they're almost certainly going to replace all the board memebers with political loyalists. the board members served six year terms specifically so they'd span multiple administrations and stay independent.

firing them all at once lets you stack the entire board with people. it's not about making science better, it's about removing the people who'd say no.

the "benefit" from his perspective is the same playbook trump admin has been running across every federal agency, he wants to replace independent experts with loyalists, remove checks on executive power, and redirect spending toward admin priorities.

the board members served six year terms specifically to insulate science funding from political cycles. that's a feature to everyone else and a bug to this administration.

could an AI native competitor eventually eat their lunch? sure. but "no new sane company wants to use their products" is a stretch when their customer count is literally still growing double digits.

i would not say "writing on the wall" at all.

when someone invents a new scheduling algorithm or a new concurrent data structure, it's usually based on hunches and empirical results (benchmarks) too. nobody sits down and mathematically proves their new linux scheduler is optimal before shipping it. they test it against representative workloads and see if there is uplift.

we understand transformer architectures at the same theoretical level we understand most complex systems. we know the principles, we have solid intuitions about why certain things work, but the emergent behavior of any sufficiently complex system isn't fully predictable from first principles.

that's true of operating systems, distributed databases, and most software above a certain complexity threshold.

i'm guessing most of the gains we've seen recently are post training rather than pretraining.

funny thing is quaternions had that exact same energy in the computer graphics community for years. after ken shoemake introduced them to CG in 1985, there was a long period of "why are we using euler angles like cavemen when this exists??". now quaternions are well known tooling for people in graphics and the mystique has worn off at least in that community.

Lots of stuff you could do. Adjust the system prompt, add guardrails/filters (catching mistakes and then asking the LLM loop again), improve the RAG (assuming they have one), fine tune (if necessary), etc.

ZIRP (especially the "double tap" ZIRP in 2021/2022) created this monster (bootcamp devs getting hired, big tech devs making "day in the life of" tiktok vids).

contractors give:

instant scale up/down without layoff optics

no benefits overhead

no severance obligations

easy performance management (just don't renew)

this mirrors what other industries typically do after large restructuring waves ... manufacturing got temp agencies and staffing firms as permanent fixtures post-rust belt collapse. tech is just catching up to the same playbook.