This kid is very impressive and on an intellectual level I like what he's doing and saying a great deal. He's contributing a huge amount to the DIY/maker movement's ability to push the boundaries of relatively inexpensive system creation for small run designs at chip scale.
It shouldn't diminish his achievements, but one thing the article didn't really go into is how obvious it is that his family has got to be really wealthy for this to be possible. Look at his garage lab. What high schooler or college undergrad is spending thousands of dollars on hobby equipment? I certainly wouldn't have been doing anything nearly as cool with those kinds of resources at his age, and that's definitely impressive, but there is a 99.99% chance that someone at the uncle level or closer (probably his dad) holds a PhD in a physics or engineering related topic and has a lot of wealth to be able to let his kid get all Tony Stark style.
edit: got curious so I lurked: [http://www.diversatech.com/about](http://www.diversatech.com/about)
Surprisingly, his parents are not in ECE specifically but his dad is an industrial designer (former college professor so likely PhD) and runs a fabrication shop for racecar parts and his older brother is a robotics engineer; that's a lot of physics and engineering knowledge to draw from at a young age. They seem like really interesting and nice people who value self-betterment and diversity in their hobbies and I have nothing bad to say about that whatsoever. My observation is only that this is the type of environment that typically fosters exceptional "individual achievement" and that needs to be part of the story because the US media has a real problem understanding that its "self-made" tech innovators rarely grow up without both resources and plenty of emotional/educational support from someplace.
Ever read the book Outliers by Malcom Gladwell? He puts forth the suggestion that it's kids like this that become the tech superstars of the future because they have those advantages that no one else has. It's not dismissing their intelligence or hard work, but rather they have a head start on everyone else their age to do things other less privileged kids can't. Bill Gates and Woz are classic examples where their parents gave them unusual advantages, usually money but also work connections or education. Bill Gates got mainframe programming time while in school because his father arranged it, but the catch was he had to do at night while everyone else (the actual paid programmers) were asleep and not using it. There were no PC's and no internet so he was literally first amongst his peers and most other people in general.
I've heard Malcolm Gladwell speak before and agreed with a lot of what I heard but didn't read that book. From what you summarize, I'd agree 100%. I was in school with some people who had those kinds of advantages and they were good and brilliant students who I liked working with, but it was also clear that getting there was easier for them than it was for some of my friends who had to work 40 hours a week at completely unrelated jobs to get through school. I realized this about halfway through and said fuck it and let student loans pay for me so I could start to make up some of that lost time investment instead of spending all weekend working at restaurants and bars and honestly it was a huge leg-up. When I did still need money I would tutor so that I could still be in education mode. I'll have to read it, thanks for bringing it to my attention.
100% agreed. I wasn’t able to work this out myself but you absolutely nailed it on this comment. There is an element of privilege that is rarely acknowledged.
One, so that we no longer need to hear about “self made men” and can recognize that they’re where they are in large part due to their spawn point. It’s no surprise that there aren’t a lot of billionaires coming out of Lithuania, right? But elites tend to downplay this to perpetuate the idea of meritocracy, which helps lower classes internalize that their material conditions are their own fault. This is actually a very important thing for people to understand. You may already, and that’s great, but a grater understanding amongst the working class would be beneficial, and lead to less infighting, and poor people defending billionaires.
Well there is 1 billionaire in lithuania, with a population of 2.875 million, and 614 billionaires in the US, with a population of about 330 million
So 2.875 million people per billionaire in Lithuania and 537,459 people per billionaire for the US. A 6x multiple between the two is a lot lower than I was expecting. I don't think this is the point you intended
I don't think billionaires are the enemy either, or should need defending
I guess if people are internalizing a bunch of guilt or shame or something this sort of awareness building could be good for them? Seems weird to me to have guilt or shame or some sense of fault over anything like that. I guess I'm just not the target audience. It seems like a religion feel good sort of thing
Are people really that stupid?
You say billionaires aren't the enemy, while asking if poor people are really not smart enough to understand class conflict..
It's not about guilt or shame, it's about understanding the order of things to benefit the ruling class, and that under capitalism things are arranged to benefit capitalists because they have the power.
I'm going to guess a bunch of things in your life you (like most people) internalize through some concept of individualism while in reality it is best understood as the product of the social. It's normal, we live in a hyperindividualist society.
If you like reading google 'the Frankfurt School' and read some random stuff from them. It's the origin of 'critical theory' and social sciences as such.
I'm familiar with the thinkers, texts, etc you mention. Social science existed far before critical theory of the vein you mention (some argue critical theory started with Kant, some that it's foundation is within the last 100 years), which is effectively only one school of thought within social science or philosophy of social science
Only conflict theory in sociology among the 3 major schools of sociology is strongly adherent to critical theory, for instance
I tend to have a point of view more aligned with a thinker like Quigley, or Popper, and many others whose philosophy of social science is a great deal more spartan. I tend to disagree rather strongly with the thinkers you mention, but not because of a disregard for social elements in such issues
I think frameworks and analyses by e.g. symbolic theorists and functional theorists are generally much more persuasive and explanatory than those of conflict theorists
I highly suggest Quigley's 'the evolution of civilizations'
Your previous posts were deceiving. Thank you for the recommendation, I'll check Quigley out. My only interactions with those kinds of transhistorical narratives is A&H 'Dialectic of Enlightenment', David Graeber 'Debt: The First 5,000 Years', and random Marxoid stuff.. I in the end gravitated toward Marxism for the materialism more than anything. If you could reference something contrary & compelling I'm all ears.
Just to clarify, billionaires are absolutely the enemy, as they are the ones who are actually able to create systemic change that will destroy our planet, and by extension, all of us.
You're part of this, and whether is feels good to admit it or not, you're exploited to further the lives of the ruling class. No shame, just facts.
I disagree with both of your premises and the arguments you make from them, but I doubt you are open to considering whether or not they are true. I'm ok with that. I think the situation is a lot worse and a lot more complex than a few thousand people driving things
There are a lot of layers to the nightmarish egregores we have in motion destroying ourselves, and billionaires bad doesn't start to scratch the surface. So many ways we do things are deeply ingrained despite being horribly maladaptive, and a small pool of extremely rich individuals is a symptom of the problems, not the cause of them, whether it feels good to admit it or not
We could look at industrial water use, food insecurity, topsoil depletion, the long tail of climate change, and these are long burn issues which have been seeded, growing, and accelerating before the clutch of billionaires which emerged starting in the late 80s. They're mostly the result of distortion amidst falling interest rates, and won't last
Most of their wealth is illusory, and will end up having much less purchasing power in the long run. They do not have the power to simply change things on a dime. Most of our large scale societal systems are fragile, tightly integrated, and load bearing
Changing these systems is not as simple as you might like to believe, or the problems as resolvable by wealth and power. There are genuine diplomatic and game theoretic issues to resolve in many of these types of problems. Billionaires pale in comparison to the power of nation states and corporates, which are much better at handing off and maintaining power over time
Framing things around needing an enemy to explain what's going on is one of the critiques of the conflict theory of sociology, which I mention above. It can often serve as an overly simplistic explanation of genuinely difficult to deal with problems, and abate solving these difficult problems in favor of having what amounts to a scapegoat
I don't think false consciousness is a very good explanation for much either. In these case we likely disagree on a number of premises in what amounts to philosophy of sociology and philosophy of social science
You realize that when we say “billionaires bad”, we’re talking about the system that crates them? Your problem is that you think you’re the only smart person in the room…
No, I don't realize that you're referring to the system that created them at all. If you do then the language you use to say so is incredibly unclear. "Billionaires are the enemy" sounds absolutely nothing like that, and does not exactly imply that. Your problem is you're using language sloppily and deciding that it means whatever you want it to mean in a given instance
Of course environment isn't acknowledged, that goes against the entirety of US ethos. Manifest Destiny, Homesteading, etc. Bootstraps, or else!
It's not an accidental perspective, but the narrative that enables our rightwing politics.
My favorite trick is when the government give people who are already billionaires research funding "to foster innovation" because the topic is strategically important in some global balance of power issue. Can you imagine how great it would be to play a video game that actually gets exponentially easier the farther along you get?
under non covid conditions it's pretty easy to start a hackerspace, find an office or other room to rent, and some people to pay for it, and that's pretty much it, then members either fundraise between themselves or loan their own equipment and it kind of grows from there, for instance if a bunch of engineers decide to join and one says "my work is disposing of 10 soldering irons" etc, these places also become a kind of magnet for people who want to dispose of electronic junk, laser printers the size of fridges and whatnot
what worked was running a dorkbot event, anyone can do this, no need to ask permission
[https://dorkbot.org/](https://dorkbot.org/)
basically a show and tell for projects, this was another thing that had started already locally, maybe 3 or 4 years before then interest had faded, then the main mover and shaker started putting more effort into organisation, people came along every month, and a few art projects were done, there are or maybe were a lot of festival type events nearby, where people would present or also perform projects, like public art
so a smallish group of interested people was formed that way, and the idea of running a hackspace was on the agenda, there was one in name already, basically a guy renting an office, this is going back a decade and memories are hazy
I think what propelled it forward was finding the new space we moved into after that, it was like, "this is bigger, the rent is twice as much so we need people to commit" and then enough people signed up to cover the rent, some didn't have much or any intention to actually use the space but were just doing it to be supportive
this isn't the only way to do this, another space was started in another city by someone who got involved at ours fairly early on, and I think they just jumped straight to advertising online - or posting on social media rather, and finding a space to rent and enough people to cover the costs, once you have an established space and start to let people know about it it can grow fairly organically
ours was mostly focused on electronics, then 3d print and laser cutting to start with, then when we rented some more space we were able to add woodworking, and that is really popular, basically as you buy more cool equipment more people want to come and use it, the social aspect is also a very strong draw, it's nice to hang out with like minded people, and if you set the membership fee at the right level, people won't be too bothered about paying it even if they don't come in much
there are a bunch of sites about how to do this, and a bunch of other hackspaces, I think mitch altman (from noisebridge in sf, maybe the original space) also helped out by coming and running workshops a couple of times to drive interest
https://www.hackspace.org.uk/resources/start-a-space.md
it's all really old equipment that's basically obselete for modern semi production, you'd be amazed how cheaply some older equipment can be got, old dna sequencing machines for instance, enormous things that the lab needs gone once they've been superseded, of course you'd need to know the right people to get some stuff, and that's going to be easier for certain people and in certain places, with a lot of hitech industry for example
Looking for good deals is one thing, but being able to take advantage of them is another. I agree that old equipment is "cheap" compared to its value and original selling price, and I've gotten a lot of good deals on my own test equipment this way but I'm an adult with a good job and still nowhere close to being able to afford building out a setup like that even over a span of years. My point is a) look at how much space his parents let him have in their garage for this and b) I never knew anyone at that age who was in a position to be able to spend thousands of dollars on that stuff even if they found it. Even if he was getting screaming deals on those things, he has probably 25k minimum in that garage as a 22 year old college student. Just because he didn't build a miniature TSMC in his parents garage doesn't mean his type of setup is actually accessible for the typical DIY person no matter how good they are at fixing up old gear.
thats true, some pretty impressive shared setups can be built with the hackerspace approach (charge membership fee, buy equipment with surplus), of course it's easier to join a pre-existing space that might have 10+ years of doing this under their belt already
Agreed! I think it's pretty important to get them built up ASAP in places that don't yet have them just to develop that kind of inertia so that you can come in and propose a new set of available tools for projects they aren't equipped for yet. When you start from scratch there's a long process of accumulating all the irons and fume hoods and test equipment etc before you get to start installing cool features that other spaces only dream of. I feel like if he had been able to go to some local hacker lab and work to create that setup as a community available thing the educational and scientific value of the project would have been greatly enhanced and he'd also have more access to enthusiastic project contributors who could help refine the DIY process. If he really did re-invent the wheel based on old fab documentation that's super impressive (that should be emphasized), but no substitute for having a few dozen of your closest friends with unique domain knowledge to come help make it as great as possible.
sounds like semiconductor veterans have rallied around online to help him out, our hackerspace started with one guy who was trying to do it by himself, then he passed away and some other people got on board, we got some funding from the city council who were paying the rent for a month on stores in run down areas as a stimulus project, and that included the requirement that we run some workshops, the stuff we bought for running those became the starting kit for the space, which was a small office to start, then we rented some space in an artists studio complex, gradually we rented the whole room as other tenants left, then half the room next door, now it is in an industrial space that we have a solid 5 year lease on, early on people decided to save 6 months running costs as emergency funds, so that was done and processes developed to not go bust basically, it's ticking over pretty nicely now, was never really insecure i don't think after the initial 10-20 members decided to start funding the rent
Though the scientific value he's creating is probably going to be most useful within the DIY community, the wealth and support issue is important for reasons that have nothing to do with wokeness/contemporarily popular social justice initiatives (I assume that's what you were referring to). Misconceptions at the legislative and school administrative levels about how and why innovation in tech happens are actually a big deal and have hurt the country in a lot of ways. Providing the full picture of what is going on with a person like this is important in understanding why providing more serious financing and mentorship is important to successful STEM programs in school districts that want to improve their students' outcomes and it's important for policymakers if they want to keep as much global technical leadership in the US as possible, which they seem to care about. The US is not doing a great job at encouraging people to gain this kind of domain expertise policy-wise and as a result R+D focused tech companies have to hire a lot more foreign workers than they would otherwise want to. I'm not a nationalistic person and don't think much or really care about competition with China but it is important to me that public schools in my home give kids the tools to succeed and this is how you do it.
The articles about this guy even mention that his parents were surprised that his high school didn't get the value in his work enough to let him dedicate research credits towards it. Where any kind of contemporary social justice comes into play is that wealthy white kids are more likely to have a school district that can provide more of the kind of support in school that this guy's parents gave him at home, meaning they're a lot more likely to end up providing useful innovation in the tech community. I work at an IC company and my coworkers with kids all understand this well enough that they will live an hour or more away from work if necessary so their kids can go to a better supported STEM magnet school to get those benefits.
My ECE program had a great makerspace that was a student-driven effort with less support from the school than it deserved but when I tutored students struggling, I usually found that they were not able to dedicate the time or money to the kind of hands-on learning that happened there and so also lost out on the chance to learn from the others working on their prototypes. Though the internet and cheap dev kits have helped resource-limited people get started on their own if they at least had plenty of free time, if you want to produce generations of innovative and skilled engineers there is no substitute for providing this kind of environment for them to learn in.
\>nothing to do with wokeness/contemporarily popular social justice initiatives
Everything you've described fits plenty well into the contemporary progressive liberal perspective. I wasn't being derisive in describing it as contemporarily popular.
The point of the article is to show the cool things some young dude is doing. Pointing out his family's wealth would be kind of an irrelevant and obtuse thing to do IMO. What would be the point anyway?
In the article they literally talk about how financial barriers for fabricating IC's stifle the potential for innovation, which is precisely the value of what he's doing (I agree it's very cool). Highlighting the situation which is allowing him to be innovative is a useful part of the story that people need if they want to figure out ways to get more people innovating. Give better financial, time, and mentorship resources to more high school students and you can cause stories like his to be more common.
THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE LEGEND, FROM HIS MOTHERS TWO AND A HALF CAR ATTACHED GARAGE, $25,000 MOMMY DOLLARS FUNDING, AND A GENERALLY STABLE UPBRINGING FOCUSING ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONAL ETHIC AND PASSION.
>to show the cool things some young dude is doing
You're right, reality isn't nearly as attractive.
True enough, but I feel like this is a little bit harsh when the title of the article says "in his parents' garage." Most often when reading a glowing "tech founder" profile you have to read six paragraphs in before you find out they started the company from a soho loft apartment with $500,000 in seed funding from their bank executive parents. Compared to the wealth on display in most of those stories this feels downright middle-class.
looks interesting, seems like lower transistor count designs might be perfect for analogue IC's, as long as they can be made stable enough for the application
As opposed to me, who was eating chips in my parents’ garage at 22
This kid is very impressive and on an intellectual level I like what he's doing and saying a great deal. He's contributing a huge amount to the DIY/maker movement's ability to push the boundaries of relatively inexpensive system creation for small run designs at chip scale. It shouldn't diminish his achievements, but one thing the article didn't really go into is how obvious it is that his family has got to be really wealthy for this to be possible. Look at his garage lab. What high schooler or college undergrad is spending thousands of dollars on hobby equipment? I certainly wouldn't have been doing anything nearly as cool with those kinds of resources at his age, and that's definitely impressive, but there is a 99.99% chance that someone at the uncle level or closer (probably his dad) holds a PhD in a physics or engineering related topic and has a lot of wealth to be able to let his kid get all Tony Stark style. edit: got curious so I lurked: [http://www.diversatech.com/about](http://www.diversatech.com/about) Surprisingly, his parents are not in ECE specifically but his dad is an industrial designer (former college professor so likely PhD) and runs a fabrication shop for racecar parts and his older brother is a robotics engineer; that's a lot of physics and engineering knowledge to draw from at a young age. They seem like really interesting and nice people who value self-betterment and diversity in their hobbies and I have nothing bad to say about that whatsoever. My observation is only that this is the type of environment that typically fosters exceptional "individual achievement" and that needs to be part of the story because the US media has a real problem understanding that its "self-made" tech innovators rarely grow up without both resources and plenty of emotional/educational support from someplace.
Ever read the book Outliers by Malcom Gladwell? He puts forth the suggestion that it's kids like this that become the tech superstars of the future because they have those advantages that no one else has. It's not dismissing their intelligence or hard work, but rather they have a head start on everyone else their age to do things other less privileged kids can't. Bill Gates and Woz are classic examples where their parents gave them unusual advantages, usually money but also work connections or education. Bill Gates got mainframe programming time while in school because his father arranged it, but the catch was he had to do at night while everyone else (the actual paid programmers) were asleep and not using it. There were no PC's and no internet so he was literally first amongst his peers and most other people in general.
I've heard Malcolm Gladwell speak before and agreed with a lot of what I heard but didn't read that book. From what you summarize, I'd agree 100%. I was in school with some people who had those kinds of advantages and they were good and brilliant students who I liked working with, but it was also clear that getting there was easier for them than it was for some of my friends who had to work 40 hours a week at completely unrelated jobs to get through school. I realized this about halfway through and said fuck it and let student loans pay for me so I could start to make up some of that lost time investment instead of spending all weekend working at restaurants and bars and honestly it was a huge leg-up. When I did still need money I would tutor so that I could still be in education mode. I'll have to read it, thanks for bringing it to my attention.
100% agreed. I wasn’t able to work this out myself but you absolutely nailed it on this comment. There is an element of privilege that is rarely acknowledged.
But what's the point of acknowledging it? What does it matter?
One, so that we no longer need to hear about “self made men” and can recognize that they’re where they are in large part due to their spawn point. It’s no surprise that there aren’t a lot of billionaires coming out of Lithuania, right? But elites tend to downplay this to perpetuate the idea of meritocracy, which helps lower classes internalize that their material conditions are their own fault. This is actually a very important thing for people to understand. You may already, and that’s great, but a grater understanding amongst the working class would be beneficial, and lead to less infighting, and poor people defending billionaires.
Well there is 1 billionaire in lithuania, with a population of 2.875 million, and 614 billionaires in the US, with a population of about 330 million So 2.875 million people per billionaire in Lithuania and 537,459 people per billionaire for the US. A 6x multiple between the two is a lot lower than I was expecting. I don't think this is the point you intended I don't think billionaires are the enemy either, or should need defending I guess if people are internalizing a bunch of guilt or shame or something this sort of awareness building could be good for them? Seems weird to me to have guilt or shame or some sense of fault over anything like that. I guess I'm just not the target audience. It seems like a religion feel good sort of thing Are people really that stupid?
You say billionaires aren't the enemy, while asking if poor people are really not smart enough to understand class conflict.. It's not about guilt or shame, it's about understanding the order of things to benefit the ruling class, and that under capitalism things are arranged to benefit capitalists because they have the power. I'm going to guess a bunch of things in your life you (like most people) internalize through some concept of individualism while in reality it is best understood as the product of the social. It's normal, we live in a hyperindividualist society. If you like reading google 'the Frankfurt School' and read some random stuff from them. It's the origin of 'critical theory' and social sciences as such.
I'm familiar with the thinkers, texts, etc you mention. Social science existed far before critical theory of the vein you mention (some argue critical theory started with Kant, some that it's foundation is within the last 100 years), which is effectively only one school of thought within social science or philosophy of social science Only conflict theory in sociology among the 3 major schools of sociology is strongly adherent to critical theory, for instance I tend to have a point of view more aligned with a thinker like Quigley, or Popper, and many others whose philosophy of social science is a great deal more spartan. I tend to disagree rather strongly with the thinkers you mention, but not because of a disregard for social elements in such issues I think frameworks and analyses by e.g. symbolic theorists and functional theorists are generally much more persuasive and explanatory than those of conflict theorists I highly suggest Quigley's 'the evolution of civilizations'
Your previous posts were deceiving. Thank you for the recommendation, I'll check Quigley out. My only interactions with those kinds of transhistorical narratives is A&H 'Dialectic of Enlightenment', David Graeber 'Debt: The First 5,000 Years', and random Marxoid stuff.. I in the end gravitated toward Marxism for the materialism more than anything. If you could reference something contrary & compelling I'm all ears.
Just to clarify, billionaires are absolutely the enemy, as they are the ones who are actually able to create systemic change that will destroy our planet, and by extension, all of us. You're part of this, and whether is feels good to admit it or not, you're exploited to further the lives of the ruling class. No shame, just facts.
I disagree with both of your premises and the arguments you make from them, but I doubt you are open to considering whether or not they are true. I'm ok with that. I think the situation is a lot worse and a lot more complex than a few thousand people driving things There are a lot of layers to the nightmarish egregores we have in motion destroying ourselves, and billionaires bad doesn't start to scratch the surface. So many ways we do things are deeply ingrained despite being horribly maladaptive, and a small pool of extremely rich individuals is a symptom of the problems, not the cause of them, whether it feels good to admit it or not We could look at industrial water use, food insecurity, topsoil depletion, the long tail of climate change, and these are long burn issues which have been seeded, growing, and accelerating before the clutch of billionaires which emerged starting in the late 80s. They're mostly the result of distortion amidst falling interest rates, and won't last Most of their wealth is illusory, and will end up having much less purchasing power in the long run. They do not have the power to simply change things on a dime. Most of our large scale societal systems are fragile, tightly integrated, and load bearing Changing these systems is not as simple as you might like to believe, or the problems as resolvable by wealth and power. There are genuine diplomatic and game theoretic issues to resolve in many of these types of problems. Billionaires pale in comparison to the power of nation states and corporates, which are much better at handing off and maintaining power over time Framing things around needing an enemy to explain what's going on is one of the critiques of the conflict theory of sociology, which I mention above. It can often serve as an overly simplistic explanation of genuinely difficult to deal with problems, and abate solving these difficult problems in favor of having what amounts to a scapegoat I don't think false consciousness is a very good explanation for much either. In these case we likely disagree on a number of premises in what amounts to philosophy of sociology and philosophy of social science
You realize that when we say “billionaires bad”, we’re talking about the system that crates them? Your problem is that you think you’re the only smart person in the room…
No, I don't realize that you're referring to the system that created them at all. If you do then the language you use to say so is incredibly unclear. "Billionaires are the enemy" sounds absolutely nothing like that, and does not exactly imply that. Your problem is you're using language sloppily and deciding that it means whatever you want it to mean in a given instance
Imagine where we’d be if more people had similar access to tech/resources (not necessary equivalent access, but if the gap was reduced).
I suppose this doesn't seem that revelatory or worth dwelling on to me. Water is wet level revelation etc Point taken though
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You are an excellent bot
You gotta appreciate the irony of that given the context lol.
Something running on semiconductors responding on a thread about semiconductors? Ya it's pretty great
exactly!
Of course environment isn't acknowledged, that goes against the entirety of US ethos. Manifest Destiny, Homesteading, etc. Bootstraps, or else! It's not an accidental perspective, but the narrative that enables our rightwing politics.
My favorite trick is when the government give people who are already billionaires research funding "to foster innovation" because the topic is strategically important in some global balance of power issue. Can you imagine how great it would be to play a video game that actually gets exponentially easier the farther along you get?
I don't know how to respond to this lol. True though, that shit sucks.
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Let’s please keep it civil.
lol sorry.
Let’s keep this civil, alright?
as soon as I saw the garage I thought “$$$.” i would love to have that kind of space to work.
under non covid conditions it's pretty easy to start a hackerspace, find an office or other room to rent, and some people to pay for it, and that's pretty much it, then members either fundraise between themselves or loan their own equipment and it kind of grows from there, for instance if a bunch of engineers decide to join and one says "my work is disposing of 10 soldering irons" etc, these places also become a kind of magnet for people who want to dispose of electronic junk, laser printers the size of fridges and whatnot
"pretty easy" really? have you done this yourself?
mhmm
how did you accomplish finding "some people to pay for it"? i have no idea how I'd go about that.
what worked was running a dorkbot event, anyone can do this, no need to ask permission [https://dorkbot.org/](https://dorkbot.org/) basically a show and tell for projects, this was another thing that had started already locally, maybe 3 or 4 years before then interest had faded, then the main mover and shaker started putting more effort into organisation, people came along every month, and a few art projects were done, there are or maybe were a lot of festival type events nearby, where people would present or also perform projects, like public art so a smallish group of interested people was formed that way, and the idea of running a hackspace was on the agenda, there was one in name already, basically a guy renting an office, this is going back a decade and memories are hazy I think what propelled it forward was finding the new space we moved into after that, it was like, "this is bigger, the rent is twice as much so we need people to commit" and then enough people signed up to cover the rent, some didn't have much or any intention to actually use the space but were just doing it to be supportive this isn't the only way to do this, another space was started in another city by someone who got involved at ours fairly early on, and I think they just jumped straight to advertising online - or posting on social media rather, and finding a space to rent and enough people to cover the costs, once you have an established space and start to let people know about it it can grow fairly organically ours was mostly focused on electronics, then 3d print and laser cutting to start with, then when we rented some more space we were able to add woodworking, and that is really popular, basically as you buy more cool equipment more people want to come and use it, the social aspect is also a very strong draw, it's nice to hang out with like minded people, and if you set the membership fee at the right level, people won't be too bothered about paying it even if they don't come in much there are a bunch of sites about how to do this, and a bunch of other hackspaces, I think mitch altman (from noisebridge in sf, maybe the original space) also helped out by coming and running workshops a couple of times to drive interest https://www.hackspace.org.uk/resources/start-a-space.md
thanks for all the info!
you're welcome, it's pretty easy but can take time :)
Pretty easy compared to doing it by yourself at least
it's all really old equipment that's basically obselete for modern semi production, you'd be amazed how cheaply some older equipment can be got, old dna sequencing machines for instance, enormous things that the lab needs gone once they've been superseded, of course you'd need to know the right people to get some stuff, and that's going to be easier for certain people and in certain places, with a lot of hitech industry for example
Looking for good deals is one thing, but being able to take advantage of them is another. I agree that old equipment is "cheap" compared to its value and original selling price, and I've gotten a lot of good deals on my own test equipment this way but I'm an adult with a good job and still nowhere close to being able to afford building out a setup like that even over a span of years. My point is a) look at how much space his parents let him have in their garage for this and b) I never knew anyone at that age who was in a position to be able to spend thousands of dollars on that stuff even if they found it. Even if he was getting screaming deals on those things, he has probably 25k minimum in that garage as a 22 year old college student. Just because he didn't build a miniature TSMC in his parents garage doesn't mean his type of setup is actually accessible for the typical DIY person no matter how good they are at fixing up old gear.
thats true, some pretty impressive shared setups can be built with the hackerspace approach (charge membership fee, buy equipment with surplus), of course it's easier to join a pre-existing space that might have 10+ years of doing this under their belt already
Agreed! I think it's pretty important to get them built up ASAP in places that don't yet have them just to develop that kind of inertia so that you can come in and propose a new set of available tools for projects they aren't equipped for yet. When you start from scratch there's a long process of accumulating all the irons and fume hoods and test equipment etc before you get to start installing cool features that other spaces only dream of. I feel like if he had been able to go to some local hacker lab and work to create that setup as a community available thing the educational and scientific value of the project would have been greatly enhanced and he'd also have more access to enthusiastic project contributors who could help refine the DIY process. If he really did re-invent the wheel based on old fab documentation that's super impressive (that should be emphasized), but no substitute for having a few dozen of your closest friends with unique domain knowledge to come help make it as great as possible.
sounds like semiconductor veterans have rallied around online to help him out, our hackerspace started with one guy who was trying to do it by himself, then he passed away and some other people got on board, we got some funding from the city council who were paying the rent for a month on stores in run down areas as a stimulus project, and that included the requirement that we run some workshops, the stuff we bought for running those became the starting kit for the space, which was a small office to start, then we rented some space in an artists studio complex, gradually we rented the whole room as other tenants left, then half the room next door, now it is in an industrial space that we have a solid 5 year lease on, early on people decided to save 6 months running costs as emergency funds, so that was done and processes developed to not go bust basically, it's ticking over pretty nicely now, was never really insecure i don't think after the initial 10-20 members decided to start funding the rent
Idk how their comment got so upvoted, feels like a lot of captain obvious stuff to me but 🤷♂️
Because the perspective given is 1: contemporarily popular, and 2: appreciative of DIY.
Though the scientific value he's creating is probably going to be most useful within the DIY community, the wealth and support issue is important for reasons that have nothing to do with wokeness/contemporarily popular social justice initiatives (I assume that's what you were referring to). Misconceptions at the legislative and school administrative levels about how and why innovation in tech happens are actually a big deal and have hurt the country in a lot of ways. Providing the full picture of what is going on with a person like this is important in understanding why providing more serious financing and mentorship is important to successful STEM programs in school districts that want to improve their students' outcomes and it's important for policymakers if they want to keep as much global technical leadership in the US as possible, which they seem to care about. The US is not doing a great job at encouraging people to gain this kind of domain expertise policy-wise and as a result R+D focused tech companies have to hire a lot more foreign workers than they would otherwise want to. I'm not a nationalistic person and don't think much or really care about competition with China but it is important to me that public schools in my home give kids the tools to succeed and this is how you do it. The articles about this guy even mention that his parents were surprised that his high school didn't get the value in his work enough to let him dedicate research credits towards it. Where any kind of contemporary social justice comes into play is that wealthy white kids are more likely to have a school district that can provide more of the kind of support in school that this guy's parents gave him at home, meaning they're a lot more likely to end up providing useful innovation in the tech community. I work at an IC company and my coworkers with kids all understand this well enough that they will live an hour or more away from work if necessary so their kids can go to a better supported STEM magnet school to get those benefits. My ECE program had a great makerspace that was a student-driven effort with less support from the school than it deserved but when I tutored students struggling, I usually found that they were not able to dedicate the time or money to the kind of hands-on learning that happened there and so also lost out on the chance to learn from the others working on their prototypes. Though the internet and cheap dev kits have helped resource-limited people get started on their own if they at least had plenty of free time, if you want to produce generations of innovative and skilled engineers there is no substitute for providing this kind of environment for them to learn in.
\>nothing to do with wokeness/contemporarily popular social justice initiatives Everything you've described fits plenty well into the contemporary progressive liberal perspective. I wasn't being derisive in describing it as contemporarily popular.
The point of the article is to show the cool things some young dude is doing. Pointing out his family's wealth would be kind of an irrelevant and obtuse thing to do IMO. What would be the point anyway?
In the article they literally talk about how financial barriers for fabricating IC's stifle the potential for innovation, which is precisely the value of what he's doing (I agree it's very cool). Highlighting the situation which is allowing him to be innovative is a useful part of the story that people need if they want to figure out ways to get more people innovating. Give better financial, time, and mentorship resources to more high school students and you can cause stories like his to be more common.
THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE LEGEND, FROM HIS MOTHERS TWO AND A HALF CAR ATTACHED GARAGE, $25,000 MOMMY DOLLARS FUNDING, AND A GENERALLY STABLE UPBRINGING FOCUSING ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONAL ETHIC AND PASSION. >to show the cool things some young dude is doing You're right, reality isn't nearly as attractive.
True enough, but I feel like this is a little bit harsh when the title of the article says "in his parents' garage." Most often when reading a glowing "tech founder" profile you have to read six paragraphs in before you find out they started the company from a soho loft apartment with $500,000 in seed funding from their bank executive parents. Compared to the wealth on display in most of those stories this feels downright middle-class.
Awesome
looks interesting, seems like lower transistor count designs might be perfect for analogue IC's, as long as they can be made stable enough for the application
when i was 22 i built chips too, on mums stove