Thanks for the links, that is a company I did not know existed, and the woofers are interesting. Really makes you wonder if they have overcome the traditional problems of large woofers. The Fostex super woofer users recommended rotating it once a year due to its own weight possibly deforming the spider structure of the woofer, at only 27" across. 60" or 100" across is back to the future level ridiculous. As another poster said, I can not see this outperforming several smaller units, but I would love to see/hear it in action.
It is hard to put into words how so many people "out there" can print things, have people read them, and they are so worded that the average person is probably reading this as "the truth".
> but it’s rather difficult to build a good analog oscillator from scratch. The most common category of oscillators you can find on the internet are circuits that simply don’t work. This is followed by approaches that require exotic components, such as center-tapped inductors or incandescent lightbulbs.
It is not hard to build a good analog oscillator from scratch, we have been doing this for decades. Secondly, while an incandescent _might_ be considered exotic, and completely unnecessary for an oscillator, a center tapped inductor is totally not exotic, and also, not really necessary for an oscillator.
As others have noted, it is simple to build a really good analog oscillator. This article is blah, and "meh" at best.
I have indeed lived life wrong. I work in HPC as a Systems Engineer (right now, in 2025, with graduate degrees in engineering, and 25 years of systems admin / engineering experience) and do not make what this person made in 2017, much less in 2025, OR 2-5x that amount for that matter (total dream salary, geez)... at one time I was the data center manager and teaching CS classes, at the same time, working 80 hours a week.
How the heck do these people secure these high paying jobs? There is some club, and I am not in it. Sorry to rant, but that 1FTE salary is huge.
Wow, I read your informative link. Where are these jobs? I went through a round of interviews last year for Sr. positions, across a number of locations in the U.S., and quite frankly, the average salary for the positions interviewed for was $80k less than most of those in the list, and $230k less than the SWE manager in the list.
The page lists the locations, and the businesses, where these jobs are placed. Unless you live on the coast (or end up in Denver/Austin), you're going to have a harder time reaching these salary numbers.
Yes, designing chips is hard, it takes a lot of knowledge. This is why medical doctors need to go through all that schooling... designing a tiny chip with more transistors running software that does amazing things is very difficult.
My Ph.D. is in computer engineering, specifically VLSI and chip design. This was from a few years ago. I _probably_ should have gone into industry, I mean, after all, it is what I went to school for and wanted to do. However, the starting salary for a chip designer (Intel / AMD / HP / IBM) was literally less than I was making at a side job (I worked my way through my Ph.D) as an IT sysadmin. Not only that, people that I knew well that graduated before me would call me up and tell me it was worse than hell itself. 80 hour weeks? Completely normal, outside of the 2 hours of commute time. Barely make rent because you live in California? Check. Pages / Calls all hours of the day outside of work? Check. 80 hours? You mean 100 hours a week leading up to a release, right? Check.
Looking back on it, it seems this was "the challenging" and if you made it past this (something like 5 years on) things calmed down for a chip designer and you moved into a more "modest" 60-80 hours a week role with less pressure and somewhat of a pay increase.
Yes, how do you attract talent under those conditions? It is not flashy work, takes a lot of schooling and the rewards are low. At least medical doctors can kind of look forward to "well, I can make _real_ money doing this", and have the satisfaction of "I helped a lot of people".
These truths mostly also apply when answering the eternal* question:
Why is everybody outside music, movies, crypto & pizza struggling to attract talent?
* Snow Crash (1992) might turn out not to be so precisely prescient due to upcoming dedollarization, AI democratization/bubble burst (the exact option depends on your personality type), & the solid state battery boom:
>When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
I have never done any chip design work, but I have seen some hobbyists going on with HDL without a degree. It's definitely not professional level but I suspect they are hireable materials at least. This leads me to ask the two questions:
1) If chip design (or X, anything) is so vital, so important to national security, why do universities insist that a degree of X include a lot of unrelated courses? You can argue that universities are not just for employment (yeah, as if most people go to university just for fun), but by the name of God, I really hate it when my university forced me to go through all those BS selective courses to reach 120. If you ask me, it's just money grabbing.
2) Why can't students go straight to a fab or whatever after bachelor and do their masters THERE? Isn't the industry a much better place to do that? Actually, why don't the industry simply hire high school students and go from there? Companies used to do that in the 50s/60s. I don't know if they still do that but I think it's rare.
These are horrendously difficult questions, though a partial answer to 2) is that labor (with "Baumol" training costs factored in) was so cheap up till the early 60s that high schoolers were easily competitive with college grads..
Ah, thanks for the link. I do hope that labor gets more share in the revenue. I kinda love the idea of "cooperative corporations" where shares are more or less evenly shared by the employees (there are ofc differences between different levels, and I'd imagine a large amount of stocks are "frozen"). I think it's going to be a lot harmonic for all employees (even the managers).
>It is
largely for this reason that performing arts organizations in financial
difficulty have often managed to shift part of their financial burden
back to the performers--and to the managements, who also are generally very poorly paid by commercial standards.
Imho the paper continues to function after you patch it with your favorite calling, design-driven industry or organizational structure :)
Are you asking why college isn’t a vocational school or technical school? Or are you wondering why the USA doesn’t have apprenticeships in the way Germany and others have?
A college isn’t really meant to be a narrow tracked vocational school - but it’s fair to ask why aren’t their more vocational schools for high tech fieldss
For number 1, there really does need to be some wider reforms, but I fear that won't happen until the whole student loan paradigm crashes and burns. I had a couple of fully paid semesters that were 100% electives I had no interest in. I would have preferred to graduate a year earlier (and thus, a year richer) or take courses that were actually relevant. Problem is that universities talk out both sides of their mouth -- raking in huge amounts of cash like a corporation, feasting off guaranteed loans from 18 year olds, while espousing some nobler concept of education/enlightenment on the other hand.
I know of a bunch of people, some who only have high school degrees, who are entirely self-taught and are doing tinytapeout (https://tinytapeout.com/) chip designs. Yeah, that's not nearly at the skill or scale of designing CPUs for Intel/AMD/NVIDIA/Apple/Marvell/etc but it's still chip design!
Your concerns about horribly long hours and lower than IT/software pay are the most concerning part to me. But, if there's really a shortage of engineers who know how to do chip design, hopefully the market will take care of that via supply/demand at least once things get really out of whack.
It's always crazy to me that you can build crappy websites in the most flexible environment imaginable and make way more than those doing the actually deep and challenging work required for those websites to run in the first place.
Looks like some kind of a gatekeeping ritual to rationalize why upper management salaries are in millions. I think we can also see in other industries too.
You hire hundreds of interns and entry level workers to let them fight in the bloodbath for 100h a week. Pay peanuts. Let them do all the work.
The ones who survive get a bit bigger salaries. Those who still persist in upper level bloodbaths are upgraded into millionaires. And paying them millions looks acceptable as it is so hard to reach the top.
While you clearly could share all those millions between entry level and paid internships, don't have 100h weeks and have a healthy industry.
Thanks for posting, I thought the same thing... my (useless data point of one) results showed 100% accuracy except the last four, which I thought "wow, I am just guessing now, can literally not see a difference".
No, OP is correct. I was teaching CS at a uni two years ago... files, directories, filesystem hierarchy, but yes, even just a file, this is a strange concept to them.
It is not a insurmountable hurdle, but it is interesting in the sense that things like git, programming, etc, all deal with files and filesystem hierarchies, and the students have never seen this, so it makes it one more thing to add to the (ever growing) list of things they need to know before we jump in.
That's just crazy to me. I'm not saying anyone is lying, just that I am in disbelief.
I taught some cybersec classes maybe 4-5 years ago and while students definitely struggled with some (what I would consider) "basic" stuff like CLI, variables, loops, etc... no one had an issue with directions like "copy this file to here", "extract the files to there", "set up this directory and point this tool to it", stuff like that.
People have had trouble with hierarchical file systems since day one. I distinctly remember being the 20 something Gen-Xer tasked with teaching boomers computers, and a large percentage just never understood why you'd want to put a folder inside a folder inside a folder. They would never do that in their filing cabinet, after all! Or why you would want to put a folder anywhere else besides the desktop since they would lose it. These people have had desktops that look like this[1] since the 90s.
>> be able to understand and empathize with the various (and often opposing) groups involved in a topic
Interestingly, I have seen Elon (DOGE) and others outside of politics (that mega-church leader) telling the public (dare I say, their followers) that one of the main problems with America is empathy, and that we need to _stop_ empathizing with others.
Interesting. From what I've seen, the lack of empathy is the root of most of the political problems in the US.
If people put the welfare of others first, for example, taxpayer funded universal healthcare wouldn't even be something that was debated, it would be implemented with as much fuss as we have over painting lane markers on streets. But Americans care less for their fellow American than most other countries out there it seems.
How would removing what little empathy that there is improve matters?
To them, removing empathy allows doing “what needs to be done,” like sending undesirables to a desolate work camp in a foreign country without any legal recourse.
I am not sure, and it may be this persons culture/background, but I do know that at a college/uni, your advisors/reviewers would tell you not to do the adjective/drama stuff, as it adds no real value to a scientific/technical paper.
e.g. potentially-devastating, hugely disruptive, special critical, greatly reducing, valuable milestone, almost completely, ambitious pragmatic, most or nearly all, existing practical.
He was the first to mass produce cars. But given that cars and mass production already existed it was probably only a matter of time before someone decided to mass produce cars.
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