Just because some people want something that doesn't suddenly make it reasonable or wise. In this case it's a problem for many already successful people living in Japan currently who will be forced to leave. It's also a problem for Japanese companies who have hired those people or who want to attract foreign talent to positions that pay well, but don't typically leave someone fabulously wealthy compared to most of the people living around them. It's also a problem because the policy is coming in at a time of increased xenophobia and overt racism and while this policy is likely to reduce the total number of foreigners living in Japan, it's unlikely to address the problems people have with the foreigners who will remain, and it could actually make those problems worse.
I don't think anyone plans on trying to step in and intervene, but I hope people also don't shy from talking about how foolish this move is, the problems it won't solve, the problems it's likely to cause, and the people whose lives are being negatively impacted by it.
Why don't you trust the Japanese to know wha they're doing when it comes to their own society? After all, they're the ones who built an amazing country everyone wants to visit!
Because the yen is weak is a big reason why visiting is appealing. Its also a big reason why their population is dwindling.
The govt is just trying to point fingers at foreigners to hide their weakness. I think recently they made a big deal about foreign owned real estate then quickly forgot about that talking point when their own study showed it equated to something like .05% of their total housing.
That’s not the point I’m making. Japan is clearly a wonderful society, seeing as how many people want to visit and immigrate. Why not trust the people who built that society that they know what they’re doing?
Something must be done, this is something, we must do it!
Just because something can be done doesn't make it good for the society. Japan has a shrinking population and is currently dependent on immigrants for low wage work. Plenty of actions can make the current problem worse and have unintended consequences. Whether they happen or not is a political question, not a moral one.
Who determined "what they want?" Did you want your government to attack Iran? Are you responsible for it? Why not?
That's their problem to solve however they want, if they want. The population shrinking by some large percentage doesn't seem to be inherently bad to me, and probably is good.
It's so laughable to me when people say "BUT THE SHAREHOLDER VALUE!" when we talk about things like the important life trends of millions of people.
Absolutely. They’ll just go through a period of a bunch of social workers discovering a new corpse every three days. Whole towns dying because there is nobody to maintain the public services. The people will get exactly what they were asking for, and they’ll die for it.
A few generations ago they were enslaving people [0]. This is what racism can lead to. Maintaining their heritage, their way of life, some would say.
Hopefully their population decline doesn't hit them too hard. But that, and their lack natural of resources, could lead to bad things. Fascists and their ilk thrive in such situations.
> I am not sure in understand the issue, if Japanese want this, what’s the problem?
The problem is I’ve built my life here and they keep treating foreigners as a lesser life form. People here can unironically be standing next to me bitching about foreigners. Then turn to me and say something like “not you, you are fine.”
Clearly Japanese feel like they don't want immigrants or want very few of them, which is fine.
With these laws, they are pushing 99% of people out while saving face from being called racists.
I think every country should have a right over their borders. Japan wasn't built on multiculturalism like United States or Canada, so I'm not surprised.
That being said, I would probably think twice about traveling to Japan as a tourist.
United States wasn't exactly built on multiculturalism either.
Laws dating back to 1790 restricted naturalization to white people, which arguably makes the US a sort of white ethnostate from the very beginning. This stuff only really went away after the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, and repealing that act appears to be an objective of the american right wing as of 2026.
It really made me question whether it was possible for a third worlder like me to ever become an american.
Plenty of foreigners are in fact quite rude towards their new hosts though. It can and does bring out the worst in people, and I can't say I blame them.
The whole idea of naturalization is to assimilate into the new culture and become one of them. Far too many people just don't put in the effort to do that.
That's the risk you run immigrating to another country.
I immigrated to another country and I went in eyes wide open knowing that at any point I might have to pack up and head home. In fact, it became far harder to immigrate only a few years after I did. Likelihood is that if I hadn't come when I did I never would have been able to.
It took 10 years to finally become a citizen, but I did so the first day it was an option (yes, I counted down the days and sent in the application on day 1), because I knew it was the only way I could safely assume I'd never be forced to leave.
It would be fine if it was a well documented recurring issue that plagued society. As is it, it feels more like a canary in the coal mine, for dirtier times to come.
In practice, most visas are short term, and none of them will allow you to benefit from social aids for very long. At most I imagine you could extend your working visa to 5 years, get sick the first year and be at charge for the remaining 4 years ? There will be ink spent on these cases, but statistically how often does that even happen to need stricter laws ?
The current political climates needs the gov to look "Japan First" and these kind of rule change are very cheap to do, especially as the people directly impacted don't vote nor can complain. It goes well with the very anti-foreigner sentiment, especially as the current wave of tourists is very unpopular despite the money coming in.
The longer view is Japan getting less workers in total, yet more of the worse immigrants as they're calling for people who either don't need Japan (have enough money to go anywhere and don't need to think long term) or are willing to take more risks (high return grifts etc.), in a time where Japanese salaries and productivity are already lower than surrounding countries.
They're basically making a bad situation worse, just for short term political play, giving in on the worse trends.
telling a person that has build a successful life after eight years, is assimilated and speaks the language and can support themselves that they have to leave on completely absurd conditions that virtually nobody could meet, including native citizens, is cruel by just about every definition of that term.
Those people have only ever paid in, have much better options than Japan at this point economically given how far the country has fallen behind, and the logical terminus of this is basically being some kind of ethnic chauvinist second world clown country.
If you're even turning skilled tech workers and law abiding people away your immigration problem is solved by virtue of being poor in another 10-20 years. Japan fell below replacement fertility in the 70s, 35% of the population is over 60, good luck caring for those tens of millions of people about to retire.
No one is forcing them to leave. They can continue to live and work in Japan on their current visa, and renew it. Japan is simply raising the requirements for permanent residence using the traditional ten year path. To be clear, there are numerous paths to permanent residence that are much easier than the traditional ten year path. (Your favourite LLM can tell you all about it.)
> completely absurd conditions
The new requirements are not this. In short: (1) modest Japanese language requirements, (2) more pension (or personal) savings, (3) higher salary.
> If you're even turning skilled tech workers ... away
They are not. As I understand, Japan does not limit the number of skilled visas, such as engineer, humanities, or manager. Also, many of those foreign tech workers will make more than 10M JPY per year and can easily qualify for something called the "Highly Skilled Professional" (HSP) visa. Depending upon your "HSP points", you can get permanent residence after one or three years without any of the other requirements.
The real issue is the people who have lived and worked in Japan for a long time, but don't earn large salaries. Japan is basically closing the door for permanent residence for those people unless they marry a local. My hot take: I am OK with closing the door for those people. They are basically earning a lower middle income. I'm not sure Japan wants or needs to have those people as permanent residents. However, they are free to live and work here as long as as they want. After they finish working, they can return to their home country. No one is taking that away.
> good luck caring for those tens of millions of people about to retire.
They will do it by expanding their existing (enormous) technical intern programme. There are already many low(er) skill foreigners working in elderly care.
I agree, but unfortunately, looking at the news from Japan, far-right support rates are higher than one might expect.
So it's true that those in power are harming innocent people in order to maintain their power, but it's also true that Japanese people believe they are being harmed by foreign immigrants.
And some of it is actually true. Of course, conversely, there's also the problem of many Japanese companies hiring Southeast Asian workers at low wages and mistreating them.
But whether it's me as a Korean or Japan, both tend to have a certain authoritarian mindset instilled based on "ethnic" identity. So one aspect of this policy is "we only welcome rich foreigners who spend money and leave," and the media responds accordingly.
Strictly speaking, if you look at these policies strengthening restrictions on foreigners from a third-country perspective, you can see them from the angle of far-rightization. That is, sanctions against outsiders for the sake of internal cohesion[1]. But considering the severe aging population in Japanese industry right now, it's effectively cutting off one's own nose to spite one's face.
However, East Asians receive a somewhat different education from you, so that's how it is.
The real cause is the failure of Abenomics and the resulting weak yen, which benefits financial companies and exports but sacrifices the Japanese people—the incompetence of the regime is the problem. But because it's hard to grasp all of that complex background, people want to attack something else that's near them.
And also, because the morality of some underdeveloped countries (I know it's an example...) differs from that of developed countries, friction often occurs. Just as the sense of time differs between agricultural regions and cities, for instance.
> The real cause is the failure of Abenomics and the resulting weak yen
i think you are right, there is a lot of over-tourism (and from some places 'rude' tourists that are really aggravating to people) but that is also being caused by weak yen in the end...
whats the saying? everything is downstream from economics?
"You must sell insurance to sick people!", "I don't wanna!", "I don't care, the law now says you must."
I mean, the whole insurance industry had spent the better part of a century (basically its whole existence) denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, and the ACA fixed it via fiat.
Not only is it clearly "hard-hitting", I'd argue it's probably the single most "hard-hitting" invasive change to corporate regulation of the post-war era. Certainly it is in terms of the amount of money involved in the affected market.
> how’s this anti-corporate?
And this is where the rub is. You're not saying that your desired regulatory structure is something different than existing proposals, you're demanding that your government engage in behavior that is expressly "anti" whatever you perceive "corporate" interests to be.
That's not democracy, that's just warfare. You have enemies and you want to win. And the problem there is that the structure of our government requires compromise.
The "everyone has access to the ER" has to be paid somehow, which is through tax dollars. The USA has a for-profit health system but typical neo-liberalism has a safety net where corporates get to dip into a different bottom-less pot. So it makes sense that we make this visible by taxing everybody who isn't paying their own insurance, since they still expect access to ER.
It "literally" did not. What enforcement exists is financial (a tax penalty) and not compulsory. And obviously most people are covered via employer plans or Medicare, as has always been the case. A quick Google says that 19.2M Americans are enrolled in ACA plans. I don't have statistics, but I'd bet that the overwhelming majority of those are willing purchasers. Most people view health care as desirable.
>The penalty for not having an ACA-compliant plan or forgoing coverage in 2018 is the greater of $695 per adult and $347.50 per child for a maximum of $2,085 or 2.5 percent of adjusted household income. The percentage penalty is capped at an amount equal to the national average premium for a bronze plan, the minimum coverage available by law
Ah yes, the very hard hitting anti-business rule that says if you don't become a customer of my friend's company, you must give me money. I'm sure the businesses were quivering in their boots when every citizen either became a customer, paid a fine, or became a felon.
Then why do the 7 publicly listed health insurers have shitty shareholder returns?
If their profits are so good, their shares would be worth owning.
Could it be because their profit margins are actually terrible (3% if lucky), and they have to get the price of their product approved by 50 different state government employees, and the federal government constantly changes their customer’s subsidies making revenue and expenses extremely volatile and difficult to forecast?
If you bought shares of those 7 companies in 2010 when the ACA passed, how much would you have today? More or less than if you bought the S&P 500?
If you're looking for policies to blame for insurance companies having a rough 2025-2026, look to the Republican-led efforts cap Medicare fees and alter eligibility requirements.
You would have about the same or less. Maybe UNH gets you a couple extra percentage points per year, but that's because they have an enormous healthcare provider business instead of just being an insurer. But it's still nowhere near a positive risk adjusted return when comparing to a relatively risk-less investment in SP500.
Since Jan 1, 2010, 18% for UNH, 15% for MOH/CNC, 14% for CI/ELV/HUM/SP500, 8.5% for CVS.
Also, these businesses are competing to sell a completely fungible commodity good with tons of non profits like Kaiser Permanente, HCSC, Cambia, Independence Blue Cross, and many others. It makes no sense to expect those businesses to be able to earn any decent profit margin when their competition only needs 0%.
> Then why do the 7 publicly listed health insurers have shitty shareholder returns?
CNC is up 90% YoY. That's far more than any of the largest tech companies. Alphabet is the highest of the tech stocks, and it's up 38% in the same period. When we look at the performance of the seven large U.S. publicly traded health insurers, their returns were extraordinary in the decade following the ACA.
If they're talking about production capacity, that is some product of die area and process steps, right? It doesn't have to be 3x die area, just 3x lower factory throughput for the same number of functioning memory bits.
I have no proof, only personal experience interacting with commenters on HN. No other tech company gets as much positive support when exerting its soft power under the guise of (bullshit) technicalities, e.g. all the issues with EU digital markets, API restrictions, 30% tax. Specifically, people were defending Apple vehemently when they feature gated remote phone control for EU citing concerns about EUs privacy laws (???).
I never stated that I know for a fact that Apple deploys bots, but I would not be surprised. I don’t even need to know if anyone is paid or not - if I cannot distinguish paid posts from fanatic apologism, then I need not care. The resulting posts are worrying all the same.
Similarly, I do not know if Apple was caught off guard by the demand - I wouldn’t trust this article. But Apple does plan production well ahead of time and forecast demand rather precisely. They could’ve been wrong. Them being unable to produce enough 1/2tb mac studios seems like a loss to me.
Interesting that Samsung still pursues PIM. IIRC they had a paper in ISCA21 or 22 where they showed HBM2 module with PIM, which back then impressed me quite a lot.
That being said, I am not sure what’s the killer application for this technology, and without such application adoption is unlikely.
As I understand it, the killer app is llms. You could run MACs directly in RAM, offloading a lot of work from CPU and cutting down on insane (external) memory bandwidth required.
Imagine (this is a fantasy pitch but potentially achievable for some use cases) wanting to run a larger llm and all you have to do is buy more RAM so it fits.
Sure, MACs are nice. However, unless there other, PIM-specific/optimal, algorithms, regular matrix multiplication algorithms like tiling-based won’t work here I think — how would the tile be shared? By doing read/write all the time?
Attention calculations aren't shared across more than one vector during next token prediction (thinking and writing) which this sounds almost perfect for. Per attention layer, for deepseek at 1M context, you want to broadcast a single 1KB vector to 4GB of dot products, and map reduce a 1KB vector back.
Rollie calculation, like the online softmax in FA, implies a centralized computing unit that does the compute and stores the intermediate results in its registers. With PIM you have no centralized compute unit, you have a bunch of memory, and a bunch of MACs all over the place.
How would you do map-reduce across multiple DIMMs w/o extra reads/writes?
PIM implies some sort of distributed compute, which can work for some cases, but I am not sure LLMs are one of them.
Is there a single reason why we can't just "distribute" the online softmax?
Each die-attached PIM accelerator computes online softmax for its own KVs. Then the central unit gathers the softmax intermediates, one intermediate per die, and uses those to compute the final softmax.
The PIM win is that we crater the memory traffic between the central accelerator and the memory dies for attention ops. Most of the attention bandwidth never leaves the memory.
This isn't "run the entire LLM in PIM", no - this is "offload the parts of LLM that benefit from PIM the most to PIM".
> Imagine (this is a fantasy pitch but potentially achievable for some use cases) wanting to run a larger llm and all you have to do is buy more RAM so it fits.
Isn't this how it works today already? Granted you wanted to run it on RAM rather than VRAM.
Yes, but running out of RAM is impractical due to low memory bandwidth.
According to the article/Samsung RAM dies inside can support way higher bandwidth than they expose, they're limited by external interface / bus width:
> Together, they can utilize the chip’s internal bandwidth across all 16 banks, which comes out to 614 GB/s. For comparison, regular DRAM accesses can hit two banks in parallel and max out at 76.8 GB/s.
And that's just for single 64-bit IC. So way faster and more power efficient.
You can scale with more memory channels. Workstation/server platforms go up to 12 or 16 channels if I remember correctly.
Consumer platforms have been stuck at dual channel for decades; most of it I attribute to intentional product segmentation. I'm hoping that LLMs might change eventually for an upcoming consumer platforms; going to 4 channel would be really nice.
We can run Doom on everything. Surely we can run some interesting apps on hardware that's originally made for AI. (One big moment for AI was when people figured out how to run it on hardware originally meant for Doom's successors.)
You have an eight socket server with 96 memory slots, you add 96x PIM memories into the server (optimistic), load all the LLM parameters or KV cache in RAM and exclusively let it perform GEMV and let it rip.
614 GB/s x 96 = 58,944 GB/s.
Alternatively, the memory is used for embedded inference tasks. You can now upgrade from the limited single or two digit MB SRAM accelerators to reasonably fast single digit gigabyte models. Without MoE you could reach 100 tokens per second with an 8B fp8 model on a single channel. With MoE you might break 500 tokens per second.
> I am not sure a vote of non-confidence would have helped here — there are only two parties.
But why are there only two parties?
The rest of the Anglosphere–Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK–have multiparty systems–some are more multiparty than others, but none of them have the hard two-party system that the US has, in which third parties have a very marginal role (not completely marginal – e.g. in a close election, the decisions of New York's Conservative and Working Families parties can make a real difference to the outcome – but certainly at a national level third parties have no real power in the US.)
First-past-the-post is a popular explanation, but it can't by itself explain it, since the UK and Canada use it, yet lack a US-style hard two party system (and with the rise of the Reform party in the UK, the British system is becoming less two-party than it has been in a long time.)
Even if first-past-the-post could change, it's not the whole ballgame. To get on a state ballot you need thousands of petition signatures, and those signatures can be invalidated on technicalities brought up by major parties' legal teams. To be covered by the media or be included in a debate you need to poll at a high percentage. You can't get public funding to campaign unless you already had a high percentage of the vote in a previous election. Nobody will donate to you because the third party just detracts from the other two that will give the big donors what they want. And gerrymandering ensures the same people keep getting elected. All those roadblocks are in place because the two major parties put them there to prevent 3rd party challengers. The whole thing is rigged.
Just to show up and get 1% of the vote, you would need a grassroots national movement to elect someone who was wildly popular, who could build a 50-state network of volunteers (including legal, political, financial, community organizing, etc), sponsored by someone with extremely deep pockets that doesn't want anything from established political figures. And you'd still lose.
We have representatives already. The problem is we never hold their feet to the fire. We keep voting for the same useless bastards, and we don't vote them out when they do nothing. Half the country doesn't vote. That's our own responsibility we're shirking. Rather than get a new party, we need to get off our collective asses, and use the existing power we have to force the parties to do their jobs.
First past the post doesn’t explain historically why we have only two parties, but it explains why we will continue to have only two going forward unless something changes.
I actually think the US hard two party system isn't purely due to first-past-the-post, it is actually due to four interacting factors: (1) first-past-the-post; (2) presidentialism; (3) a deeply-entrenched primary system; (4) cultural homogeneity
Point (4) will likely strike many Americans as dubious, but the US doesn't have anything comparable to Québec – there is presently no US state where English isn't the majority language; nor anything comparable to Scotland or Northern Ireland (no state where a significant percentage of its population identify with a competing national identity). So, no matter how much (undeniable) diversity the US has, in the sense that counts for this purpose, it doesn't.
Hence: while abolishing first-past-the-post would no doubt do a lot to break the US hard two-party system, it could also be broken while retaining it if something happened to (2) or (3) or (4) instead.
But, in US politics, changing (2) or (3) is even more politically fringe than changing (1) is. Maybe that might change at some point though, who knows what the future holds.
And (4) will likely eventually cease to be true, but only in the long-run in which we are all already long-dead.
I don't mean that the two party system we have is due to first-past-the-post, it almost doesn't even really matter why we have it. But first-past-the-post is the mechanism which currently entrenches it and is the most likely to change. I think that (3) is a result of the system, not a cause.
It explains why you end up with two parties even if you start with more. The two largest will woo minority parties until they get a majority. And minority party members know they will be marginalized unless they are aligned with the majority (or hope to be in the majority some day.)
Changing that will require a radical reconsideration of democracy, like replacing FPtP with... something.
It doesn’t because the UK has FPtP yet doesn’t have a hard two party system.
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have nationalist movements that want out of the UK-state independence movements exist in the contemporary US too, but they are very fringe
But even England has not just Labor and the Tories, but also the Lib Dems, Reform, the Greens, Restore
So England proves you can have multiple parties with real power, with FPtP, even in the absence of regional-nationalist movements
I dont see how the uk system's small parties are not marginalized. The larger parties still claim outright majorities with 35% of the votes or less (last time 172 seat majority with 33.2% of the votes) so they are irellevant.
If I am not mistaken all disruptions to fpp two party systems eventually settle back into them, maybe not the same parties but two nonetheless.
The smaller parties are all aligned with one of the two major parties. In a lot of ways they act more like caucuses than separate parties. Like Bernie Sanders being "independent".
That's overstating it, but it's why the largest group always can form a government. They go to the same aligned parties looking for a majority.
In 2002, Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq War. In 2008 Obama used that fact successfully to [help] win the Democratic nomination and went on to beat McCain.
> all for profit companies are greedy by their nature, but US companies are on a different level because you can 'buy' the government by lobbying or supporting their election campaigns
How would you call decades of chinese state-sponsored industrial espionage of western IP? Benevolent act?
> How would you call decades of chinese state-sponsored industrial espionage of western IP? Benevolent act?
I want to share 3 things here, to think out loud:
1. lets not go too far to the past, because I will say industrial espionage is less harmful than imperialism. Imperialism costed millions of lives across India, Pakistan, African nations, Indonesia and even in China, we are talking about how the West got extremely rich, which allowed it to live in prosperity, when everyone else were struggling (impact of it is still ongoing for some nations). I am fine with lesser of 2 evils, which is an industrial espionage in this case.
2. I didn't say 'benelovent act'
3. this is not baked by a science, just a personal preference, I prefer if country supports companies to advance the country, rather than allowing companies get too rich and bail them out with taxpayer money if they fail because of their dumb actions. (not saying one is better than other, I like how CCP elevated China from 3rd world country to a level, even the US companies are scared, in very short time, without invading and extracting resources from other countries. But it obviously has its own problems (e.g. how competitive is the life in China for kids and so on), I am not saying China is perfect, but China became superpower in the last 30-40 years, which is an impressive accomplishment.
Sure, but not the way West conducted it, by going and killing generations of people. Look at India, before British colonization they accounted for almost 25% GDP of the world (~1700s), now it is around 3-4%
Or lets look at China itself, before the opium wars and British colonization, it accounted for ~30% of the world GDP, by 1970s it dropped to 4-5%, now climbing back to 20%.
Indonesia would be another example.
You keep defending the West, even though its actions were much worse than "industrial espionage", because you probably live in the West and feel nice about your day to day life and regular things like education feels granted, and not seeing the enormous impact of the West's evil actions to the lives of billions of people around the world in the last 200 years. (US hasn't even stopped yet, see Cuba, Middle Eastern countries)
> Sure, but not the way West conducted it, by going and killing generations of people.
Ridiculous statement. China is doing it today — uighurs are actively erased bit by bit.
> Look at India, before British colonization they accounted for almost 25% GDP of the world (~1700s), now it is around 3-4%
This statement is rooted in “zero sum” logic, and based on the assumption that without colonization India should have stayed with its 25% or more share. Hypotheticals are hypotheticals, and nothing more.
> You keep defending the West,
I’m not defending anyone. I find it ridiculous that you are so high on “the west is bad, China good” horse and completely oblivious to so many things that China does, which are objectively worse.
> I find it ridiculous that you are so high on “the west is bad, China good”
Can you read what I have written? if not, let me copy what I wrote earlier here:
> I am fine with lesser of 2 evils
> But it obviously has its own problems (e.g. how competitive is the life in China for kids and so on), I am not saying China is perfect
I am not saying China is good, I am saying it is lesser of 2 evils with much less negative impact to the lives of human beings around the world, in my opinion.
I am not sure we are arguing here on the merit of the argument itself. You are fine with China’s genocide TODAY because China is the “lesser of two evils”?
I do not understand this. It sounds like a cultist/religious position.
> Sure, but not the way West conducted it, by going and killing generations of people.
But they did. Look at Xinjiang, Tibet, and the history of Manchuria, among others. They did it to themselves as well, like most backwards dictatorship. And "the West” does not really do genocide anymore, either. This is more a consequence of it being a terrible strategy than Chinese benevolence (or anyone’s, really). At some point we realised that direct administration is a burden and that it’s much more cost effective to bribe nominally independent governments without having to deal directly with local populations. China does this a lot, just like evil western imperialist countries. Empires look different in the 21st century than in the 19th, that’s all. And where would you put Russia in a neat west-rest of the world dichotomy?
> You keep defending the West, even though its actions were much worse than "industrial espionage"
“The West” is not a monolith. It’s made of several countries, some of them better than others, and each one of them with its good and bad sides. It is not useful to work with generalisations like that. It obscures any information or lesson we could get and leads to wrong conclusions. It’s also counter-productive because for all its evil, there is nothing “the West” did that is unique. Except in scale, but then it’s more a quirk of history than something being intrinsically evil in “western” people.
I would say that saying about anything “whataboutism” is a cheap way out.
China does industrial espionage for the same end goals as American companies work on new things: market domination. So, I find it funny when someone is mad about American companies but not Chinese, while both pursuit the same goals.
I am not sure in understand the issue, if Japanese want this, what’s the problem?
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