Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 753 posts

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#421

Post by [deleted] »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #403
hyperbovine wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I perceive as younger people are horrified at the idea of fifty year old tools My students are shocked (horrified?) to learn that they're basically running 50-yr old Fortran code when they use scipy.minimize to train their fancy little neural nets.

I always chuckle at how Python became the dominant language for AI / ML / data science etc but wonder why it is that Fortran and Python became the golden combo, it could have been done with any other language, no complaints, I love Python, but its just amusing to me.

[deleted]

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#422

Post by 7thaccount »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #403
hyperbovine wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I perceive as younger people are horrified at the idea of fifty year old tools My students are shocked (horrified?) to learn that they're basically running 50-yr old Fortran code when they use scipy.minimize to train their fancy little neural nets.

I always chuckle at how Python became the dominant language for AI / ML / data science etc but wonder why it is that Fortran and Python became the golden combo, it could have been done with any other language, no complaints, I love Python, but its just amusing to me.

It's really just that it's a pretty easy language to learn that finds a good balance between structure and brevity. It has very good support for the data structures you need and libraries for everything. A lot of people love the language and that built up a lot of momentum and eventually people started adding stuff like numpy and scipy and pandas and before long you had this giant scientific computing environment that almost anyone can get into.

I tried out most of the scripting languages out there (Ruby, Perl, Tcl, Groovy, R, and many more) and Python just seemed to click more and it has a whole lot less to worry about upfront than languages like C# and Java. In comparison to languages like C and C++, it's a godsend for those with typical automation needs.

In my eyes it seems like a pretty straightforward development. There have been plenty of other tools that may have made sense throughout history too. Matlab could have done this, but by that time nobody was going to build out massive libraries for something expensive and partly closed off.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#423

Post by mschuster91 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #402
tclancy wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a really interesting generation gap issue in the replies to your comment. What I perceive as younger people are horrified at the idea of fifty year old tools while the older folks are thinking (I imagine) “if the tools have lasted that long they must be well-honed and very good”. Of course, this could simply be the perspective of someone turning 50 this year.

> There is a really interesting generation gap issue in the replies to your comment. What I perceive as younger people are horrified at the idea of fifty year old tools while the older folks are thinking (I imagine) “if the tools have lasted that long they must be well-honed and very good”. It's like when someone wants to choose a brand new web framework that isn't battle tested over one of the most battle tested web…

> You can hire way more developers with battle tested tooling, than some bleeding edge thing you don't know if it can even scale.

There's a crucial difference!

You can hire expensive developers on battle tested tooling... or you can hire a shit ton of juniors that want to work on $BUZZWORD for cheap in exchange for the CV creds of "worked on $BUZZWORD".

Resume Driven Development...

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#424

Post by youngtaff »

wmwmwm wrote: post #214
alsetmusic wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Access to contemporary luxury does not a genius make. There was that bit in the film, "Goodwill Hunting," about an Indian man who found a math book and went on to define groundbreaking math from what he extrapolated. I don't know the details, but I don't think the film made that up.

I’m guessing Ramanujan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

The Music of Primes by Marcus du Sautoy has a chapter on him

Book is a bit heavy going but well worth a read

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#426

Post by bdbdkdksk »

gregw2 wrote: post #371
simgt wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you end up with 10-15 years? China is almost perfectly vertically integrated from raw materials to highly advanced finished products. Their industrialization started in the 70s. Getting to that level would require a lot of planning as well as the kind of hard constraints imposed on China through embargo. We're not even getting back to that level, we've never reached iPhone level of manufacturing in the US or E…

Musk apparently stood up a brand new raw to finished goods manufacturing for Starlink kits in 2-3 years in America/Texas. Non trivial, but doable in niches at least, per a factory engineer: "The main function of this site is to produce our standard Starlink kits. Right now, we’re producing 15,000 a day straight out of the factory. Raw plastic palettes come in, raw aluminum comes in and we make those into the Starlink…

So they form the plastic (already processed) using machines they've imported, and then put pre-populated PCBs with components made in China inside them? Hardly soup to nuts manufacturing.

I've worked in a niche assembly line in North America where we populated some of the board components in-house, but they were etched in batches off-site.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#427

Post by ModernMech »

tclancy wrote: post #302
mikewarot wrote: post #133

Having worked in a job shop, a factory that did gears down to quantity one, I became quite aware of the differences between IT, my previous job, and actual physical production. The machine tools were all made 50+ years ago. Changing anything was a dangerous thing to do, because you might cause jobs that have known and reliable setups that are done a few times a year in quantity, to fail, erasing the profits for the j…

There is a really interesting generation gap issue in the replies to your comment. What I perceive as younger people are horrified at the idea of fifty year old tools while the older folks are thinking (I imagine) “if the tools have lasted that long they must be well-honed and very good”. Of course, this could simply be the perspective of someone turning 50 this year.

Yeah I have students who ask me "Why are we learning C++? My dad said it's older than him!"

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#428

Post by danans »

bluGill wrote: post #394
baq wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, minimum wage there pays for 10 people on the floor in Asia and the cost of the factory is approximately the same. There’s no economic sense to build a factory in the states… which is where all the government subsidies enter the stage, but the budget is already running a war time deficit. It’s going to be so much worse for those small used-to-be-factory cities until the printer starts for real, and then…

> There’s no economic sense to build a factory in the states… That isn't how it works. Details matter. A local factory can save a ton of money because it can be more just in time - you don't have to build excess because of shipping times. (shipping costs can also save a lot of money for a local factory). The states have lots of cheap reliable power (not perfectly reliable, but close enough). If your production line i…

> The states have lots of cheap reliable power (not perfectly reliable, but close enough).

Industrial electricity rates are pretty much the same in China and the US, from 8-9c/kWh. In both countries, however, electricity is going to face upward price pressure from AI datacenters.

> Production close to engineering makes for a lot of savings because when a part is designed you can get a prototype to testing faster.

This already exists in the US. In California, for example, there are many specialty prototype manufacturing companies that focus on this problem specifically. They are adjacent to the r&d firms designing the products.

That's not the type of manufacturing that the recent debate over reshoring is about. It's about production scale manufacturing - creating an American Shenzen with an equivalent amount of jobs - and very soon. But any such capability will be heavily automated, so it won't produce the equivalent jobs.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#429

Post by mschuster91 »

gregw2 wrote: post #371
simgt wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you end up with 10-15 years? China is almost perfectly vertically integrated from raw materials to highly advanced finished products. Their industrialization started in the 70s. Getting to that level would require a lot of planning as well as the kind of hard constraints imposed on China through embargo. We're not even getting back to that level, we've never reached iPhone level of manufacturing in the US or E…

Musk apparently stood up a brand new raw to finished goods manufacturing for Starlink kits in 2-3 years in America/Texas. Non trivial, but doable in niches at least, per a factory engineer: "The main function of this site is to produce our standard Starlink kits. Right now, we’re producing 15,000 a day straight out of the factory. Raw plastic palettes come in, raw aluminum comes in and we make those into the Starlink…

This certainly is not a "raw to finished goods" plant, it's a typical Musk exaggeration.

The housing, maybe. Makes sense to produce that domestically at the volume SpaceX requires, less shipping costs because the dishes do take up volume.

But the PCB? Almost certainly not. With any luck they're making and assembling the PCB in house, but the components originate from a lot of suppliers and there are a lot of components on it [1]. Personally, I'd guess the latter, given that the PCB contains a lot of pretty novel tech [2] of which I'm certain that SpaceX wants to be able to iterate on as fast as they can, without having to wait for even a day or two for a new plane full of PCBs from China.

[1] https://wccftech.com/starlink-user-terminal-apple-supplier-t...

[2] https://hackaday.com/2021/01/11/starlink-satellite-dish-x-ra...

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#430

Post by beeflet »

coliveira wrote: post #147
crote wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nukes make conventional war for survival irrelevant. So how come Russia hasn't annexed Ukraine yet? And why spend literally hundreds of billions of dollars a year maintaining a conventional military when you already have nukes? And when are you going to press that button? Do you nuke Eurasia the second they cease diplomatic communications? When a cargo ship heading to LA founders for mysterious reasons? When a smal…

Russia doesn't need to use nukes for that.

clearly they do
Post reply on HN