Posts by bertkaye 65 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2017
The H1-B arena has been massively corrupt for many years. In Silicon Valley I had several go-arounds with rep Anna Eshoo, a major supporter of the fraud. To her, none of the major employers could do no wrong. To stop the abuse we need to get rid of the grifters. In California however, you cannot become a politician without embracing the grift machine.
The Windows operating system user interface has been prettified but the functionality is still low end crudity. A proper operating system UI would give users great power to set up customized views of file data, but even Win11 is still primitive in that regard. The VR world is developing better ways to see data.
In the middle of the night the mutant tomatoes silently extricated themselves from the sample cabinet and went on the prowl. The next morning a technician found the night guard drained of blood and with a look of terror on his petrified face. Shortly thereafter a loud sound was heard and a blue box materialized in the space lab room.
"Have a jelly baby?" a tall man with a scarf offered to the astonished technician. "They're very good."
There is also identity theft through fake recruiters. I have been scammed multiple times before I started enforcing strict rules for myself. In these, things proceeded to a 'contract' and I submitted requested identity information. Then the recruiter vanished and the company ghosted all contact. Now I demand ironclad proof of authenticity which I check.
This article hits the mark - I am in AI and what I see is that the field currently is on a false trail that will indeed hit a wall. True AGI lies on a different path, but 90% of today's researchers - especially the big corp teams -- fail to integrate the necessary multiple fields needed to design an AGI. A good AGI architecture must put together philosophy, linguistics, psychology, mathematics, knowledge theory, and more, and throw out the idea that artificial neural nets will best get us to AGIs. ANNs may be a tool for making engines, but ANNs do NOT tell us how to architect a mind. My analogy for this is to compare it with silicon chips: designing SSI logic gates does not give one good insight into how to architect a core7 CPU. You have to go about it a different way, driven by a different perspective.
When we know how to architect a synthetic mind that can generate philosophies by itself, that's when we can make true progress. Right now, chatbots / LLMs are only good for simulating small parts of mind. However, I know from my research work that we can build good AGIs - it is not hopeless. But to illustrate the complexity needed: I am writing a 10-volume series on design of AGIs. From my perspective there is a lot to be integrated, but I know we can do it because I am doing it. I plan to teach courses in this later.
Given the degree of non-honesty I have encountered here in the US from offshore-base recruiters, and the level of incompetence I've experienced with so many H1Bs, not only do I have no sympathy at all for Tata and their bretheren, but I will be smiling when I read news of their collapses into a black hole. The double whammy of poor economies and advent of AI tools will kick them in what doctors call 'the goolies'. Okay well, some doctors, not my doctor.
I plan to get rich selling Metaverse printing paper and disposable virtual paper coffee cups that sit in that pop-out cup holder at the top of your tower PC. I haven't yet quite figured out the logistics of virtual reality laser toner but when I do I will clean up the market.
I examined fiverr recently, and was appalled by the number of people who claimed they were AI experts, or other kinds of experts, and who posted a rate of $5 / hr to do work. $5 USD. Globally there are a number of cultures spawning dishonest (and stupid) people coming to tech. Current AI will merely empower them to do more fraud. Maybe we need to fight fire with fire and have some AI tools to find AI-powered fraudsters.
I observe that 99 out of a 100 recruiters I get email from are Indian. Recruiting has been taken over by foreign recruiters for quite awhile, and I am aware that they have a huge bias towards bringing in their countrymen in to the US. They contact non-Indians only to gather a few Americans they can show to the government as proof of need for H1Bs because they tried but couldn't find many US citizens first.
I also observe that when I apply through the foreign-born recruiters I almost never get an interview with client, where as going in through Americans I get interviews maybe 80% of the time (and generally win these). This leads me to believe the Indians pretend to submit me to clients, and indeed many times I have caught them lying.
In addition, I see blatant gaming on wages, where foreign-born recruiters low-ball rates, either from sharp bargaining tactics or trying to cast off Americans in order to profitably bring in Indians. Recently we had two prosecuted cases in Silicon Valley where crooked agencies lied a lot to bring in cheap tech labor which they then exploited.
As for H1B competence, I've lived next door to several H1Bs and tried to engage them in friendly technical conversation. In almost every single case they have avoided talking about what they do, or about programming. The one time an H1B talked about doing C# programming for the client, it was obvious he was junior grade and there should have been no reason to bring them into the US as plenty of even college kids could be doing the job.
I did get suspicious when I asked ChatGPT for a weather report and it responded with "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
Hey, all I wanted was to know whether to take an umbrella with me going out for takeaway curry, not read a Victorian novel.
The test fails to account for whether what is being sensed is simple black area density; for example, if it had sets of black dots covering same area as the black bars did, that would test whether it is not counting but detecting luminous volume density. It is too early to enroll the zebrafish in Calculus 1a.
Well, the positive side of this is that the US government now doesn't have to worry about putting caps on H1B hiring, and the airlines will be making bags of gold from flights from Bay Area back to southeast asia.
On the negative side, Mark now still can't afford to buy Hawaii.
Fully half of the Win 11 updates regularly break my corporate laptop in some way. Twice the update put my Dell into thermal runaway while it was sitting unattended overnight. Other times these messed up communications. And I hate the UI.
Replacing buttons with touch screens is a foolish design choice. Driven by marketers, who often are on the wrong side of the IQ median. Any company that makes you take your eyes off the road instead of simply feeling a button to push deserves to lose sales.
Also, 25 year old computer UI designers are not the right people to design auto interfaces. Not everything is a phone screen and UIs are less intuitive than buttons. And driving is not like navigating a web site.
When I buy a car I want to own it, not be a slave to a subscription service full of gingerbread features. Which is why I don't own a new BMW or GM product, or fo that matter use Microsoft 365 or an Adobe product. Forced consumerism stinks, whether in vehicles, computers, or via climate change mandates.
On a minor side note, there is an enormous number of tiny agencies in New Jersey all within a few mile radius. I get a huge amount of AI-automated spam from them (all 'ceipalm'). There is a company there selling AI-based job spamming software, and I suspect it is all connected. At each shop, the AI does the work, an off-shored Indian handles responses to the emails. None of the Indians know the faintest thing about the jobs - it seems they are villager / clerks, and many are unprofessional. I suspect it is somehow connected to New Jersey law. Most of the recruiters have a bias for Indian labor and the cited rates are tuned for foreign labor.
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