Having had the opportunity to have ideas and pursue them extensively as a corporate employee, startup founder, and independent researchers, all I can say is that there seems to be a violent agreement of how stuff actually happens and that it's almost never fully made possible in either industry or academia. It's like a living irony.

For a deeper treatment of the broader subject - one of the most cited books is the "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"

Finally if we were to think in terms of a proper memory/latency hierarchy, what's a Model + CPU's equivalent of working memory? Registers? L1 cache?

What I'm seeing is that companies like Formlabs (plastics) and divergent (metal) are changing the game and you have car parts to car engines to rocket engines being 3d printed.

See my other comment above for more links, but things seem to be changing fast in manufacturing.

Edit:

I think this quote sums the point though:

“With the increased throughput and decreased costs, Fuse X1 has completely changed our perspective on what kinds of projects our lab can support versus what we would have traditionally moved to an injection mold.” Cody Jepsen, Engineering Technician, Additive Manufacturing at Tesla Giga NV

Formlabs recently launched a $80K industrial-grade machine that works better than it's $500K alternatives.

https://formlabs.com/blog/announcing-fuse-x1-industrial-sls/ https://formlabs.com/blog/diy-injection-molding/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TvjUVdn3YQ&t=2586s

Formlabs is used by Tesla to print car parts to Ukraine to print drones.

The thing about SLS is that it works with metal too. So you have startups like Divergent (recently raised $290M) in LA printing car engines https://www.latimes.com/b2b/space-tech/story/2026-06-23/dive...

Note that rocket engines are 3d printed too from SpaceX to India's Sky Roots https://www.selfcad.com/blog/how-spacex-uses-additive-manufa... https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/skyroots-vikram-1-reache...

So is injection molding more effective than additive manufacturing? This question is a bit like "no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim".

But while you have metal at industrial scale you have "desktop" metal printers for ~$10K https://all3dp.com/4/first-look-at-the-scrap-1-desktop-metal...

edit: this doesn't invalidate the OP thesis, which I strongly agree with. Except that it's not just engineers, this is a more general thing across many fields.

"Good enough ISA plus zero licensing cost" beats "perfect ISA plus royalties" in the embedded space.

Also, let's not forget that the reason the world is built on the von Neumann architecture is that it was made available for free.

[1] - https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/espressif-moves-exclusively-...

It's interesting to learn actuators are "behind". I kept seeing cool stuff in the 3D printing space and thought there's a lot of progress. I'd love to learn more.

Given the volume of text philosophy wrangles, I’m not surprised TAOCP was casual =))

The law is huge, complex and can often have conflicting aspects.

This is assumed by some to be "by design". When the law is such that everyone is breaking it, then the power shifts to whoever can bring people in "front of the law".

So, in every case with strong beliefs such as yours, IMMV and it's easy to voice an opinion when you feel "not in target".

https://www.regulations.gov/comment/EPA-HQ-OPPT-2026-1387-00...

This is the manufacturer marketing copy on Opteon™, which is functionally comparable to Freon

https://www.opteon.it/-/media/files/opteon/opteon-pfas-infog...

This is (some of) the research

https://chemrxiv.org/doi/10.26434/chemrxiv-2024-0djqt

> Trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) is a persistent and mobile substance that has been increasing in concentrations within diverse environmental media, including rain, soils, human serum, plants, plant-based foods, and drinking water. Currently, TFA concentrations are orders of magnitude higher than those of other per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). This accumulation is due to many PFAS having TFA as a transformation product, including several fluorinated gases (F-gases), pesticides, pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals, in addition to direct release of industrially produced TFA. Due to TFA’s extreme persistence and ongoing emissions, concentrations are increasing irreversibly. What remains less clear is the thresholds where irreversible effects on local or global scales occur. There are indications from mammalian toxicity studies that TFA is toxic to reproduction and that it exhibits liver toxicity. Ecotoxicity data are scarce, with most data for aquatic systems; fewer data are available for terrestrial plants, where TFA bioaccumulates most readily. Collectively, these trends imply that TFA meets the criteria of a planetary boundary threat for novel entities because of increasing planetary-scale exposure, where potential, irreversible disruptive impacts on vital earth system processes could occur. The rational response to this is to instigate binding actions to reduce emissions of TFA and its many precursors.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49071960

Points: 10

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