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22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

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Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#211

Post by jjoonathan »

halpert wrote: post #190
jjoonathan wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rules for Rulers is real. It's not that management is dumb, it's that every layer of management is self-interested. Every hierarchy has to contend with principal agent problems. Organizations can do a better or worse job of it, but the incentives are always there and they lead to predictable inefficiencies which are frequently observed. Everyone knows this, but unless you know how to get someone to manage without sel…

Is self-interested management really an inefficiency if it’s unavoidable? You don’t get to run a company in a vacuum. You have to run it within the bounds of human behavior. Saying that “if only all humans acted in some way against their nature, then the system would be more efficient” isn’t an effective management strategy.

You were arguing that RfR / Dilbert coludn't be true because if it were, it would have been optimized away. I argued that no, just because it happens and is broadly understood doesn't mean that it can be optimized away.

You can play semantic games about whether or not it should be called inefficiency -- I don't really care what you call it -- but the RfR / Dilbert dynamic is very real and very prevalent.

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#212

Post by was_a_dev »

rdtwo wrote: post #202
astura wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 22-year old full time student can't even afford "dirt cheap" second hand equipment (nevermind the space to store it!) unless: -They have some sort of windfall -They have a trust fund or stipend that they receive just for existing -Their parents pay for everything, or, alternatively, their parents pay for all of their living expenses so their own money is only "fun money." -They, somehow, have a high paying job. In…

Yeah I mean so what. College room and board is 30-50k I’m sure he can get the microscope running for less than that

My PhD is funded by a research council and my stipend is £12k. After rent, food and bills there is some room.

But it's laughable to think I could repair and run an electron microscope. Already mentioned, finding a broken microscope for £1k wouldn't happen here. And you're seriously underestimating the resource requirements to operate such a machine

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#213

Post by blululu »

whimsicalism wrote: post #175
blululu wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a recent trend. America has had a big political issue over large industry since day one. The Jeffersonian vision of a nation of yeoman farmers (who maybe owned slaves) vs. an industrial economy built on science and technology. This shows up in debates over railroads (anti-trust laws start here). It leads to the financing of canals, and cars (more democratic forms of transportation). It leads to subsidies…

I agree that central distinction between industrial economy vs. yeoman is a big cultural clash in the US. I don't see what makes cars more "democratic" or anti-trust as firmly on the "yeoman" side of things.

A car is privately owned and oriented toward a small scale family/individual. It can go from anywhere to anywhere at anytime (assuming roads). Unlike a railroad which achieves much greater efficiency but requires more fixed schedules and routes. Everyone must move to the same place at the same time together. A lot of this is imagined but people really did buy into this (same with canals), and given the 200 year distrust of railroads, that gave a lot of political fodder to break up urban rail lines and make cities more car based.

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#214

Post by bruceb »

hwers wrote: post #184
hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very interested in his childhood education. I want my kid to start early on something he is interested in too but I don't really know how to do that. I know the general rules (expose him to a lot of stuffs, watch him do things, etc.) but don't know how to implement them properly. I myself wasted a lot of time in my childhood so I guess that's why I don't know how to do it properly.

You probably can't go wrong with giving your child resources that's too expensive for other children to be exposed to for some free future competitive advantage (which translates to adult success), as a general first heuristic.

AKA how Bill Gates because Bill Gates. One of the very few kids to have access to a computer at the time.

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#215

Post by RugnirViking »

halpert wrote: post #105
ipaddr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be honest. Engineer managers are largely replacable and more easily than individual engineers. The pool is larger and can accept more manager unrelated experience. There is more to this. As the person senior leadership communicates with this person is seen as more important than they are. Senior leadership wants to maintain a leveling system to separate groups of people. It's a hedge a flat organization which m…

Then why don’t companies adopt a flatter structure with higher compensated engineers? The goal of a company is to make money after all. If management could be removed and top engineers retained with higher salaries, then a company would surely have an advantage in the marketplace. Since this doesn’t happen, there must be more to the picture than people in upper management simply clinging to their jobs. If removing mi…

this kind of reasoning simply does not follow in the real world. There are many, many cases of some companies out competing others. Why? if they were all rational actors none would have any advantage over the other.

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#216

Post by was_a_dev »

rdtwo wrote: post #205
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 le…

Why not eBay? Usally things are more expensive but for small stuff you pay market price

eBay in the UK is just a platform for people to sell their old hardware near retail price.

Some niches are decent value

Finding a £1k electron microscope would never happen

Edit:

A quick search across Europen eBay, I could buy a used/broken SEM for £5000 ($6850)

Then I'd need to rent somewhere to operate it

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#217

Post by kragen »

futharkshill wrote: post #25

> 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"?

There are ten thousand semiconductor engineers kicking around Silicon Valley and Albuquerque and Portland, and another hundred thousand in Shenzhen and Taipei and Seoul. So conservatively ten million people know a semiconductor engineer.

Instead of focusing on the problem that only one person in a thousand knows a semiconductor engineer, we should figure out how to fix the much worse problem that out of the ten million people who do, only two people have made transistors in their basement, because that leak in the pipeline is apparently about five thousand times worse.

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#218

Post by rdtwo »

was_a_dev wrote: post #212
rdtwo wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I mean so what. College room and board is 30-50k I’m sure he can get the microscope running for less than that

My PhD is funded by a research council and my stipend is £12k. After rent, food and bills there is some room. But it's laughable to think I could repair and run an electron microscope. Already mentioned, finding a broken microscope for £1k wouldn't happen here. And you're seriously underestimating the resource requirements to operate such a machine

If my public middle school could do that in some back room closet it can’t be that bad.

For reference in us costs and spend your public stipend is less than my city spends per person on homeless folks and half of minimum wage. I think we’re taking different scales of money.

These kinds of projects are open to the top 5-10% of earners in the us so 15million or so folks could fund this but only 1-2 actually do it.

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#219

Post by resueman »

ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #209
resueman wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically a member of the middle class in a developed country. How remarkable.

I don't know many middle class families who would buy 10s of thousands of dollars worth of equipment for their kid.

Well that goalpost sure made a leap. Spread it out over six years and imagine the kid is pulling in real cash with a youtube channel showcasing his projects.

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#220

Post by kragen »

andi999 wrote: post #76
Wronnay wrote: post #72

He could make a business out of that by replicating retro chips. Some chips are not easy to get and I bet vintage computing fans would pay enough so that a business in that area could be profitable.

Copyright might be a problem.

Chip design mask works only last 20 years, and they probably aren't copyrightable.
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