Yes, I already did, even before this particular news broke out…

I tried to individually tell every one I know IRL (which is not too many ppl sadly), basically told every single one of them to consider back-up career options… There are a couple of 1-year exchange students from Europe in my floor and I have not-subtly hinted at them to make contingency plans for PhD training back home. I’ve been following the news very carefully recently so I can share relevant items as soon as possible… The people need to know. I’ve even considered making know-your-rights printouts before they claimed they’re doing an ICE raid in Chicago, but realized how little resources I have for that… I absolutely will do something. Not sure what it is but I can’t see society go this way.

I just feel bad that as a non-US citizen there is only so little I can do… I don’t even know if I could join a protest without being considered for deportation at this rate. Am planning my leave as well so there’s that.

Funny incident, I blurted out to my family 2-months ago that Trump will probably build a concentration camp and was told to shut the F up… Murphy’s law I suppose

Conventional AI/ML: I… don’t think so, unless they are models specially designed for playing games (with extreme examples being the likes of AlphaZero for chess/shogi/go). Actually I guess you could say that whatever DeepMind was doing was technically training/improving their models using video games? Case in point, their innovation on AlphaZero led to AlphaFold (which literally got a Nobel Prize) and the recent weather prediction tool

Generative AI: The field seems to have a major existential crisis due to running out of high-quality training data. So maybe there would be a way to use games to augment training data? I’m not an expert in Generative AI/LLM training so I’m not sure of the details

AGI: I’m certain an AGI model can be improved using video games but I don’t think researchers even remotely have a concept of how to build an AGI model yet

Sadly nothing yet, maybe just a couple of T-shirts… Mainly because I had to move/relocate every 1-2 years for my entire adult life until now & had to sell/give/throw away anything I couldn’t bring with me every time I move

There are a few active discussions on Reddit/Bluesky… I think the short answer is none of us are really sure. However, I read comments saying that language from the memo seems to suggest that they would stop disbursement of funds, which would be the absolute worst case scenario (since that would straight up terminate a lot of ppl’s jobs)

If there’s any lawyer here who can parse/interpret the original memo I’d appreciate some insights…

It was just HHS a few days ago… Then it came for NSF… Then this happened

I know the official memo claims this is “temporary” but there is literally no way this would end well. Heck there was at least one clinical trial terminated because of the “temporary” HHS pause, and this burden is on the entire country now

I envisioned for the worst when Trump was elected… and somehow this administration has managed to exceed some of my wildest expectations

Technically my primary computer activities are gaming, but these days I game exclusively on the Steam Deck or the tablet (for mobile games)…

My most speced-out computer was actually purchased for work related reasons. I wanted a decent GPU because I thought I’d be working in deep learning. Well current job doesn’t require training models and I was required to use a dedicated work laptop so… This high-spec one I mainly use for just about everything else other than gaming