101–110 of 133 posts
Gonna be a bit of a downer and say, "The kids who need to hear what this guy was saying aren't in school with the kids whose parents are engineers." (Well, not all of them.)
I find it interesting how far we've come so far from the mindset of "You can do that." There was a hilariously funny reddit post about someone who discovered that you could just blend peanuts and it would make peanut butter. But there was sadness there too. All of my kids spent hours pouring over a book we had called 'The Way Things Work' with a delightfully funny Mammoth and a good description of how things actually…
> When I was a kid I was amazed that people like Edison and Tesla had labs not filled with gear from some lab manufacturer, but stuff they built themselves from first principles. Edison did not build his stuff himself. Edison had people building stuff for him. More people as his career progressed. His lead machinist was John Kreusi.[1] Kruesi personally built the first Edison light bulb and the first phonograph. Krue…
The distinction is rather that the device was made next door, from raw materials, with them possibly watching. Certainly acknowledging the craftsmanship, but still while understanding your tools.
Today, labs are filled with expensive machines and you are not able to peek inside. You need something? Only from a catalog, made in a mystical factory, without you knowing what's inside.
This abstraction speeds up your process (the tool you bought is fully qualified for what you plan to do) but also detaches you from the low level inner workings. Kids are fascinated if you take an everyday object apart with them (but maybe only if it was already broken)
I find it interesting how far we've come so far from the mindset of "You can do that." There was a hilariously funny reddit post about someone who discovered that you could just blend peanuts and it would make peanut butter. But there was sadness there too. All of my kids spent hours pouring over a book we had called 'The Way Things Work' with a delightfully funny Mammoth and a good description of how things actually…
What happens when the low-hanging fruit is gone? Of course the first sets of people to build something aren't buying it off the shelf... but the reward for the millionth person to be able to do the same thing from scratch is also gone. 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 au…
I have an industrial engineer education. My master’s degree was specifically a collection of small projects to demystify (and have the keys understand deeply) all kind of manufacturing processes and the designing that goes with it : machining, soldering, smelting, forging, electrical circuitry. I ended up working in IT for a large company because of opportunity. Both in terms of interesting projects and pay. All my f…
On entrepreneurship - the low execution cost and huge capital inflows in software startups actually makes it very hard to succeed in that space because it leads to intense competition. The success stories are the tip of the iceberg.
This makes hardware startups relatively easier to build, believe it or not.
I find it interesting how far we've come so far from the mindset of "You can do that." There was a hilariously funny reddit post about someone who discovered that you could just blend peanuts and it would make peanut butter. But there was sadness there too. All of my kids spent hours pouring over a book we had called 'The Way Things Work' with a delightfully funny Mammoth and a good description of how things actually…
Outside of Silicon Valley, most organisations strictly only buy commercial-off-the-shelf (CotS) software. If they do get something developed bespoke, it'll be an isolated thing with very defined boundaries.
This gets absurd after a point, where'd I've seen organisations was millions of dollars to avoid what amounts to an afternoon of scripting... and that was before LLMs!
If you even suggest custom code "an executable" (gasp!) to some people, they'll nearly faint from the stress of even thinking about it.
I've always found this kind of self-imposed constraint a bit odd, but it is surprisingly pervasive.
I find it interesting how far we've come so far from the mindset of "You can do that." There was a hilariously funny reddit post about someone who discovered that you could just blend peanuts and it would make peanut butter. But there was sadness there too. All of my kids spent hours pouring over a book we had called 'The Way Things Work' with a delightfully funny Mammoth and a good description of how things actually…
Any standouts you recommend? My 6 year old son loves all those David Macaulay books. Haven't taken that to the next level of "How to build stuff" yet.
I have an industrial engineer education. My master’s degree was specifically a collection of small projects to demystify (and have the keys understand deeply) all kind of manufacturing processes and the designing that goes with it : machining, soldering, smelting, forging, electrical circuitry. I ended up working in IT for a large company because of opportunity. Both in terms of interesting projects and pay. All my f…
I worked for a company whose factory really was just a room - the company was a machine-builder, a B2B manufacturer of custom production equipment, but with very little investment in special-purpose machinery for its facilities or even machine tools, just an attitude that the company is the people and we can do or buy anything that our customers need. In some ways that attitude seemed admirable, but ultimately it did…
Custom machine building is a very difficult business to be in. As you mentioned, it's hard to scale. I knew of a particular service provider (custom motion systems) whose philosophy was to break even on the first job and profit on any followups.
It's called Learning Curve Based Pricing / Experience Based Pricing First popularized by BCG (Boston Consulting Group) and Texas Instruments
https://commoncog.com/c/cases/texas-instruments-learning-cur...
Helped Texas Instrument become what it is, and dominate the decade that it implemented this strategy against its peers.
The guy who invented it there, was who later founded TSMC Morris Chang
I find it interesting how far we've come so far from the mindset of "You can do that." There was a hilariously funny reddit post about someone who discovered that you could just blend peanuts and it would make peanut butter. But there was sadness there too. All of my kids spent hours pouring over a book we had called 'The Way Things Work' with a delightfully funny Mammoth and a good description of how things actually…