UK universities should be rolling out the red carpet for all the great students who the USA no longer want. Unfortunately our government seems more interested in pandering to the bigots who think "more foreigners == bad". :-(
UK universities did their own student exodus move with brexit, I'm still friends with several professors of Russel group universities and they all say the same thing - after Brexit the number of MSc and PhD level students have collapsed and not recovered anywhere since. UK is in for a very rude awakening in a few years where its position as a superpower in research starts to dwindle. And to add on top of it - the universities are now cramming as many international(non-EU) students as possible, because they pay ridiculous fees that support school coffers - lecturers are more or less directly told they are not allowed to fail those students in any way almost no matter the transgression because they are the main source of income for universities.
The conversation in UK media and the ruling class consensus has shifted so far to the right on immigration that it would be a miracle if UK continues to see similar levels of foreign student enrolment in future.
Weirdly, despite all that, migration to the UK was a record high this time last year, and although it has reduced a bit since then it remains massively higher than before Brexit — see graph half way down the article: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c89pvd58nd3o
The student enrollments had already started going down last year. 2023 was the peak. From the article you linked:
> According to separate Home Office figures, 393,125 student visas were issued to foreign students in the year ending December 2024.
> That is 14% fewer than in the previous 12-month period, but still almost 50% higher (46%) than in 2019.
So a 14% decrease between 2023 and 2024. I am willing to bet this will go down further this year.
The post-brexit surge in international students was driven by UK universities leaning on foreign students to fill their financial hole. The fees for domestic students will start to go up now that foreign student enrollments are declining.
> Maybe China can become the destination for ambitious smart people.
Don't underestimate the language barrier. All those stereotypes about Chinese people mixing Rs and Ls? That works both ways, not just tongue twisters like Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den*, but even "Hello": https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=“你好”%20%2F%...
And machine translation is currently so bad, that the last few time I tried giving an example here, people who actually speak Chinese would respond with something along the lines of "I have no idea what you tried to write, that is nonsensical".
> And machine translation is currently so bad, that the last few time I tried giving an example here, people who actually speak Chinese would respond with something along the lines of "I have no idea what you tried to write, that is nonsensical".
Then I'd say essentially yes, despite it being a fine and not imprisonment and getting quashed later anyway, because most of us aren't lawyers and won't care about that kind of distinction — and that goes double for students on a visa.
Closer to the opposite, it happens more when we do care about the distinction.
[Edit: Just realised the "you" in your comment can either be the poster or the police, with very different consequences.]
The rules are something that looks like a credible threat.
Both these, at the time of the conviction, did look credible.
The second was only overturned because enough people argued well enough that it wasn't credible and shouldn't have ever been seen as credible. The rules were then changed to emphasise the arguments people had made so this didn't happen again.
Strange, I've been attending the EuroTcl conferences for a few years now, I don't remember any of the presentations I've seen being related to EDA - https://www.eurotcl.eu/pastevents.html :-/
The OpenACS and Tcl/Tk Conference 2025 will be held on 10-11 July in Bologna, Italy - https://openacs.km.at/ . For those who appreciate the finer things in programming and web-serving.
I don't think Magic and Raft are anywhere close to the importance of Tcl, though I've probably at some point used a chip that was designed in Magic. And, while I like Tk and find it inspiring, the number of Tk apps I can remember ever using (that I didn't write myself) is maybe three, and they weren't very important to me.
As for Sprite-LFS, I really enjoyed the Sprite LFS paper and found it inspiring, but my conclusion was that Seltzer's followup BSD-LFS paper falsified some of its more surprising claims, and ultimately the underlying predictions about the relative trends in RAM size and disk size turned out to be wrong, undercutting the key advantages of the LFS approach overall. Vaguely LFS-like approaches are important to SSDs and SMR disks, but WAFL was already about that LFS-like in 01995 (which is admittedly after Sprite-LFS), and SSD FTLs also do some not-very-LFS-like things. So ultimately I don't think Sprite-LFS turned out to be that important.
Sprite as a whole I'm less able to evaluate. I've never been an OS researcher, but I've spent a fraction of my life reading SOSP and HotOS papers and systems dissertations, and I don't remember seeing anything that came out of Sprite except Sprite-LFS. I was thinking maybe doors in Solaris did, but no, that was Sun's Spring, not Sprite. Other side of the Bay, where Ousterhout took Tcl eventually. So it's possible Sprite was a great achievement, but I haven't noticed it. But I think more likely it's one of those things where we tried the "obvious" thing (SSI across a bunch of workstations) and found out why it was bad, which influenced later efforts like PVM, MOSIX, Beowulf, distcc, MapReduce, Ceph, etc., because Sprite stepped on the mines so they didn't have to. There's a nice retrospective (by Ousterhout, natch) at https://web.archive.org/web/20150225073211/http://www.eecs.b....
So I don't think Tk, Magic, Raft, and Sprite-LFS really have the same level of significance as Tcl. Sprite maybe.
I don't think it's bad to spend a lot of time and effort on things that turn out to not be very significant, for two reasons. One is that, after a long enough time, very little indeed remains very significant. (Who, today, can recount the disappointments of the Minoan queens?) The other is that things you could do that are significant—even for a little while—are usually things that will probably fail. So if you spend a lot of time doing things that might be significant, you'll fail at most of them.
But in Ousterhout's case, one of those things did succeed brilliantly, and it was Tcl.
Many of the requirements apply to services of any size. This is why I will be blocking UK access to my little service (hosted in my home in the UK) when the act comes into force.
