiency in modern technology, the folks at the lower rungs of the manufacturing ladder don't. Even if they do have the desire to learn, learning anew today has become an onerous process in most fields.

We really have a Continuous Learning problem that has to be solved here - helping people reskill or deepskill easier, if they have the mentality to improve upon themselves.

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

#559

Post by umbcorp »

donnachangstein wrote: post #545
beachy wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the American experience that decisions are made at the executive level based on faulty intelligence, while people working at the coal face such as yourself have a much better understanding of what's really going on. Case in point the Vietnam war, which cost thousands of lives because decisions were based on statistics from the field which had been heavily manipulated as they percolated upwards. Right now, just a…

[flagged]

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I'm new to PCB Design, I cannot afford to do $2700 mistakes, with PCBWay hardware is more accessible.

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

#560

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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