Factories are just rooms

(both things are true, yes reality is infinitely more complex and no you're probably not going to be the next President or cure cancer, but that's not the lesson one ought to instill. And I do believe there is a scaffolded way to do it. All things are possible... to explore. The feedback loop of fidelity of lessons, comes incrementally, after.)

How useful is it to know how to spend 5 times as much time and money to make your own piece of equipment that is now a commodity and readily-available?

For instance: 3d printers and automated metal and woodworking tools. Yeah, they exist. Yeah, it's never been more accessible to make your own tools and gadgets and toys with them. But no, they aren't tools that let you have even a 1-in-ten-thousand chance of being the next Tesla or Edison.

I've re-soldered shit in Xbox controllers, I've fixed stuck mechanisms in motorized Christmas decorations, I've saved thousands on labor for car repairs, I've built my own furniture, I've re-wired speakers and installed conduit at home.

But knowing how to do those things in the 2000s is not the same as inventing how to do those things or even knowing how to do those things as a well-compensated career before things were so completely consumerized and commoditized.

I'm still limited by the state of the world I'm playing in. It's worth learning those things if they strike your fancy, if you want to be able to do it for the love of the game, if you value knowledge generally (and I think you should!). But. It's also a something of a luxury hobby at this point.

I can't fab a new high-performance CPU. I can't even realistically learn enough to even compete design-wise with the teams upon teams of people already standing on the shoulders of giants in that industry, or in any other highly-technical highly-advanced one.

> But knowing how to do those things in the 2000s is not the same as inventing how to do those things or even knowing how to do those things as a well-compensated career before things were so completely consumerized and commoditized.

Two things; First those skills are more useful than you can imagine when you're using commoditized things to do something new and second, it isn't "low hanging fruit to recreate something you can buy anywhere.

If you look at today's software (as an example) we have programs that waste the crap out of resources. Is making them more efficient a win? Yes if you can re-purpose the resources you freed up for other things. I've thought long and hard about things people use "computers" and the "internet" for today that could be built more securely on simpler hardware with ironclad privacy guarantees and more utility. That is a low hanging fruit.

What I'm hearing when I reading your comment is that you feel that all the value has been sucked out of the market and there isn't anything left. And in that I think you'll find that enshittification has polluted the value so much that new opportunities have opened up for unpolluted value. There are many things that are currently "solved" with an existing and and over priced solution which creates opportunities to re-imagine the solution with something less expensive and come in underneath the market. The IBM PC/AT completely displaced minicomputers at small to medium businesses, you can build a PC/AT equivalent today for $6, not $6,000.

The thing here is that 'technology' isn't the same thing as 'value.' Just like knowledge is not the same thing as wisdom. As the author in the linked article writes, it doesn't take a whole lot to stand up a manufacturing line to make a new thing these days, and if that thing has value because it solves a problem, then people will pay to enjoy that value. And to pair that with the earlier metaphor, if you wanted to start a local newspaper (high value) you could with a printing press, some newsprint, and a journalist or two. But without the experience of how newspapers are valuable to their readers, you might be unsuccessful even though you know everything you need to know about writing news stories and printing them.

I'm not trying to be pedantic here, yes there are lots of things going on, and it can seem hopeless, but it isn't. And if you do want to design a high performance CPU you can get a kick ass FPGA to host it for cheap. Variants on RISC-V are pretty impressive and you can make a new one and license it to a chip fab if you choose to. This is WCH's entire business. Don't worry about being the next Tesla or Edison, neither of them knew they were going to be the Tesla or Edison we know today. They were both just trying to create solutions to problems. Look for the problems, think about ways to solve them, and then talk to people who live with those problems day in and day out and see what it might be worth to them to have that problem solved. People love to complain in my experience :-).

Depends on why it's gone? For example, before the shocker of Facebook buying Oculus, there was an active community of side-gig businesses selling kits around VR, large touch panels, haptics, and such. What couldn't exist, was scaling that beyond hobby kits. No VARs, no integrators or assemblers, no OEMs, no contract or bespoke manufacturing, no searching for viable niche products. Because "it's merely a kit" was the only way the US patent system allowed the stuff to exist at all as a business. The gap between what you could make, and what you're allowed to sell, is large. Even now, we can't reasonably search for those niche market fits, because such scales are beneath the notice of big patent-holding companies. So absent FRAND reform or some such ("you're required to let me use it and pay you"), no fruit for you.

CA lacking non-competes, "Stealing IP!", grew software fruit in CA. But the US has lacked the growing conditions for Shenzhen fruit. So, what happens when the low-hanging fruit is gone, from the US? Fruit is grown, and enjoyed, elsewhere.