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Why are people who don't have degrees always so weird about it?
yea, so so weird about sharing how they’re optional.
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It might be related to patent portfolios. AMD might be reluctant to pursue something that can step on Nvidia's minefield. OTOH, you mention developer experience, and it'd be wonderful to have something less developer hostile than CUDA. I remember my feelings when I learned how to use the Cell's SPUs and how much I didn't want to touch it with a barge pole after that.
If that is the only issue, any initial CUDA patents will be expiring now
What this article misses is that all that hardware is pretty much standardized. You need very small teams to design and test it. Manufacturing is mostly automated (or outsourced). This is still a niche job market compared to software, even if software is shedding and RF is adding. As a Ham, RF engineering seems interesting, but there's really not much for job prospects. Glassdoor shows 125k Software Engineer jobs and…
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i have done firmware development, pcb design and light ee work and basic rf and antenna design professionally with zero degrees. like anything else it’s a matter of getting your foot in the door first, then outperforming the academic nerds with zero experience
Why are people who don't have degrees always so weird about it?
People that have multiple degrees are usually pretty weird about it too.
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What sort of 'harmful materials and chemicals' are we talking about?
I used to work at a place that had a factory that made cryogenically-freezable circuit boards. I only had to visit from time to time... It was a crazy 1980s legacy place with ancient machines and weird vats of weird smelling chemicals all over the place for etching and finishing. No idea whether they were harmful or not, nobody seemed to need any PPE though....
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Idk, I'd like to see AI design a schematic and lay out a board. Even the occasional "Show HN" that combines AI+PCB stuff is about analysis and checks. It doesn't seem like anybody is even near any kind of ECAD using AI. People still complain about autorouters. Even frontier models need architecting and guard rails in software to avoid spaghetti, it seems like an even harder problem to get them to choose the correct p…
Its just a data problem, there's nothing special about the task. It just happens that there's a lot of data about programming already.
I'm sure it'll happen -- if you can defeat the world Go champion you can certainly route traces -- but so far it seems to be an exception to the bitter lesson, where proprietary hand-tuned algorithms are still on top. Given the lack of large quantities of PCB CAD files that can be appropriated for training, it might be one of those things that has to be self-learned by the AI, again reminiscent of how Alpha Zero worked.
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Its just a data problem, there's nothing special about the task. It just happens that there's a lot of data about programming already.
PCB routing is still a murderously-hard NP problem, AI or no AI. Not least because a fully-automated schematic-to-PCB flow has to be driven by component placement, which in turn is driven (or at least influenced heavily) by requirements further up the chain. I'm sure it'll happen -- if you can defeat the world Go champion you can certainly route traces -- but so far it seems to be an exception to the bitter lesson, w…
I'm one of the young(er) few who stuck with hardware out of passion rather than follow the comfortable allure of software that all my peers did. You make less money, often half. You need to commute to work. Work prospects are narrower and heavily military biased. You get exposed to harmful materials/chemicals. Hardware development is slow, tedious, and punishing compared to software. Having a home lab requires far fa…
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Do you really think that the university is going to be the bottleneck? I have to imagine that sometime in the next decade, there's going to be some big reorganization to reflect the fact that you can now learn just as well OUTSIDE of a university context. Credentials are going to become less important, standardized testing and examination far more.
To just get started in RF you need to have a basic understanding of multivariate calculus, circuit analysis (including non-linear devices), systems and signals, electromagnetism, and semiconductor physics. These are not topics you will just figure out on your own or "on the job".
People would if they have the incentive to.
I was always amazed at how many game developers learnt fairly deep mathematics and computer science without an academic background.