Comparing visa datasheets and application requirements will not give you the complete picture on immigration. I cant iterate case by case over every western nation here so I will limit my myself to the US since this is HN.

For most H1B immigrants residing in the US on dual intent visas, there is no realistic pathway to PR either, due to country caps and observation that one country supplies a majority of immigrants to the US.

Most H1Bs here spend their full careers in an anxious immigration limbo between USCIS, unreliable employers, power tripping border agents with 3/6 year renewals and periods of restriction on travel. Many who arrived to the US pre-2001 are still yet to recieve their promised green card. That is not practical in any meaning of the word. Immigration and PR into other western nation is an order of magnitude easier.

Many without the fortitude pack up early and return home, the USCIS does not account for them AFAIK.

Most immigrants get the same or better experience under the Z visa with minimal pretense and bullshit. The Chinese govt is kind enough to dictate reasonable terms. You renew every 3/5 years at the local visa office until you reach 60 and head back home. You arent treated like a criminal at airport immigration. The points system used for Z visa not a hurdle for anyone remotely compenent. It does not ask you to learn fluent Chinese, getting paid sufficently, having enough prior experience making grants enough points, its table stakes for most immigrants. If you want to reside in China beyond 60 you can figure out an avenue with immigration consultants, but it rightfully requires justification.

Peering into the future, net legal immigration into the US has passed its inflection point. As DJT admin looks into curtailing OPT, H1B and birthright citizenship I would say US is looking worse today than China in matters of immigration. Compared to just 2 years ago, 2024, nobody coming to US is expecting to stay permanently. That door has long shut. In contrast foreign student enrolement in Chinese universities is trending higher every year. Eventually this may lead to better terms to reside in the country.

China welcomes all skilled foreign talent to come work and take residence in the country with open arms. The process to live and work in China is open and transparent as in any other major Asian economy: first find a job there and second, apply for the visa. You can even work for a major Chinese multinational outside of China, provided that they aren't blacklisted like ZTE by the US government.

Don't enter with the expectation to naturalize and you will find you can do more than you think: go work for Baidu in Beijing, study in Fudan University as a student, or start your own business. Whatever you feel like mostly. Understand that you are on a visa and adjust your conduct like any immigrant in any western country understands.

Learning Chinese has amazing utility but most expatriates can get by without knowing a lick of it, my own family is living proof of this. Any multinational hiring a foreign talent will also hire translators for said talent. In day to day life there is no shortage of people in the city who can speak english, for the rest there are LLM's and translation apps. The Chinese community is behind on truly understanding life from the immigrant's perspective but it is adapting positively.

The most common objection from outsiders is the restricted access to global services like Google, Facebook, OpenAI, the easiest remedy for that is to just use a VPN. You can order a latte from Starbucks down the road in the meantime - or Luckin coffee if you want a better option.

A lot of the fear is unfounded. The local police station is not going to arrest you for accessing the outside world. You aren't going to lose a "social credit score" for being late to work, cutting a line or being obnoxious in public, the scoring system exists but AFAIK it serves as a tool in extreme scenarios, but AFAIK most foreigners don't get one.

Finally, coming back to intentionality of the restriction - most restrictions that irk outsiders are codified and enacted to protect domestic business and individual interests. Reasonable to heavy restrictions on curtailed big American conglomerates and services allowed for amazing domestic alternatives like TikTok/Douyin, BYD, Deepseek to flourish. Companies which provided keystone infrastructure the economy - like Visa - were deemed too critical to allow for a strangle-hold and regulated, for these acted as a foreign tax on every domestic transaction, thus Alipay and Unionpay were born.

I have already finished training the standard discriminative auto-regressive architectures by imitation learning on player actions, compared it with previous baselines set in the study. I want to match or exceed the best prior model Kakuna @ 142M params, but in a limited budget. JEPA style world models are showing promise when conditioned on actions [1] and frontier research on JEPA with trajectory straightening [2] shows that improved planning is natural outcome of improved representations.

If any good research ideas come out of this exploration then even better!

Currently fork with my models: https://github.com/sooham/metamon (under checkpoints) Orginal source for pokeagents: https://github.com/metamon/metamon

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19312 [2] https://arxiv.org/html/2603.12231v1

A good primer on world models from Welch Labs - one of my favourite ML youtubers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYkIdXwW2AE

I have also taken an interest in learning distributed paradigms like MPI and am using it on my own cluster of rPis