A 17-year-old designed a novel synchronous reluctance motor

Unlike a lot of breathless "engineering breakthrough" stories, this piece, as well as young Mr. Sansone himself, readily acknowledge that this is a work in progress and may not pan out. Even if it doesn't, what an incredible achievement for a high-schooler – and just imagine the great contributions to the field this kid is poised to make in the coming decades.

In the old days (80s and 90s), a software startup could release their first version that did something truly unique even if it was still really rough around the edges. People would buy the first version with the expectation that a good portion of the revenue would be used for R&D which would make version 2.0 way better. You could boot-strap some really great projects that way.

It seems that today, a new product never stands a chance unless it has great funding up front with all the kinks worked out and tons of bells and whistles built-in before ever being introduced to the public.

I created a new kind of data management system that manages unstructured data (i.e. files) completely different than conventional file systems. It also does some amazing work with structured data using Key-Value stores to make really fast relational tables.

When I demonstrate how it can do something like file lookups thousands of times faster than file systems or how it can do a query against a big table 10x faster than Postgres; you would think that would capture people's attention and make them want to investigate it further.

Instead, most just point out what your little startup project is still missing when compared to 40-year old projects that are on version 15. They say, "Get back to us once you have A,B,C,D,... features working, tested, and perfected". When you lack the resources to do that, it can be soul crushing.

All engineering is about tradeoffs and if the kid is replacing air gap with "something", that efficiency has to be balanced against better bearings vs better mfgr tolerances etc. Its still a valid tool in the collection of tradeoffs; but its unlikely to match the boosterism tone of the article as being "the solution to all our problems".

The problem with boosterism is not that its positive or criticism is good or complaining that contest he was in, is mostly a contest of parental income and willingness to spend, but the problem with boosterism is it can completely overshadow any actual science or engineering. The kid probably DID do something cool and interesting, but it's buried under the boosterism and exhilarating claims of world changing etc.

Its a valid criticism because this kind of popular coverage gives the false impression that actual science journal articles or EE component datasheets should consist of 99% boosterism with perhaps 1% content. From a journalistic perspective its worthy of criticism in the sense of this is NOT science and engineering journalism, its just a puff piece full of glory and sparkles. From an educational perspective its worthy of criticism in that the tone of the article implies kids should not go into STEM fields unless their parents are rich and easy spenders, which ironically would be a better match for a non-financially rewarding liberal arts degree; I assure you that a kid can grow up to be an excellent EE even if his parents can't afford a 3d-printer.

I will say that WFH has helped immensely, at 6PM-ish I turn off the VM that is my day job computer and flip over to whatever it is I want to be working on, or go in to my workshop. I have designated areas in my home office for - this is where I write, this is where I do electronics, this is where I write code, this is where do my day job, this is where I do woodworking. That compartmentalization prevents other activities from spilling over. Limited social media hours, just like limited TV hours, is also another boon.

I write a lot of what I call "lab notes" about my thought processes as I work through ideas, example here https://github.com/justinlloyd/retro-chores for a current project, take lots of pictures of things as I research, and see where it leads me.

I also abandon a lot of things too, when I am no longer feeling the spark. I'd rather have a hundred abandoned creative projects than a few that I feel guilty about not working on, or not feeling the urge to work on.

The problem with cogeneration is its usually incredibly heavy and there aren't many uses for very low temperature process heat in most real-world applications.

Another problem with cogeneration is you might get a small percentage boost by connecting a backup generator to the HVAC system but the capex can be VERY high if done safely and reliably, and system complexity seems to scale at an exponential rate. It seems a no-brainer to dump the radiator heat from a backup generator into an office building thereby burn less natgas to heat the building; however you factor in that you have to frost-proof it all and its going to be hundreds of gallons of anti-freeze in those pipes which is expensive and all pipes leak eventually with has ecological issues, and you can't have exhaust leaks into the building and over half the time you need cooling not heating anyway and the HVAC cannot be made smaller because you still need to heat even when the gen is off and the HVAC system will be less reliable because it'll be more complicated and the backup gen will be less reliable because its more complicated, perhaps making the backup gen less reliable than wall power. So shrug shoulders and dump the gen heat using an air cooled radiator, even in the winter.