Hilarious to see Cadence and Synopsys in this article. They are arguably the cause. The complete lack of open source tooling and their agressive tooling price is the exact reason this ecosystem continues to be an absolute dumpster fire.
I used Vivado (from Xilinx) a bit during my undergrad in computer engineering and was constantly surprised at how much of a complete disaster the tooling chain was. Crashes that would erase all your work. Strange errors.
I briefed worked at a few hardware companies and I was always taken aback by the poor state of the tooling which was highly correlated with the license terms dicated by EDA tools. Software dev seemed much more interesting and portable. Working in hardware meant you would almost always be searching between Intel, Arm, AMD and maybe Nvidia if you were a rockstar.
Software by comparison offered plentiful opportunities and a skill set that could be used at an insurance firm or any of the fortune 100s. I've always loved hardware but the opaque datasheets and IP rules kills my interest everytime.
Also, I would argue software devs make better hardware engineers. Look at Oxide computer. They have fixed bugs in AMD's hardware datasets because of their insane attention to detail. Software has eaten the world and EEs should not be writing the software that brings up UEFI. We would have much more powerful hardware systems if we were able to shine a light on the inner workings of most hardware.
Every hype AI post is like this. “I’m making $$$ with these tools and you’re ngmi”
I completely understand the joys of a few good months but this is the same as the people working two fang jobs at the start of Covid. Illusionary and not sustainable.
I built and debugged an embedded stub loader for
Rp2350 to program MRAM and validate hardware status for a satellite. About 2.5 hours of my time, a lot of it while supervising students/doing other things.
This would have been a couple day+ unpleasant task before; possibly more. I had been putting it off because scouring datasheets and register maps and startup behavior is not fun.
It didn’t know how to troubleshoot the startup successfully itself, though. I had to advise it on a debugging strategy with sentinel values to bisect. But then once explained it fixed the defects and succeeded.
LLMs struggle in large codebases and the benefit is much smaller now. But that capability is growing fast, and not everything software developers do is large.
Around 30 to 35, don't remember which year it was exactly.
And the thing that was largest in making me go, "Yeah, this isn't good for me, I need to quit" was that it was consuming my thoughts all the time. When I wasn't in front of the computer gaming, I was thinking about the game and planning the strategy for my next move. (I usually played turn-based games rather than action games). Which is fine in small doses, but it was taking over my mind when I was at church wanting to focus on worshiping God, when I was at work (and distracting me from getting work done), when I was trying to read...
Basically, I realized that it was an unhealthy focus for me, and taking over way too much of my attention that I wanted to be able to spend on a much wider variety of things. So I quit. First year was the hardest, second and third years were hard too, but by now I've gotten used to reaching for a book to read rather than a game. And the book, I can put down anytime I need to, without feeling that empty-ish feeling that says "Awww, I want to get back into the game..." That letdown when I exited the game was another clue, BTW: it matched how I'd heard drug addicts (specifically, former addicts who had kicked their habit) describe the feeling of coming down off a high. I've never used drugs myself so I can't compare it directly, but it was similar enough to the descriptions I'd heard from them that I said "okay, that's probably not a good sign either."
Are there archives of this? I have no doubt after this post goes viral some of these files might go “missing”
Having a large number of conspiracies validated has lead me to firmly plant my aluminum hat
This makes sense for HPC and ML workloads. Big batch jobs where you are pushing the hardware and having everything local is a clear advantage. Also this company sells hardware so it makes sense for them to have hardware experience.
Still think that for the majority on here, needing to make a physical phone call to their data center team (!!) to rack a server is a nutty proposition.
You think the AWS api is slow? Trying calling Steve.
If you have fixed compute costs after a year, sure, look at pulling some stuff on prem.
It isn't though. It crossed the chasm when Steve (who I would like to think is somewhat comfortable after writing a book, holding a director level position at several startups) decided to endorse an outright crypto pump and dump.
When he decided to monetize the eyeballs on the project instead of anything related to the engineering. Which, of course, Steve isn't smart enough to understand (in his own words) and he recommends you not buy but he still makes a tidy profit from it.
Its a memecoin now... that has a software project attached to it. Anything related to engineering died the day he failed to disavow the crypto BS and instead starting shrilling it.
What happened to engineers not calling out BS as BS.
My favorite part about that is gas town is supposedly so productive that this guys sleep patterns are affected by how much work he’s doing, but he took the time to physically go to a bank to get a 5 figure payout.
It makes it difficult to believe that gas town is actually producing anything of value.
I also lol at his bitching about how the bank didn’t let him do the transactions instantly as he describes himself how much of a scam this seems and how the worst thing is his bank account being drained, like banks don’t have a self interest in protecting their clientele from such scams.
Convicted 5 times... if this was a natural person it stands to reason their license to operate a motor vehicle would be revoked. However, a "corporate" person faces no such consequences.
What is the equivalent of jail for these "corporate" entities who are more than happy to pay fines.
I used Vivado (from Xilinx) a bit during my undergrad in computer engineering and was constantly surprised at how much of a complete disaster the tooling chain was. Crashes that would erase all your work. Strange errors.
I briefed worked at a few hardware companies and I was always taken aback by the poor state of the tooling which was highly correlated with the license terms dicated by EDA tools. Software dev seemed much more interesting and portable. Working in hardware meant you would almost always be searching between Intel, Arm, AMD and maybe Nvidia if you were a rockstar.
Software by comparison offered plentiful opportunities and a skill set that could be used at an insurance firm or any of the fortune 100s. I've always loved hardware but the opaque datasheets and IP rules kills my interest everytime.
Also, I would argue software devs make better hardware engineers. Look at Oxide computer. They have fixed bugs in AMD's hardware datasets because of their insane attention to detail. Software has eaten the world and EEs should not be writing the software that brings up UEFI. We would have much more powerful hardware systems if we were able to shine a light on the inner workings of most hardware.