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It's a poor take to be honest.

I'm an EE with main expertise in IC design but I design a lot of the chip packages, PCBs, mechanical stuff like custom made sockets etc and write a ton of SW, be it tools for myself for development and testing, be it the firmware of the chip I'm designing or another chip I use on the board. For me it never felt like SW was the hard bit, because you can write and test it pretty immediately and pretty much for free. HW felt harder because of the tooling costs, lack of documentation and examples, things that aren't obvious at the beginning (EMI/EMC) etc etc but these are very minor compared to the actual issue: long and expensive development cycles. Now, that doesn't apply if your HW is extremely simple and just a glorified uC and rhe development time is mostly the code running on it. This is why this is such a poor take. One can argue for anything at extremes. SW can be very very complex and much harder than HW, and vice versa at different extremes.

Neato used to have a straight edge with 90 degree corners on both front edges. My Neato D7 is thr best robot vacuum I had. Unfortunately they shut down their cloud services, so it's useless now.

As an engineer in semiconductors in the Netherlands, I hear from a lot of my friends working at ASML the typical red flags of the rot. They have a very thick middle management layer. Nobody feels like they are working at a high tech company with cutting edge solutions. I believe the customer support roles are very dynamic and satisfying.

It is actually a type of cypress, not a cedar.

I have been buying an Asus laptop with Intel for our employees in the last 1.5 years, an ASUS ExpertBook P5 90NX0861-M007X0 to be precise, and it did not see even a cent of price increase.

I suspect this is because of its CPU, Intel Core Ultra 7 258V with 32GB RAM directly soldered on the CPU package, being overstock or something, or Intel secured the RAM supply upfront. I don't know but it's wild that this laptop is still early 2025 prices.

You can and this is absolutely done for GPUs. It's often more feasible to jump to the next gen GPU at this point while the old part goes into the refurbished market. I believe China buys a lit of parts like these. You will never know how much lifetime is left in them though, as there's no history of the chip.

Chips age and fail with age. You can check hot-carrier injection, bias-temperature instability and electromigration as they are the main aging mechanisms. All if these are a linear function of time but exponentieal of temperature. 90-100C these chips are running at are really tough, so they are likely to fail at couple of percent to 10% range in 2-3 years depending on the margins they have in the design.

The solder joints are notorious to fail at a high rate too.

Similar to an HFT company I know, using the money spent on tokens per developer as their efficiency metric. Insane.

Wow this is a nice read. I never thought injection moulding precision, relative to the dimensions of the object, to be in the same ballpark of what you can achieve with photolithography in chip manufacturing. This of course makes sense because we are at the end limited by the same principles of mechanical inaccuracy.

Even in late 90's the IP wasn't waponized. Most start-ups were just a bunch of employees leaving a company to compete with them while improving upon the previous IP.

Nowadays even start-ups are paranoid and starting a semicon company is orders of magnitude harder..

This is really inaccurate. The real reason is similar to why America was at the forefront of the other high tech sectors like aviation etc too: massive defense spending, a lot of business people (like Fairchild) willing to invest in a sector where they see the potential procurement from Pentagon, while starting to serve the civilian sector.

This is plainly wrong. I'm a chip designer. There's no way to implement a DFF operating at 12 GHz in 180nm, period. This isn't an optimization problem, it is physics.

Wait. Dod I read this right? Are you saying rice isn't real food but meat is?

I understand most cultures over-appreciate meat, but treating a premium carb source like rice lowly is a surprise.

12 GHz on 180nm? Sorry, that's not possible. What's the actual clock speed?

Because you can just look into it and see if it's what you sent fof production, and if not and the word gets out you are done as a fab. Fab business is about trust. You also should trust that your design isn't leaked to the competition.

It's very common to xray the dies, especially for debugging. Also common is to etch it layer by layer, take photos and rebuild the circuit schematic, mainly for reverse engineering but I've seen companies doing it to their own dies too.

Things get more blurry at the board level, the combinations of suppliers and service providers are endless.

That's one way to make sure people living under aerial bombing firmly support a regime defending their sovereignty, hence legitimizing the islamic republic. Example: Taliban, with boots on the ground, didn't get any weaker at the end.

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Instead of this we have anti dual-use policies, especially in semiconductor. Any chip a fab produces need hefty paper work to prove it cannot be used for military. This is due to the military-industrial complex lobby. They don't want cheap competition.

14 kelvin is not easy to achieve at scale + after that, you need to keep it pure.

This is an extremely pure form of He, not the stuff used by the divers. That's a completely different supply chain.

Alaska and Norway understood something critical when oil was discovered: if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value, you never will. Alaska amended its constitution. Norway built the largest sovereign wealth fund on earth. Both were acts of people saying "this belongs to us, and we deserve a return on its extraction."

This is also true for the first commercially exploited natural gas fields in the world, in the Netherlands. This ruined the Dutch manufacturing industry, and became a textbook example of tge development of one sector harming others known as Dutch disease [].

AI has a great potential like this too..

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

It's not only carbon. There are a multitude of gasses which cause greenhouse effect.

Yeah of you are running Comsol you need real cores + high clock frequency + high memory bandwidth.

Gaming CPUs and some EPYCs are the best

In HPC, like physics simulation, they are preferred. There's almost no benefit of HT. What's also preferred is high cluck frequencies. These high core count CPUs nerd their clixk frequencies though.

Good to see this is getting more common!

Changing the time every year cause a lot of accidents involving wildlife. Wild animals learn human activity patterns and avoid the roads during our active hours. When we shift the time we start they get caught off guard and a lot of accidents happen. It takes roughly 2 weeks of adjustment apparently.

You cannot pay with cash in a lot of places in my European country. The number of no cash places is increasing by day.

You can use your debit card though.

That's not the star of David.

Ebikes cannot go faster than 25 kph in the Netherlands, where the author lives. Also they cannot provide power assist without pedalling.

If you find this interesting, try Nedersaksissk (low-Saxon) Wikipedia: https://nds-nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldsassisk

It's fun for modern Dutch/Frisian speakers, most likely the same for German speakers. I think English won't be enough though.

It survives in modern Dutch too: in bedstede, steevast etc. Steevast mostly means always, but sometimes means firmly similar to modern English steadfast.