> in his parents' garage
Yeah, sure thing.
22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
51–60 of 351 posts
Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#52> Zeloof’s family was supportive but also cautious. His father asked a semiconductor engineer he knew to offer some safety advice. As impressive and independent as this is, you have to wonder if any other gifted child could have done the same feat. The article seems to skip over this point, how many people know a "semiconductor engineer"?
I am quite confident that almost nobody could have blazed this trail, even with the same support network. The resilience, ingenuity and practical skill required is outrageous.
Nah, I worked for a pair of 20-somethings that taped out a chip on a shuttle run in 6 months. Gpcpu asic, totally from scratch architecture.
Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#53I've followed this project for a while. And while it truly is an impressive feat, I just wonder how did he afford all this equipment. I'm 24 and a physics PhD student, and just afforded my first soldering iron. I lack the space, let alone the equipment to attempt anything close to this. What a lucky, talented guy!
>I just wonder how did he afford all this equipment.
Living in the US comes with certain advantages like some of the lowest consumer prices in the West including HW equipment being dirt cheap on the second hand market plus houses being big enough for space for such hobbies along with the biggest take home pays yielding some of the highest purchasing power in the West, a formula tough to replicate anywhere else.
At least compared to where I live now in Europe, such hobbies would definitely be unaffordable for me monetary and real-estate wise, which is also a monetary issue at the end of the day.
I was looking on an interesting blog about buying certain older ThinkPads or older multi-core server chips for $50 used for building a cheap home lab, and when I checked, super exited, on my local second hand market, such machines or chips were fetching north of €250 and that was before the chip shortage broke the market. That's just one anecdote, but you get the point.
Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 1200 transistors is way beyond what I thought is possible in a garage what (prior) breakthroughs enabled Zeloof to achieve this?
All the research that was founded by tax dollars in the 70s before all the research was privatised (like nor more scientific publications how it was done etc).
absolutely believe this 100%. and even if isn't publicly funded, under capitalism wage laborers are shorted when they get paid a wage and their code becomes the private property of a capitalist. so yeah, i agree with your framing 100%.
my question was more: what is the short laundry list of the exact developments/research that allowed Zeloof's garage-size/at-home chip-making?
Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard to compete with FAANG, Finance, and Consulting. Unfortunately, that's where a lot of people end up.
TC isn't everything. I'm pulling truly bonkers TC at 26, and yet I feel a deep void inside me. I recently realized that this void is because I am not living by my ideals/purpose. I know what I want to do in life, I know how I want to contribute to the story of humanity, and yet I am letting my greed overrule me and force me into a different path. Essentially, I am betraying myself, and this causes that feeling of unf…
[deleted]
Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard to compete with FAANG, Finance, and Consulting. Unfortunately, that's where a lot of people end up.
TC isn't everything. I'm pulling truly bonkers TC at 26, and yet I feel a deep void inside me. I recently realized that this void is because I am not living by my ideals/purpose. I know what I want to do in life, I know how I want to contribute to the story of humanity, and yet I am letting my greed overrule me and force me into a different path. Essentially, I am betraying myself, and this causes that feeling of unf…
Working on something that feels like it makes a difference can be very rewarding. But my experience is that if it really makes a difference (how do you measure that is probably a book by itself), it is never easy.
For the last 15 years I have worked on things that I felt needed doing. Others agreed. Even though our teams achieve something worthwhile it can often feel deeply frustrating. The challenges of financing something new, that doesn’t fit the box of how it is normally done, at some useful scale, is hard. I don’t want to do anything else, but sometimes it is very frustrating.
In the end, I think there is so much one can work on that really makes a difference in “the story of humanity” as you call it, that there really is no need to take a job that goes against ideals you may hold. Healthcare, energy systems, data for better governance, food tech, Ed tech, the list goes on. There will be something interesting to work on I am certain.
Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#57Amazing! "Zeloof says he doesn’t know for sure what he wants to do after graduating this spring" - I hope we don't hear later that he went to work for FAANG. One the saddest things about Big Tech is how they take young talent away from innovative, potentially competing enterprises and into busy work internal projects just because they can.
If one looks a century back: AT&T, Xerox, IBM ... those were opportunities we can romanticize in hindsight looking back at the glowing examples of Bell Labs, PARC etc.
Today's Big Tech is unrivaled in its unique position to fund R&D.
To put it on the talent's shoulder to decide against it ...? One can hope for individual cases but it is futile as Big Tech has fundamentally tilted the playing field not only on things like information flow but also on talent pool in their favor. From a system's POV at some point this of course gets stuck.
For example Musk tries to outpace this with his "rate of innovation" concept which on surface seems like a refreshing idea but is running on an outdated and collapsing hardware ("actual existing globalization") resulting in absurd numbers on the BBI like $243B. Leaving aside the forgone "sign-changing" and hefty "printing" by the central processors, initiated manually by a curious circle of people with access who decided it was a good idea.
Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#58Amazing! "Zeloof says he doesn’t know for sure what he wants to do after graduating this spring" - I hope we don't hear later that he went to work for FAANG. One the saddest things about Big Tech is how they take young talent away from innovative, potentially competing enterprises and into busy work internal projects just because they can.
> I hope we don't hear later that he went to work for FAANG. One the saddest things about Big Tech is how they take young talent away from innovative, potentially competing enterprises and into busy work internal projects just because they can.
yes i hope Zeloof (or someone else young, enthusiastic and social media adept like him) turns into the Marcin Jakubowski [1] or Dave Hakkens [2] of semi-conductors.
in this exciting still-early open source digital paradigm, a new type of leadership is required with a massive focus on horizontal knowledge production and transmission, a focus on a multitude of pedagogical styles, as well as a deep foundational belief in the abilities of our fellow humans (since it's easy and common to either believe we are 1) over-special or 2) dumb, as our schools are stuck in this reward/punishment paradigm which both 1) over-estimates a small number of students' skills because of advantages they gained outside of school (were you born with wealthy parents/community who had time and money to encourage/support you), or 2) which forces you into straightjacketed, (pedagogically) un-diverse, un-tailored learning journeys that make you take steps too quickly (a way to filter out as many working class people as possible except for a select few, by design)).
[1] Marcin Jakubowski: Open-sourced blueprints for civilization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GEMkvT0DEk
[2] Precious Plastic Universe: a big bang for plastic recycling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os7dREQ00l4
Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
"One of Zeloof’s best finds was a broken electron microscope that cost $250,000 in the early ’90s; he bought it for $1,000 and repaired it."
A thousand dollars is an achievable amount of money for a smart kid in a poor family. I have had good friends from really poor families in Europe make more from bug bounty programs. If that's you're trying imply.
> A thousand dollars is an achievable amount of money for a smart kid in a poor family
This is a by-the-book example of privilege.
And even if a poor "kid" has the combination of ability and luck to obtain $1K most poor people would spend such money on basic needs like food, clothing and house repairs than a hobby. And that would be the most reasonable choice.