Just imagine how many suits people will buy for their robot butlers! Suits to the moon!
Readit Newssmallmancontrov commented on The Coming Robot Home Invasion andykessler.com/andy_kess... · Posted by u/walterbell
Yes, that's true, but the point the parent commenter was making is that recent previous administrations also didn't take this problem seriously.
Who was president in 2020 again?
It was failing long before this. The border used to be down by Panama.
The border didn't magically eradicate the flies on one side. Pushing the border down to the Darien Gap took work, but we did it before and can do it again. The real problem is the gleeful destruction of government capacity to do things like this.
Dead Comment
American corporations are what created "Silicon Valley" in the first place. America is not slow, and it's definitely not "too big to fail" as the current administration is trying to make it fail, but that is an aside.
I think America doesn't manufacture semiconductors because it is a very unclean process, full of nasty chemicals. It's expensive to make semiconductors and deal with the clean-up. There are less environmental restrictions and cheaper labor in other parts of the world.
There are a bunch of Superfund sites around Mountain View, CA that serve as a reminder about the US Semiconductor industry - Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, National Semiconductor, Monolithic Memories, and Raytheon to name a few.
Nobody in the U.S. really wants that in their back yard. Of course we've seen the same kind of thing from fracking, and everything else that rightly should be regulated or banned.
What happens now with a defunded and purposefully dysfunctional EPA is anyone's guess. Maybe manufacturers will exploit the political climate to further destroy the environment to make a few more million or billion dollars.
TSMC's competitive advantage comes from Taiwan's unique willingness to look away from wanton dumping of used acid wash like it's the 80s in Silicon Valley? Or moderately more expensive labor on one of those highly automated factories with FOUPs zooming every which way?
Press (X) to doubt.
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smallmancontrov commented on Intel's retreat is unlike anything it's done before in Oregon oregonlive.com/silicon-fo... · Posted by u/cbzbc
The problem with R&D as a career (in a "large organised company/institute" context at least, where you don't own and control the results) is the limitless supply of impoverished students and postdocs willing to work for exposure.
Right, but cheaping out on the foundation of your building has consequences -- which have come home to roost orders of magnitude in excess of the money saved.
In R&D management, this is an extremely well-known problem with an extremely well-known solution: use the oversupply to be selective rather than cheap. The fact that they chose to be cheap rather than selective is managerial incompetence of the highest order. They had one job, and they blew it. "Selective" doesn't even mean that the rating system has to be perfect or even good, it just has to equilibrate supply and demand without shredding morale. Even a lottery would suffice for this purpose.
smallmancontrov commented on Intel's retreat is unlike anything it's done before in Oregon oregonlive.com/silicon-fo... · Posted by u/cbzbc
> At the time Intel's dominance was supreme
They are the poster child for "we have a monopoly so we don't have to innovate or even maintain competence". Mind you, how much worse must things be at AMD that they're not winning the x64 war? Eventually the "PC" market is going to get run over by ARM like everything else. Especially now there's a Windows on ARM with proper backwards compatibility.
(although something is very odd with drivers on Windows-ARM, if anyone knows the full story on how to get .inf based 'drivers' working it would be genuinely helpful)
It sure seems like AMD is winning the x64 war?
https://www.alltechnerd.com/amd-captures-17-more-cpu-market-...
smallmancontrov commented on Intel's retreat is unlike anything it's done before in Oregon oregonlive.com/silicon-fo... · Posted by u/cbzbc
Intel dropped the ball, and it was the biggest bullet I ever dodged. Even 20 years ago, I felt there was something wrong about the internal culture there, so I turned down the post-internship job offer.
There's a bunch of teams there with three-letter acronyms whose origins have been totally forgotten. Like, nobody knows what LTQ or ASR stands for, or what purpose they have. When you're an intern, you tend to think that the higher-ups know what they're doing, but if you ask for an explanation, you will soon conclude that they don't know either.
People were not working hard enough. At the time Intel's dominance was supreme. They should have been picking up on niche ideas like GPUs and mobile chips, it would have been cheap and adjacent to what they had. Instead, all I heard at the meetings was laughing at the little guys who are now all bigger than Intel. Even my friend in the VC division couldn't get the bosses to see what was happening. People would spend their whole day just having coffee with random colleagues, and making a couple of slides. It's nice to relax sometimes, but when I was there it was way too much of that. There was just way too much fat in the business.
I still have friends there who stayed on. They tell me not to come, and are now wondering how to do the first job search of their professional lives. A couple have moved very recently.
It's very odd that the guy who was famous for saying what upper management should do (set culture) ended up building a culture that has completely failed.
Same. I started down the semiconductor path about 15 years ago (physics student, loved my EE classes, loved nanofab class, wanted more) and got warned away by an astonishing number of independent postdocs, interns, and seemingly successful industry contacts who all agreed on one point: the pay was such utter dogshit that one should consider it a passion career like art or music. Some of them saw consulting for the Chinese as their "big ticket light at the end of the tunnel" -- but that got shut down soon enough. I changed directions before getting first hand experience but the R&D job listings tended to support this view. "They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" seemed to be in the advanced stages at that point.
At least in R&D, from the angle I saw it. Clearly, being stingy wasn't a universal problem: heavy buybacks, ludicrous M&A (in foresight and hindsight), and that $180k average salary in the article sounds completely divorced from the snapshot impression that I got. I don't know what gives, was R&D "salary optimized" to a degree that other parts of the business weren't? Did the numbers change at some point but the culture was already rotten and cynical? Or did I see noise and mistake it for signal? Dunno.
In another world I'd love to have been part of the fight to make 10nm work (or whatever needed doing) rather than working on something that doesn't fully use my skills or in my private opinion contribute as much to humanity, but my employer pays me and respects my time and doesn't steer their business into every iceberg in the ocean, and in the end those things are more important.
Like 75% off for the first run of chips?
https://semiwiki.com/forum/threads/nova-lake-to-use-tsmc-n2p...