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TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

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Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#191

Post by karakot »

overfeed wrote: post #189
karakot wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wondered - why people use a nation-state notion? Why not just a state or a country? USA is not a nation-state, or UK, or India, or Russia, etc. Does your question imply that none of these countries are capable of orchestrating this and only nation-states can do it?

> I always wondered - why people use a nation-state notion? It's a shibboleth, similar to HN favorites: "orders of magnitude" and "orthogonal". Shibboleths are often social signifiers, sociology has lots of research on why people use them

ha-ha, thanks, makes sense.

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#192

Post by tonyhart7 »

tomasphan wrote: post #178
tonyhart7 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What’s going on big guy? Maybe take a break from commenting

I thought HN commenter would be smart people, turns out they just good at Tech and sucks at everything else

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#193

Post by cosmicgadget »

93po wrote: post #153
fidotron wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because if you tolerate that you disincentivize actually developing the IP in question in favour of stealing everyone else's, which leads to nothing being developed.

is it impossible for society to advance without IP laws? is capitalism a requirement for advancement?

Do non-absolutes exist?

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#195

Post by melagonster »

93po wrote: post #153
fidotron wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because if you tolerate that you disincentivize actually developing the IP in question in favour of stealing everyone else's, which leads to nothing being developed.

is it impossible for society to advance without IP laws? is capitalism a requirement for advancement?

Obviously, if this happened, Taiwan would not exist now.

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#196

Post by [deleted] »

ethbr1 wrote: post #116
ryanjshaw wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This abuse of Excel might be in the running for a new form of esports.

It's always worth remembering there's exactly one reason Excel is abused -- IT isn't giving "non-developers" access to tools they need to automate their work.

[deleted]

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#197

Post by giardini »

john01dav wrote: post #186
tracker1 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The VBA hammer is real... it can force any screw, nail, staple into any hole you desire. Until the web version takes over, and you can no longer connect to anything real.

I doubt that the people who use Excel care enough about computers to be deterred by cloud.

Last night enjoyed reading the HN topic

"Lessons from writing a Kubernetes Security book" at

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44784495

all about the joys and problems developers encounter using kubernetes/k8.

And reading now, today here about Excel/VBA, it struck me that something was missing: couldn't I eliminate 90% of computer software and ease 80% of software devops simply by building/selling a system that ran purely Excel atop kubernetes?

I mean, isn't that all there is to computing nowadays? Plus a little social media? And some AI for fun and maybe a little Excel/k8 work as frosting on the cake.

EDIT: Upon some further thought and prompting by helpful anonymous others, I have found a slightly different path: a FORTH/kubernetes system that will be used to bootstrap versions of VBA & Excel to the cloud. This will be made available to the great unwashed masses of humanity (and their AI friends) for implementing social media for all.

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#198

Post by burnt-resistor »

sgarland wrote: post #32

Right before I left Samsung Austin Semiconductor (Samsung’s fab in the U.S.), in 2019, they were phasing out local share drives in favor of a self-hosted cloud that Samsung created. The supposed reason was better security, though it’s unclear to me why they couldn’t globally apply whatever rules they wanted to enforce to all office locations, instead of forcing everyone to use a remote endpoint. The throughput was ab…

This is a pathology of megacorps who don't continually reinvest in process and support infrastructure and instead abuse backoffice desktop software inefficiently. In 20/20 retrospect, it should've been converted from Excel to a proper app as soon as it became a bottleneck.

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#199

Post by 4gotunameagain »

tonyhart7 wrote: post #45
4gotunameagain wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem lies in forming and managing such a huge organisation that deals with the problem in an efficient and lean way, not the technical aspects. The materials science aspect is a challenge, not to produce, but to produce with a sane cost. The rocket science aspect of things (namely the linearisation of the booster model in order to be able to be solved in constant time by an MPC) is more or less a solved proble…

so it still "rocket science", you saying that the hard part is to make it lean and efficient isn't that what they do in SpaceX????, your comment literally counterproductive

It is comparably hard to creating a lean and efficient car manufacturing company.

Yet you don't hear people throw the phrase "automotive science" around.

Rocket science has some niche parts that are very hard indeed. But this is not where the major challenge lies.

Re: TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets on iPhone 18 chip process

#200

Post by K0balt »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #170
asdff wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the average age is 73 that's the issue right there. People are refusing to retire at 62 and make room for juniors. Then when they finally do retire (73 average seems like "dies in office" levels) there are 2 decades of missing juniors who haven't been trained in the pipeline. This is the shortcoming with most technical fields. No one is incentivized to see the big picture of the training pipeline that exists well…

The actual killer is the pay and working conditions, and the problem is fairly intractable. If you are smart enough to be a good tool maker, you are likely smart enough to be a good 6-figure keyboard-all-day worker. Losing a finger (or three) and breathing VOCs all day for half the pay is not very enticing. These industries aren't glamourous for investors either. The business proposition sucks, the cost and liabiliti…

At this point, even if die makers started making 300k a year, there isn’t enough master die makers left in the USA to bootstrap the capacity in less than 5 decades. The only practical solution at this point is to max out apprenticeship and somehow incentivise the industry so that we could flood other countries with apprentices as well. Then, we might be able to start getting things balanced in as little as 2 decades.

Otherwise, completely homegrown manufacturing is essentially dead in the water.

If we want to regrow US domestic manufacturing, we need to throw about 100B at scholarships and incentives, or figure out how to capture remaining diemaker empirical knowledge into ML / robotics.

Or maybe we could spend 10B on immigration incentives for qualified Diemakers? Idk about the global state of affairs and how that would work. At any rate we need at least 100-300k new diemakers if we really want to rebuild 100 percent domestic capabilities overnight. And then we need a career path for them 20 years farther down the road.

It was really, really foolish to allow strategic industrial capability to wither on the vine.

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