Exactly this. Top 1% of artists earn about as much as the average software engineer. Ranking people purely based on salary is turning h1b into a visa for people in specific professions.
Genuinely curious: why do we need H1B visas for artists? My understanding is that H1B visas are meant to cover highly-skilled work that can't be done by locals, and "art" doesn't seem like a field with a shortage of local candidates?
Interestingly, there's a whole category of H1B visas just for fashion models. H-1B3, which is for models with "distinguished merit and ability".
A famous supermodel can most likely get an O1 visa, for people of extraordinary ability. But agency models more commonly work on H1-B. Melania Trump is a famous example. These visas are tied to an employer and there's less portability. It's a two tier system.
Personally I think that there is some harm here. Agencies bring in young women from relatively poor countries and they are put in conditions where abuse, even sexual assault, is common and can face pressures to tolerate conditions and shoots that a local person with a safety network would not.
this also holds true for chemical, biomedical researchers, mechanical engineers working in deep tech, software engineering is such an anomaly that it's hard to do income based lottery without overindexing on swe market
If these other professions don’t pay as much as swe, then doesn’t that indicate that domestic supply is meeting those industries needs better than it is swe?
or it doesn't have software like margins so you can't pay insane salaries and you still need great talent that's not available in us (those salaries might be higher than normal but it won't match swe salaries)
Top 1% of artists have the O1 route, not the H1B route.
Tying H1B to salary is imo a reasonable solution for most companies. Thing is, in that case, most companies would simply resort to bringing in more L1 employees.
Yes, and the usual suspects already abuse it to move jobs abroad. If you had observed, it's often multinationals, usually Indian consultancies or companies with Indian Capability Centers, which abuse the H1B. They'll just be forced to switch to the L1.
The key difference here is that the L1 is a non-immigrant visa with a period of 7 years. The H1B isn't.
Why not filter it by ISIC&ISCO codes (if sector not in whitelisted ISIC code or job not in whitelisted ISCO code, automatic reject of company's immigrant worker request with return code "domestic talent exists")?
Why get hung out on the example profession and not the fact that some jobs pay drastically disproportionate rates?
Linus developed Linux, but we wouldn’t be able to hire the next version of him because hedge funds would dominate the high salary reqs in this hypothetical system.
In that case some technical aspects needs rework...
Currently O1 visa being a nonimmigrant visa have no path to PR/citizenship (unlike H1Bs) and need annual renewal. This make it unattractive to "who possess extraordinary ability".
Yes, but even for people eligible for EB1A (it usually has a higher bar in practice, EB2/NIW is easier but way worse backlog), filing a (or according to some lesser stringent interpretation, having an approved) I-140, will make you have immigration intent and thus illegible for extension of any nonimmigration visa.
So you apply for green card and if you don't immediately get it (particularly because of the backlog for some countries), you have to leave the US.
(I'm not an immigration lawyer and these are only my personal interpretation).
That’s not the case. o1 is not officially classed as dual intent but it mostly functions that way.
“Labor Certification Exception:
Under the doctrine of dual intent, the fact that a U.S. employer has filed a labor certification, or an individual has filed a permanent residence petition on behalf of the non-immigrant, shall not be a basis for denying the O-1 petition, a request for extension of stay, admission to the US, or change of status for that O-1 non-immigrant.”
AI literally produces more mesmerising art, for pennies, than an artist ever could, because their whole shtick was "out-there visual concepts", which was a wide open space of anything that's "not normal", which now and AI can pump out copiously.
I'd say this goes for a lot of developers too. The amount of push back I see online when Chrome implements something that was previously only available in app land is weirdly high. Like do you seriously want to write separate ios app for everything?
I don't understand how Google is willing to do this but won't sell TPUs to other days centers. It should be obvious from Nvidia's market cap that they're missing a huge opportunity.
The only reasons I can think of is they see them as their secret sauce, they don't want to support them for customers long-term, or they don't have the foundry capacity.
It's definitely #3. The GPUs have to first satisfy Google's own computing needs, and only then can they start selling them to others. Given how much training and inference the company is doing and how much demand there is internally it's very unlikely they are able to manufacture loads of extras, especially not profitably.
Would Google seriously have trouble raising the funds to build a chip fab? This seems like something they could do if they actually want to but I’d guess that would take actual leadership when they appear to have none.
Especially in today’s political climate, building this in a purple state would ensure longevity too. The Trump admin would probably let them break ground immediately if they had the plans and I doubt democratic leadership would disagree either.
If I was an investor and Google said they are going to now compete with Nvidia and TSMC I would take that as a sign they the leadership has completely lost the ability to see what their core competency is. Investing 100-200+ billion into fabs just to be on an equal playing field, is not it.
Would be a poor allocation of capital. Especially since, as they build up capacity for their own jobs, they get to see the excess to customers.
Not GP but... I have some doubt on Wikipedia data: I'm from Italy, living in France, and well... Italy is the ONLY (AFAIK) country in the world with a mean domestic electricity contract limited at 3kW, here it's common 36kW (12 per phase) just as a small comparison, so I highly doubt a mean Italian can consume 5MWh/year... Of course data per-se are the same Terna (the grid operator) cite, but I think they have computed something weird mixing industry and residential, because:
- in Italy only very few have electricity to heat
- A/C is still not that common
- BEVs are still not common at all
While in France electrical heating is definitively common, albeit not the sole source of heat for most.
Essentially: I think such data need much more proof on how they are collected before being trusted.
36kW is far from common in france. Heck, event 3-phase is not that common. I've never known anyone with 36kW except farmers. According to ADEME, 6kW is the most common with 70% of (I think) non-commercial subscriptions.
I'm in Alpes de Haute Provence, essentially al homes here are three-phase 36kVA to be precise witch is a little less than 36kW indeed. New homes tend to be 12kW monophase if there is no pool or EVs. Only apartments are 6-9kW.
6kW is the minimum you can get, the cheapest offer, but it's mostly a city thing. Not so small apartments are 9, old homes with new contracts vary from 9-12 mono or 36 threephase but while I have no general statistics that's still pretty common in the "countryside".
I disagree with the assessment of the title. It's specifically trying to not be evil and going overboard with it that got Google into this mess. It's almost fascinating how the values of one culture (Google's bay area centric one) differ so much from the rest of the world.
But it's all fake. It's generated images. I guess I don't understand what people want out of the fake image generator. It will never produce anything historically accurate as a visual medium, because the images never existed.
At least with LLMs generating text you are more clearly communicating ideas that are intended to be interpreted by the reader, not imposing a concrete visual representation upon them.
> I guess I don't understand what people want out of the fake image generator.
Plausible images.
> It will never produce anything historically accurate as a visual medium, because the images never existed.
Is there any photograph of Louis XIV? No, because photography had not been invented. But Louis the Fourteenth was a human being, and if a camera were sent back in time and placed in such a way that photons from the Sun or candles bounced off of his skin and hit that camera, on a particular day when he was wearing particular clothing, then the camera would record a certain picture. If I ask an image generator for ‘photograph of the French king Louis XIV’ that’s what I want. I probably don’t want a picture of a Chinese noblewoman, or a painting of a grapefruit, or a Mondrian sketch.
Okay, well what about things which never happened at all? I still want them to be otherwise consistent with reality. If I ask for ‘Vikings fighting an UFO’ there’s a lot of latitude for the AI to play with. The UFO could be a flying saucer, or a plane/jet/thing, or a rocket. The Vikings might reflect material culture from any particular time within the Viking era. Heck, given that the Vikings did travel there should be a chance for some of them to reflect descent from some non-Scandinavian parentage (a very very small chance, but not zero). Given that Vikings travelled, it’s not crazy for them to be fighting the UFO in Anatolia, or the south of England, or in Sicily.
But if the AI generated a picture of a merry band of polyracial Viking warriors, led by an African woman, three of whom are Han and one of whom is an aboriginal American wearing a head-dress while the UFO is an F-16 piloted by a white man — yeah, that AI would be biased, and in a weird and disturbing way.
Obviously once you go back 200 years 99.9% depictions have to be fake and once back 2000 or so years an outright 100%. And everything that we do have is also cherry picked and faked, by the original authors, but still fake. Pictures are cherry picked (and we don't have any going back even a few centuries) and paintings are outright fantasy.
Just look what a giant Napoleon is in all his paintings (or even the size of his grave)
Napoleon was not actually short it was British propaganda based on the difference in length between the longer French and shorter British inch. The British took his measure in French inches and reported it in British and mocked his height. In fact he was actually taller than the average Frenchman at the time.
Wrong, it's because being an animation artist is much more often a career of passion, which brings down the salaries in the industry due to increased labor supply.
