The impacts here are with food delivery apps, fitness apps, weather apps, cloud services, ad tech agencies, data resellers/brokers, etc.

Among other things this proposal attempts to prevent:

1. prevention of DEI related grants

2. prevention of grants promoting anti-american ideologies

3. prevention of gain-of-function research (think covid-19)

4. prevention of ai-powered social media censorship research

5. prevention of FEMA dollars going to help undocumented immigrants

6. prevention of foreign aid dollars being spent in africa on gender ideology

It would but restrictions directly into the grant awards give strong tools to the USG to suspend the grant and prevent the money being dispersed via a subrecipient.

will AI displace jobs: yes undoubtly. But it's not equal even across the tech sector. Outsourcing jobs are extremely at risk. Companies have been offshoring to vietnam, india, malaysia, etc for decades because they're cheaper to hire/pay than americans. But guess who is even cheaper then them? AI. so all the back office work will transition to AI. it's just a matter of time.

But it remains to be seen if corporations will downsize significantly due to AI. I dont currently see it. In fact the opposite is happening. The hype around AI is driving job growth not decline: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/data-shows-surprising-rebound...

The premise of this that AI will cause a catastrophic wipe out of jobs everywhere is FUD. In software we are much more likely to see the cambrian explosion of software companies and the de-FAANGing of corporate america as software development because easier. a pizza team of 6 can now create something amazing that might have once required a huge budget and organization. The consolidation of tech that has been happening since the 90s might actually be reversing.

AI is something that is empowering new modes of business. Think about how media has become democratized in the last 20 years and big corporate media conglomerates are struggling to hold the publics attention because its now easier than ever to publish your own movies/news. AI (i believe) will democratize things that are now held in control by guilds/companies/etc. And maybe this isn't such a bad thing.

there's a long history of X is dead posts. PHP is dead, Java is dead, jquery is dead, unix is dead, REST is dead, graphql is dead, microservices is dead. and of course none of those things are dead. but... they're great for clickbait.

i've seen a few interview types in my time:

1. technical interviews run by nontechnical or junior engineers who can't judge technical talent. this typically produces sub-par hires. imagine you are made the director of UX design and you have to hire someone but know little about the industry. what type of hires are you going to get?

2. technical interviews that focus on CS skills. can you write a red-black tree in Java? can you write a bubble sort in haskell? The problems here is that this has bias towards new CS grads that dont have much industry experience but just took tests on stuff like this in their degree. google pioneered this style of interview and it's taken off as leetcode. the problem is that experienced devs dont typically write bubblesort algorithms. this type of interview is biased toward younger out of college hires and codecamp hires that have little experience but gring on leetcode sites.

3. technical interviews that have too many opinions for a hire recommendation. this seems to be a new trend where you need 3 or 5 or 7 thumbs up to get hired and any negatives sink the candidate. this does raise the bar, but typically what i see is someone on this panel has a high opinion of his/her abilities and gives everyone they seem a thumbs down.

What i've found is that soft skills and team dynamics are > the technical accumen. I can teach you how to write go(lang) but its much harder to teach you how to influence your peers or to communicate effectively.

Experienced devs probably dont know how to ace your leetcode interview, but they do know how to influence and communicate and when to stay away from bad ideas. You dont get tested on these things. It's analogous to a being combat veteran. You've been there, you've done that you know how to survive. You might not know the new tech, but that can be taught. I have never seen an dev not be able to pickup a new platform/language/skill within 6 months of hire - anywhere.

Here's hoping this will get better one day but i'm not holding by breath.

US companies dont sell AI services in China (as far as I know) but deepseek markets to US companies and customers.

NIH has publish guidance: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-1...

It seems like the intent here is to prevent "subawards" going to foreign linked entities where the USG can't track it. The NIH is introducing a new linked award system where the foreign entity receives their own independent grant number and that primary on the application must be a US entity.

This introduces new activity codes (PF5 regular grant and UF5 cooperative agreement) where upon granting the new money the foreign entity will receive their own RF2 grant or UL2 grant (based on the original grant type).

Under the old system a grant to a US institution (like a university) could be doled out to foreigner institutions as subawards without the USG seeing where the money was going. This is a violation of FFATA and the USG wants to track these dollars because US universities are not reporting it.

Additionally the USG has grown increasing suspicious of certain countries (think russia, china) that are getting subawards that are effectively transferring US IP to these entities via pliant US individuals at an institution. This forces the PI to get a linked award and pull these folks out of the shadows where they are now identified and where the USG can run a background check on them.

This also deals with university outsourcing where an institution can get a grant and then simply pass the money off (mostly entirely) to a foreign entity where the US university became essentially a shadow distribution vehicle. Under the new rules to do this the PI must show that but funnel funds to a foreign institution that institution must offer something not readily available in the US.

Once a foreign funded entity has received money in this way and then violates policy, or breached security it falls on the university to police their grants (which mostly they can't do effectively). So the USG wants to cut out the middleman and for the foreign entity to become a direct recipient of the grant making them legal liable to the USG for all the terms and conditions. If you violate the grant the NIH can sanction them directly without going through the university.

So companies that have the ability to lay down, fiber do so in necessary cooperation with other providers to create a large patchwork across the country. This means that network companies have to cooperate with each other to send traffic back-and-forth.

It’s not realistic or feasible to have the US government generate a fiber optic connectivity for the entirety of every household in the United States. In fact, the free market was the only realistic possible to deliver this.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02768-9

A more interesting item in the slide deck is that anyone that has more than 2 hours of meetings in a day has a loss of focus. I think it's conceivable to say that a heavy meeting culture may also force people to be "obligated" to work after hours because they have lost focus time in the day.

This isn't how most engineers write software at the ground level though. Engineers need quiet concentration, free from distraction. Yes, there are hard problems that need collaboration to solve, but that type of interaction can be scheduled when needed. Far from needing to "bounce ideas" off other engineers, most senior engineers are pretty self-sufficient.

There is a different issue at play with junior engineers. They need supervision and that's hard to do unless your on a zoom call with them all day long. This isn't a new problem - it's simply a problem exposed by being remote. When we were in the office, all these junior engineers, were pulling productivity away from your senior engineers. Moving everything back to the office didn't increase productivity, it's actually decreasing it. Commute + sidebar conversations + mentoring junior engineers = less productivity out of your senior engineering staff.

There's definitely a "managers are from mars and engineers are from venus" sort of vibe happening here. Managers need that interaction and collaboration in order to provide oversight and provide direction. Senior engineers need a place to concentrate - and typically that isn't in the office where we have noisy open floor plans.