1/ The Fairness of High-Skilled Immigrants Act, 2019, or #HR1044/#S386, which would've removed country caps on green cards in the US for Indian and Chinese nationals, particularly bringing the wait time for Indians from 150yrs to ~10...
2/ ... was blocked in the Senate by Sen. Dave Perdue after bipartisan support in the House. If you were Indian and moved to the US for an undergraduate degree in 2001, you'd be 36, have spent half your life in the country and not have a green card.
3/ You might be married with kids but if you lose your job, you might have to leave your family after paying for a college degree and 14yrs worth of usually fairly high taxes. Isn't that absurd?
4/ Despite being Indian, and a beneficiary of this bill, there are problems with this bill. One, most Indians in the backlog are not high skilled tech workers, but cheap outsourced labour from IT consultancies like Wipro and Infosys.
5/ Two, without a smoother cap removal transition plan, this would essentially flood the green card quota with Indians for the next ~10yrs, throttling competent candidates of other nationalities.
6/ If those two issues are fully addressed, I this bill will be unanimously favored and @sendavidperdue will let it pass and hopefully Trump will sign it!
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No one talks about the real reason driving the ~500k tech layoffs.
Section 174 in the 2017 tax cuts turned engineer salaries from an instant tax deduction into a 5yr write off, causing billions in tax bills.
It even incentivizes offshoring R&D, which has a 15yr write off!
1/4
The numbers are staggering:
— Microsoft: Paid extra $4.8 BILLION in taxes, fired 16,000+ workers
— Meta: Cut 21,000 employees (25% of workforce) after "material" tax increases
— Amazon: 27,000 layoffs concentrated in R&D teams
— Google: 12,000 cuts despite record profits
2/4
A software company with $1M revenue and $1M in engineer salaries suddenly owed $189,000 in taxes on ZERO profit.
Small, low margin companies got crushed the worst.
3/4
Karpathy today said Cursor for Slides needs to exist.. but it already does.
When asked to "Create a detailed data-driven slide deck based on Google's recent financial filings",
It created a stunning 6 page deck with graphs, diagrams IN Google theme!
It's called Genspark.
It thinks about the plan of each slide, and it does this unique thing where it generates graphics in Python (matplotlib) and then moves the assets into a landscape static HTML website that it compiles into a slide.
Pretty neat tactic.
It allows pointed edits on slide elements with "Select to edit" and has a nifty drill-down Fact check tool too.
The few numbers I checked passed the sniff test too.
If these 3 Japanese companies you've never heard of went down, all modern digital infrastructure (and every AI breakthrough) would grind to a halt.
Here's the story of JSR, Tokyo Ohka Kogyo (TOK) and Shin-Etsu, the most important companies you've never heard of...
1/7
These 3 control 80% of the global EUV photoresist market.
Photoresists are exotic light-sensitive chemicals that enable the patterning of circuits on silicon wafers when UV or EUV light hits these materials through a mask.
How did they achieve this dominance?
2/7
The chemistry is insanely complex.
They use ~30-50 proprietary compounds and 1000s of patents. It responds to extreme ultraviolet light at 13.5nm wavelengths.
The patterns are smaller than DNA strands and require decades of expertise.
🚨 This was the BEST Google I/O that I can remember.
Google launched over 12 different insane things.
Here is every single one of the launches and the best tweets about them:
1/12
The future of building software.
LLMs are pretty good at generating code, but they're slow. Gemini Diffusion is 10-15x faster than autoregressive models by using diffusion, which used to be for images. This is the 2nd model after Mercury Small to show this.
Google, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, Meta, Nvidia and Palantir - the biggest tech employers have collectively stagnated headcount, data shows.
This is why CS majors can’t get jobs. Bigtech hypergrowth era is over.
Here's why:
1/4
— They overhired in the pandemic (2020-2022) during zero interest rates
— Revenue growth of several consumer software products peaked in the pandemic but slowed after it was over
— Higher interest rates force CFOs to juice operating margin
2/4
— Cost of capital shot up and many had to place high capex bets in gen AI infra (chips)
— AI productivity gains
Is this the new normal? Does Microsoft having 400k vs 200k people actually 2x the business?