I used QGIS 2.x and 3.x a lot when making maps for research papers. But something that always stung was reproducibility. The python tooling was not there compared to what I could do with click-and-mouse, and there was no easy way to transfer my click-and-mouse sessions into an equivalent python script.

Is the situation unchanged? (Maybe a good use for Opus would be to write a wrapper for the python tooling?)

Sad/funny that your comment is at the bottom.

Workers on strike are classified as not employed, so yeah we should ignore that category

For me the issue is why there's not a new mini since 5-mini in August.

I have now switched web-related and data-related queries to Gemini, coding to Claude, and will probably try QWEN for less critical data queries. So where does OpenAI fits now?

Are there good open models out there that beat gemini 2.5 flash on price? I often run data extraction queries ("here is this article, tell me xyz") with structured output (pydantic) and wasn't aware of any feasible (= supports pydantic) cheap enough soln :/

If you are in early career (i.e. graduated your PhD within the last 5 years) you are extremely unlikely to get the gifted people visa. The standard approach is to just get the H1B (not the lottery stuff for tech companies but the non-lottery one for hiring faculty at universities). Ask any foreign MIT professor hired early in his career and they went through H1B (and later on, they are more reluctant to move into a place like Florida..)