different companies 'launder' it differently: with voice, it was done by "accidental" voice assistant activations. i guess with glasses, maybe there will be less window dressing this time. after all, it is clearly pitched to see what you see, at all times of the day.

similar controversy happened with the various roomba products, although arguably that was a combination of data harvesting + lazy engineering.

https://ngspice.sourceforge.io/docs/ngspice-manual.pdf

in big hardware companies, things start getting siloed, but that probably has more to do with big companies (seemingly invariably) operating as a union of fiefdoms (dunbar-number-ification?)

anything HN countersignals, go long on.

if the greatest minds of earth, in their wisdom, have all collectively concluded that the smartest thing for them to do is make as much money as humanly possible, then evidently the greatest calling for mankind is... to be wealthy!

and the older i get the harder it becomes to argue with such a perspective... hmm... maybe i am getting closer to wisdom? haha!

I could not disagree more! With pesky humans, you have all sorts of things to worry about:

- is my question stupid? will they think badly of me if i ask it?

- what if they dont know the answer? did i just inadvertantly make them look stupid?

- the question i have is related to their current work... i hope they dont see me as a threat!

and on and on. asking questions in such a manner as to elicit the answer, without negative externalities, is quite the art form as i'm sure many stack overflow users will tell you. many word orderings trigger a 'latent space' which activates the "umm, why are you even doing this?" with the implication begin "you really are stupid!", totally useless to the question-asker and a much more frustrating time-waster than even the most moralizing LLM.

with LLMs, you don't have to play these 'token games'. you throw your query at it, and irrespective of the word order, word choice, or the nture of the question - it gives you a perfectly neutral response, or at worst politely refuses to answer.

its quite funny to me that ext4 very much mirrors him in that regard. its underpinning damn well everything, but you'd never know about it because it works so well.

surely armed with a C compiler + LLM, this is a non problem nowadays?

i think that, for digital design to be interesting, the cost of entry must be lowered by probably orders upon orders of magnitude.

the google skywaterpdk thing, whatever it is (or was?), did produce a great deal of hobbyist designs and proved that there really isn't anything special about rtl - infact, its really quite monotonous and boring.

which is a good attitude to have, really. lots of hobbyist designs got cranked out quickly on what, as i understood, was a very obsolete pdk from two decades ago.

but its fundamentally still too expensive and too limited. open source software 'blew up' because

1. the cost of entry was free...

2. ...for state of the art tools.

its not enough to be free, or open source. it also has to be competitive. llvm/gcc won the compiler world because they blew the codegen of proprietary compilers out of the water, ofcourse being open source it became a positive feedback loop of lots of expert eyeballs -> better compiler -> more experts look at it -> better compiler -> ...

for digital design to become interesting, you can't trick the kids: they want the same tech the 'big boys' are using. so, what scope is there to make it economical for someone like Intel carving out some space for a no-strings-attached digital design lottery?

i get the impression that, unlike for most manufacturing processes, the costs of silicon digital electronics increases every year, and the amortisation schedule becomes bigger, not smaller.

so if anything, it seems that the more high tech silicon manufacturing becomes, the smaller the pool of players (who have the ever-increasing capital expenditure necessary) becomes, which should indicate that the opportunities for digital design work are actually going to be shrinking as time goes on.

tests are ofcourse very important, but fact of the matter is, bright smart and arrogant young engineers-to-be are very eager to show everyone how much better their version of the 'thing' is, and desperately want to write their version of the thing: they don't want to verify someone else's version of the thing.

if we're being honest, how many people do you really need to do the design of some hardware feature? realistically the design can be done by one person.

so you might have one lead designer, delegates each block to 10 guys, and everything else is basically 'monkey work' of writing up the state machine logic, testing it, and hooking it all up.

and now lets count the number of companies that can put up the capital for tape-out: amd, intel, arm, nvidia, meta, aws, google chips, apple, and lets say plus 50 for fintechs, startups, and other 'smaller' orgs.

so if you want to do design, you might be competing for... lets say 3 lead designers per org on avg, 3 * 50 = 150 silicon design spots for the entire globe. to add, a resource in such scarce supply will no doubt be heavily guarded by its occupants.

i did this calculation back when i was still in uni. i'll never know if it paid off, or if it was even rooted in logic, but i remember thinking to myself back then: "no way in hell am i gonna let these old guys pidgeon hole me into doing monkey work with a promise of future design opportunities." arrogant, yes, but i can't say i regret my decision judging from the anecdotes i get from friends in the hardware world.