I find it interesting how far we've come so far from the mindset of "You can do that." There was a hilariously funny reddit post about someone who discovered that you could just blend peanuts and it would make peanut butter. But there was sadness there too. All of my kids spent hours pouring over a book we had called 'The Way Things Work' with a delightfully funny Mammoth and a good description of how things actually work. But I've always augmented that with "okay and this is how we'd make something like that." As a result my kids, now adults, always start with the mindset of "Somebody made this, so I could too if I had to." and that really unlimits the kinds of self constraints people put on themselves. When I was a kid I was amazed that people like Edison and Tesla had labs not filled with gear from some lab manufacturer, but stuff they built themselves from first principles. And when I see someone building tools out of the abundance of capabilities that are out there I say, "Yup, they get it." 3D printing, inexpensive miniature milling machines and lathes, libraries full of books about making stuff. Its all doable, you don't have to buy it from a store and the one you make yourself will work exactly the way you want it to.
This is an incredibly impactful childhood. I'm from Honduras, a developing country where there is practically zero investment in science or the arts, and I was fortunate enough to also have gotten a similar book. One thing that struck me is how not a single person around me ever conceived of the things we use and consume on a daily basis as having been created by someone...another human being with our same physical faculties. I found all kinds of tech fascinating as something one could create, but my culture is too preoccupied with petty gossip of what others think and third world consumerism traps that prevent any kind of development. I felt like a fish out of water telling everyone about water and them not noticing it growing up over there
I wonder if this is why so many fantasy narratives lean on the trope of a long-dead precursor civilization which had greater knowledge and capabilities than our own. To most people, real historical innovators are in effect members of some mysterious and magical "precursor civilization", rather than "just people" they could identify with, or feel any kind of continuity with.
> but my culture is too preoccupied with petty gossip of what others think and third world consumerism traps that prevent any kind of development
Your culture is the outcome of colonization, dictatorships propped up by first world powers, and being ruled by the same families that came with the Spanish 500 years ago.
Might be worth it to also invest time in reading another book, like "Open Veins of Latin America", to understand the realities of what happened to Latin American countries in general, so you stop repeating stuff like that.
This kinda sounds like some middle ground between forced modernization of Eastern European countries (this isn't our tech but we could make it ourselves if we wanted to but we don't want to because it would be inferior) and the cargo cults of the Pacific islands (technology literally comes from the sky).
I kinda wish somebody made some study of how different ways societies acquire technology impacts the given society's making/tinkering culture. I wonder what patterns would emerge.
While difficult to control (as a study) it would probably be a solid basis for a PhD in anthropology or sociology. If you could compare two cultures, one which was exposed to the knowledge of how the technology came to be, and one which was simply allowed to buy the technology they wanted, over the next 30 - 50 years how does it change the group. If we ever were visited by extra-terrestrials this would probably be something they had already studied :-).
> When I was a kid I was amazed that people like Edison and Tesla had labs not filled with gear from some lab manufacturer, but stuff they built themselves from first principles.
Edison did not build his stuff himself.
Edison had people building stuff for him. More people as his career progressed. His lead machinist was John Kreusi.[1] Kruesi personally built the first Edison light bulb and the first phonograph.
Kruesi started as a locksmith (which meant actually making locks in those days) and ended his career as the chief engineer at General Electric in Schenectady, the world's leading electrical works at the time. If you go to Greenfield Village in Detroit, you can see Edison's lab, moved from New Jersey and rebuilt. Ask which was Kruesi's bench.
The distinction is rather that the device was made next door, from raw materials, with them possibly watching. Certainly acknowledging the craftsmanship, but still while understanding your tools.
Today, labs are filled with expensive machines and you are not able to peek inside.
You need something? Only from a catalog, made in a mystical factory, without you knowing what's inside.
This abstraction speeds up your process (the tool you bought is fully qualified for what you plan to do) but also detaches you from the low level inner workings. Kids are fascinated if you take an everyday object apart with them (but maybe only if it was already broken)
Taking apart modern day “advanced” objects is way less fulfilling than those from the past. Miniaturization/integration and the increased complexity puts things beyond what even an adult can easily and visually grasp, let alone a kid. It’s mostly “black box” chips now.
Those advanced lab tools were built by many very skilled people. We’re past the time where a single person could hold it all in their head. One man could build a modern lathe back when they were a new thing, one man can’t build a modern lithography machine today.
I wanted to say that lathes have been around for over 2000 years and for most of that time a single well trained man could build one. In fact I’d wager that most lathes and indeed maybe even every part of that lathe up until the industrial revolution were built by a person working alone.
The advanced machines of today are no longer within reach for almost any single well trained man. Now it takes an army of people with non-overlapping skills and knowledge.
200 years ago a basic component was wire or a metal sheet, you’d get them “pre made”. Today the basic component is a chip with millions of transistors and thousands of lines of firmware code that do 99% of the job.
At least you can understand every part of a pencil even without having one in front of you, what it does, and a bit of experimentation would get you an absolutely terrible but technically functioning pencil. Make the tiny leap to a pen and you already lost everyone.
Could build a lathe from parts they could purchase, but not from scratch. The simple ballpoint pen is an absolute marvel of precision engineering that we take utterly for granted. That ball in the tip? Not something you could knock out in a weekend by hand. Even wire itself as a basic component is freaking impossible to feasibly do from scratch compared to going down to the hardware store and spending $5 for a spool. That I can also get a microcontroller devkit that's impossible for me to recreate from a local store is mind-blowing, if we stop to think about it.
2000 years ago the person who was capable enough to think of and build a lathe didn’t go to order the pieces. They modeled the raw materials (wood, metal, stone) into what they needed. But let me give you a less debatable example. Watch makers or even the people who built the Antikythera mechanism didn’t go to the cog and sprocket store to get the parts. They manufactured the components from the raw material or as close to it as possible. They probably built their own tools to for the longest time.
And when I said pen I meant fountain pen. It’s counterintuitive but probably more people today can draw a conceptual diagram of a ballpoint than a fountain pen. Ballpoints are a very simple design limited only by the very tight tolerances need to make them work.
But that was my whole point, complexity got so high that most things around us cannot be built without specialized tools, specialized building blocks, and specialized knowledge that takes years to gather. And this needs to be repeated for almost every object. Different tools, building blocks, and knowledge.
A highschooler today knows more chemistry than Mendeleev but that doesn’t help because the complexity in each field or product increases faster than one person’s ability to keep up with learning.
You’d be surprised how much that still happens. In my research clean room in grad school we used to have to build machines ourselves all the time. Not from first principles mind you, but we did have a machine shop and had to make all sorts of stuff. When it’s never been done before, you’re kinda on your own, machine wise.
In industry, you usually have professional machinists and toolmakers doing much of that. They're better at it than grad students.
I once worked at an R&D facility for heavy hydraulic equipment. It looked like a factory with an office section, but only made and tested prototypes.
The production plants were elsewhere.
About three quarters of the workforce were factory workers, good ones.
Engineers did not operate lathes. That was prohibited by union rules.
> All of my kids spent hours pouring over a book we had called 'The Way Things Work' with a delightfully funny Mammoth and a good description of how things actually work
I grew up with this book - I have vivid memories still of the pages about a nuclear reactor - and I was pleasantly surprised to visit a bookshop recently and find it still in print, updated with new things like LIDAR, 3D Printers, MoCap, etc.
The author David Macaulay taught illustration at my college. His original series started with buildings like “Castle”. The way things work was a breakout hit.
This book is probably 90% of my understanding of how why so many transistors can add up to a CPU, and I didn't learn any programming for a good ten years after I pored through that book as a kid (for me it was "The new way things work", updated for the computer age).
> When I was a kid I was amazed that people like Edison and Tesla had labs not filled with gear from some lab manufacturer, but stuff they built themselves from first principles.
Most chem labs re still like this — ours certainly is. Certain instruments you might buy (gas chromatograph, micrometer) but it’s hardly unusual to find them adapted as well. There’s lots of blue tape in the fume hood too.
And our prototypes are all hand made because it’s simpler. Once we’ve worked out the physics of the device (with lots of tweaks along the way) we can then start to think about DFM. You’ve seen a picture of one of those prototypes: the boards were sent out but mostly we did the welding, bending, assembly, firmware etc all ourselves.
And as a startup a small team can move faster and more flexibly than a bigger organization when making these kinds of things.
Yeah, research in general. Sometimes the thing you want just doesn’t exist. The story of the blue LED is like one guy with a CVD machine he could adapt with great precision because it was the only thing it had.
I agree with your premise, but I think it’s also important to reconcile this with the idea that nothing is simple. Everything that’s made is usually much more complex than it appears in the surface
What happens when the low-hanging fruit is gone? Of course the first sets of people to build something aren't buying it off the shelf... but the reward for the millionth person to be able to do the same thing from scratch is also gone.
How useful is it to know how to spend 5 times as much time and money to make your own piece of equipment that is now a commodity and readily-available?
For instance: 3d printers and automated metal and woodworking tools. Yeah, they exist. Yeah, it's never been more accessible to make your own tools and gadgets and toys with them. But no, they aren't tools that let you have even a 1-in-ten-thousand chance of being the next Tesla or Edison.
I've re-soldered shit in Xbox controllers, I've fixed stuck mechanisms in motorized Christmas decorations, I've saved thousands on labor for car repairs, I've built my own furniture, I've re-wired speakers and installed conduit at home.
But knowing how to do those things in the 2000s is not the same as inventing how to do those things or even knowing how to do those things as a well-compensated career before things were so completely consumerized and commoditized.
I'm still limited by the state of the world I'm playing in. It's worth learning those things if they strike your fancy, if you want to be able to do it for the love of the game, if you value knowledge generally (and I think you should!). But. It's also a something of a luxury hobby at this point.
I can't fab a new high-performance CPU. I can't even realistically learn enough to even compete design-wise with the teams upon teams of people already standing on the shoulders of giants in that industry, or in any other highly-technical highly-advanced one.
> What happens when the low-hanging fruit is gone?
Depends on why it's gone? For example, before the shocker of Facebook buying Oculus, there was an active community of side-gig businesses selling kits around VR, large touch panels, haptics, and such. What couldn't exist, was scaling that beyond hobby kits. No VARs, no integrators or assemblers, no OEMs, no contract or bespoke manufacturing, no searching for viable niche products. Because "it's merely a kit" was the only way the US patent system allowed the stuff to exist at all as a business. The gap between what you could make, and what you're allowed to sell, is large. Even now, we can't reasonably search for those niche market fits, because such scales are beneath the notice of big patent-holding companies. So absent FRAND reform or some such ("you're required to let me use it and pay you"), no fruit for you.
CA lacking non-competes, "Stealing IP!", grew software fruit in CA. But the US has lacked the growing conditions for Shenzhen fruit. So, what happens when the low-hanging fruit is gone, from the US? Fruit is grown, and enjoyed, elsewhere.
Simple money. If you already have a scrap motor and some lumber from somewhere (or even if you have to buy new, in many cases) the cost can be more affordable to build some tools at home, especially if the commercial market for that tool is not competitive.
I would strongly disagree with the idea that 'low-hanging fruit' is gone.
> But knowing how to do those things in the 2000s is not the same as inventing how to do those things or even knowing how to do those things as a well-compensated career before things were so completely consumerized and commoditized.
Two things; First those skills are more useful than you can imagine when you're using commoditized things to do something new and second, it isn't "low hanging fruit to recreate something you can buy anywhere.
If you look at today's software (as an example) we have programs that waste the crap out of resources. Is making them more efficient a win? Yes if you can re-purpose the resources you freed up for other things. I've thought long and hard about things people use "computers" and the "internet" for today that could be built more securely on simpler hardware with ironclad privacy guarantees and more utility. That is a low hanging fruit.
What I'm hearing when I reading your comment is that you feel that all the value has been sucked out of the market and there isn't anything left. And in that I think you'll find that enshittification has polluted the value so much that new opportunities have opened up for unpolluted value. There are many things that are currently "solved" with an existing and and over priced solution which creates opportunities to re-imagine the solution with something less expensive and come in underneath the market. The IBM PC/AT completely displaced minicomputers at small to medium businesses, you can build a PC/AT equivalent today for $6, not $6,000.
The thing here is that 'technology' isn't the same thing as 'value.' Just like knowledge is not the same thing as wisdom. As the author in the linked article writes, it doesn't take a whole lot to stand up a manufacturing line to make a new thing these days, and if that thing has value because it solves a problem, then people will pay to enjoy that value. And to pair that with the earlier metaphor, if you wanted to start a local newspaper (high value) you could with a printing press, some newsprint, and a journalist or two. But without the experience of how newspapers are valuable to their readers, you might be unsuccessful even though you know everything you need to know about writing news stories and printing them.
I'm not trying to be pedantic here, yes there are lots of things going on, and it can seem hopeless, but it isn't. And if you do want to design a high performance CPU you can get a kick ass FPGA to host it for cheap. Variants on RISC-V are pretty impressive and you can make a new one and license it to a chip fab if you choose to. This is WCH's entire business. Don't worry about being the next Tesla or Edison, neither of them knew they were going to be the Tesla or Edison we know today. They were both just trying to create solutions to problems. Look for the problems, think about ways to solve them, and then talk to people who live with those problems day in and day out and see what it might be worth to them to have that problem solved. People love to complain in my experience :-).
I'll start my first job in an engineering role in a few days and I could reach behind to my bookshelf and flip through "The Way Things Work" right now if I wanted to. Fantastic book that really inspired me when I was younger.
I think the mindset is usefull personally. When large complex systems are required and economic pressure is applied it can rapidly turn into an dangerous strategy. You will quickly realize that no you can't just build that.
You'd be missing the point though. The foundational point. All things have their origin story.
(both things are true, yes reality is infinitely more complex and no you're probably not going to be the next President or cure cancer, but that's not the lesson one ought to instill. And I do believe there is a scaffolded way to do it. All things are possible... to explore. The feedback loop of fidelity of lessons, comes incrementally, after.)
> I find it interesting how far we've come so far from the mindset of "You can do that."
Outside of Silicon Valley, most organisations strictly only buy commercial-off-the-shelf (CotS) software. If they do get something developed bespoke, it'll be an isolated thing with very defined boundaries.
This gets absurd after a point, where'd I've seen organisations was millions of dollars to avoid what amounts to an afternoon of scripting... and that was before LLMs!
If you even suggest custom code "an executable" (gasp!) to some people, they'll nearly faint from the stress of even thinking about it.
I've always found this kind of self-imposed constraint a bit odd, but it is surprisingly pervasive.
I worked for a company whose factory really was just a room - the company was a machine-builder, a B2B manufacturer of custom production equipment, but with very little investment in special-purpose machinery for its facilities or even machine tools, just an attitude that the company is the people and we can do or buy anything that our customers need.
In some ways that attitude seemed admirable, but ultimately it didn't help the company win or keep consistent business. You'd have gaggles of smart people building custom prototypes but nothing scaled up. The customers couldn't see the vision of scaling their production there, or just saw that they could get better pricing going to factory which had already invested in the right special-purpose machinery.
That's what a factory is to me - ideally reconfigurable, but a place with capital investment for production. It's good to show kids what's behind the curtain but don't get it mixed up with a prototype shop.
Factories, were like that. Giant Mills, Planing machines, vacuum forming tooling, welding stations, etc. Configurable, yes. Tooling, yes. It's why ford, singer and a hundred other american factories could start making bombs, guns and anything during WW2. You had machinists who could read a drafting diagram, and drafters who could draft anything up.
Today, could we do that? probably not. Not even - we don't have the basic bootstrapping tools in capacities needed, we don't have a wide group of people with the skillset.
So yes, you can make anything in a factory designed to make mostly anything
With specialization, especially like in the auto industry, you'll have one shop in mexico that gets an order 6 weeks ahead of time and has to deliver down to the day on the production schedule of ford to supply say a car headrest, and thats it. So, could we... today... maybe?
Right but big robot arms do need to be reprogrammed. In short we traded higher throughput for less flexibility. Tooling and such is expensive and complicated. A sheet brake and a welder and a mill and lathe can produce a LOT of stuff without any expensive tooling.
This has always been the trade off. One of my first design jobs was working for Simco. They made boxes with fans and ionizer and you could design what ever you want as longs as it’s bent sheet metal. I’m trying to develop a small run manufacturing facility. Last step is a 9 month composite construction certification course in September. I think composites will provide freedom in the final form and flexible tooling.
Custom machine building is a very difficult business to be in. As you mentioned, it's hard to scale. I knew of a particular service provider (custom motion systems) whose philosophy was to break even on the first job and profit on any followups.
I setup and ran a small (10 people) factory many years ago in the UK. Hand assembly and a bit of soldering. It was the most enjoyable work I’ve ever done. I built custom jigs, worked with my team to improve the process, managed inventory, line balancing, work in progress, dispatching, deliveries, built palette racking, learned about kanban and buffers, wrote software to manage it, all working with a team of great people.
If anyone has the opportunity to work in manufacture or adjacent to it I highly recommend.
Its still one of the summer jobs I look back on with a wistful what-if. I worked in a small (10ish employees) factory in the 1990s. I selected, bent and inserted resistors into fire alarm PCBs. If I'd been there longer than 6 weeks I think I'd have learned more about it. But I'd already lined up my next job at the pub a few doors down.
Super cool, what did you make? How large was the factory? How did it work out? One observation from my experience, the closer you are to production, the more stressful things are. But probably scale changes experience. For me, working on stuff that entered automotive production lines, anything that made the line stop or go slow was insanely stresful.
We made a relatively simple fan unit to improve airflow for UK central heating radiators, some fans, an electrical harness with a custom designed control PCB and a mix of injection moulded and extruded plastic parts.
Factory was about 2,500 sqft from memory. Ran the business for 8 years, made and sold 75,000 units but ultimately ended the business due to a lack of poor financing and a lack of business resilience to the weather (when it was unseasonably warm in winter our sales would drop)
Any pointers how to get into that? I think I’d enjoy it. Was at a company that did manufacturing, and I was supporting it, but factories were in China and I was in the US.
I work at a large factory. Most of the senior people started on the shop floor or as engineering interns. It's a long road, but the pattern I see is smart people who are willing to put themselves out, volunteer to run a line, volunteer for continuous improvement projects etc. Most of those positions are advertised internally. In the management team I see many who started in a junior job 20 years ago. There are lots of roles at a large factory, so everything from finance, software development, legal, hr are all ways in. There just aren't as many factories any more
Sadly nothing specific, I founded that company with a friend so I don’t really know if another path in. Automotive production is interesting and there are lots of ways in that don’t require a formal background in the area if you’re willing to start nearer the bottom again, quality engineering is interesting and that brings you near the line without always being on it.
I have an industrial engineer education. My master’s degree was specifically a collection of small projects to demystify (and have the keys understand deeply) all kind of manufacturing processes and the designing that goes with it : machining, soldering, smelting, forging, electrical circuitry.
I ended up working in IT for a large company because of opportunity. Both in terms of interesting projects and pay. All my fellow classmates that went into industry seem to be stuck in heavy internal processes, or working like hell to finish projects that barely recoup their costs. Those who went into hardware entrepreneurship struggle to find clients and investors. The only sector that still seems sexy is the very high end for B2B and luxury.
My analysis is that scale cannot be reached by non Chinese companies except for very specific and high end products (that have a smaller scale by design). Therefore it is impossible to compete on the price/quality ratio of large scale products. And I end up thinking that tariffs could be the solution.
Agree job-wise somewhat. With the caveat that you're discounting that you're good at IT, which is why you find it easier; your classmates wouldn't.
On entrepreneurship - the low execution cost and huge capital inflows in software startups actually makes it very hard to succeed in that space because it leads to intense competition. The success stories are the tip of the iceberg.
This makes hardware startups relatively easier to build, believe it or not.
I would argue a fast food kitchen (or any kitchen) is a factory. An incredibly efficient one at that. Things are made and assembled to order from intermediate components.
We take it for granted the amount of labor that goes into our food. There's no reason we could not make other consumer goods in the US at such scale - we just have weird, self-imposed constructs that say assembly line workers get more prestige and protections and food workers don't. Or that we are willing to pay $8 more for a nicer version of a meal, but we won't pay $5 more for a nicer pair of flip flops.
Zoning and related matters is what really holds the US back. You are allowed to open a restaurant nearly anywhere, but good luck renting out a random office space or garage to start any other kind of small factory without a whole lot of pushback, especially if the process is "dirty".
Unsurprisingly, 70% of the manufacturing that does take place in the US is in rural areas. Trouble is that 80% of the population live in urban areas, so when a factory starts to gain some steam it cannot find anyone around to hire, starving any potential growth.
It's really interesting how the education system works, you walk into a room of 7-year olds and you'd be amazed at the level of curiosity and interest those kids have for everything around them, you can literally see it in their eyes.
Fast forward a few years and all of that is gone, in teenage classrooms. There is no "awe", it has meticulously been sucked out of them.
I really love maker spaces exactly for this reason, it helps keep that spark alive.
By that same logic, you could compare a room full of 7-year-olds to a room full of teenagers and claim that the school system gives people sexual libidos.
It's true that adolescents are very behaviorally different from younger kids, but it isn't clear how much of that is natural biological development, how much is parenting, how much is culture, and how much is the school system.
To be fair: this was a parent stepping up to offer the students something unique. Doing so with children is easier than it is with teenagers, but I think that has more to do with the values we instill than it does with the nature of schooling. While children are still interested in how the world works, while teenagers are more interested in popular culture.
The reason why I say that is because most children seem to be curious about non-school stuff, but even the little ones can lack curiosity about the things they learn in school. Math is the classic example. While you will always have a few who are intensely curious about it, I have to mentally prepare myself to present how amazing math is anytime I say the word in front of children. (In my case, it's not that hard since I grew up fascinated by math-adjacent subjects. For most people though, that would be difficult.)
Being interested in popular culture is being interested in how the world works. It's an interest in how influence and power and money make things move in the rooms that aren't factories, and how to navigate your way into and out of them safely.
We've designed a world where math mostly doesn't hurt you when you're not thinking about it, but boy, oh boy, can your community, social circle, or people you don't even know hurt you if you haven't paid attention to and aligned yourself with the common sentiment.
> We've designed a world where math mostly doesn't hurt you when you're not thinking about it, but boy, oh boy, can your community, social circle, or people you don't even know hurt you if you haven't paid attention to and aligned yourself with the common sentiment.
This isn't the result of anyone's design. In human communities hundreds of thousands of years ago, your community, social circle, or people you don't even know (because they are foreigners from a different 100-person hunter-gatherer band than your 100-person hunter-gatherer band) could absolutely hurt you; and these are the conditions that human beings evolved our social skills in. Understanding math came much later in the history of humanity.
This applies mostly to assembly lines. If you've seen large industrial complexes, you should know factories are not rooms. Instead they are large scale "machines". Tire factories, large pipe factories, chemical plants, etc. are much more complex than most assembly lines.
I loooove the idea of teaching children inspiration instead of intimidation. Everything in the built world was made by a person just like you and me. That person may have had special training or unique experiences, but we too can move towards training and experiences and build/do cool things.
One of the ways I try to do this with my kid, is to try to investigate what's behind what we see and interact with -- with technical stuff it's asking how it works and how things fit together, with social stuff it's asking what's going behind the scenes and getting involved with it. Then reflecting on how cool the technical thing or event/social machinery is and what function it serves. This has been generative of tons of great questions from my kid and great discussion with them.
> Churches/theologians generally are good with this interplay.
IME churches and plenty of theologians stop at thought terminating cliches, like "faith is believing without seeing". I've had more satisfaction exploring mysteries by following the evidence and things that can be falsified.
Here's a practice factory that GM operates to train new employees to work on an assembly line.[1] There are plywood mockups of cars rolling on conveyors, and the new employees bolt things on.
A useful lesson for kids to get is how you make a hundred of something. The difference between making one and making many is not something most people get.
Make something on a 3D printer. Then, for comparison, make a mold, and resin cast a batch of them.
This is from someone that has observed Shenzen. A location where much is made in garage sized factories (usually literally a garage space at ground level where people will bang out products by hand).
You might not expect a bespoke 2 ton electric train engine to be made in a series of garages but it really is. One lot of workers will be experts at winding coils. They'll have a rig that spins and a spool of copper to wind on with a practiced skill so that they do it as well as any multi million dollar machine could. Then there will be another shop that forges an engine housing. They'll shape out a cast in sand and pour in molten steel (produced by another nearby shop) into the cast to make the housing. Another shop will make the brushes, another the motor controller, etc.
The end result? You travel to Shenzen to build a bespoke megawatt scale electric motor and you have a prototype delivered in 3 days. Not even kidding. It's not some megafactory where you will never be worth their time for an order of 10 engines to replace aging motors in a custom 20year old fleet. It's a set of people in rooms making things for low price point at exceptional scale that are easily outcompeting the western "bigger is better" style.
The USA seems crazy with it's focus on mega corps or nothing honestly. Every law seems to encourage this - eg. The healthcare system which absolutely harms small business owners who have no ability to negotiate a corporate health care plan. How do you ever develop a Shenzen style manufacturing culture in such an environment? How does a megafactory that makes a billion of one thing innovate rapidly? You need the multitude of garage workshops that collectively fill every niche that Shenzen has. Today if the West was cut off from Chinese goods we'd be stuck in so many ways. We just don't have what China's enabled here.
I admire Chinese industry quite a bit myself, though I haven't yet completed my pilgrimage to Shenzhen. Just a quick clarification about the healthcare plans, though. As a single-person LLC I'm able to get a non-fancy Kaiser Permanente plan here in SF. It's not super cheap or anything but it's there.
I don’t know about health care but a lot of stuff in the US is set up for megacorps and individuals but nothing in between. As an individual you can easily get a self funded 401k plan. As a small business you basically can’t.
Of course the US still biases towards megacorps who get to do things like distribute dividends taxed at capital gains rates instead of ordinary income like sole proprietorships.
The thing is what you can't get a non-fancy Kaiser Permanente in a such places.
Between a fully capitalist American model or a [fully capitalist in all but the name] Chinese one I chose %he one where I can get a basic level without it just by being a citizen.
But is there any reason, other than money and some bureaucratic overheads, why that could only work in China?
I bet you could do it in same timeline in any sufficiently developed country by airdropping a 40ft container full of gold bars to a University front yard, and declaring that first team to deliver the motor gets 2/3 of unclaimed bars included with full legal and tax services plus one bar each for supplier coordinators. Do it in world's top engineering schools like MIT or ETHZ, and professors would come running to it with off the shelf motors in hand, ripped out of some equipment and machined in haste to suit your requirements in matters of minutes.
It's not like that motor would be made using some future tech that only Shenzhen workers truly understand, but it's probably like they're made with basic standard quantum physics taught at any engineering schools that they too were taught. The difference is that they're taking your task with good amount of efforts for the money you pay.
I don't mean to support(or interfere with it in any ways, as I'm not from US however I cut and twist it and I'm not supposed to) the current US admin, but they kinda-sorta have a point with its weird tariff and exchange rate insistences. There is no free market competition possible with the brain-hour cost China is charging unless some completely insane countermeasures were taken, whether it's million percent tariffs or currency exchanges based on physical mass of bank notes.
The shop calling shops and working together story is the same as how industrial zones in Japan were described, in the past. Same probably can be said about 20th century US or 19th century German industrial towns. That's not the source of the Chinese superpower.
This is China's massive differentiator than anywhere else. They have impeccable supply chain management. You will find that certain items are almost always made in the same city. Shenzhen (and surrounding area) is just the hub for electronics manufacturing. Within the city there is the main output, and then a bunch of smaller manufacturers making all the input components within driving distance of that factory which allows it all to work incredibly efficiently. This makes manufacturing in China so much faster than elsewhere.
I'd even go so far to say that Shenzhen is probably the wrong place to build the electric train motor above. I bet there is some 2nd or 3rd tier city somewhere in China that specializes in just that. For example, the only reason I'm aware of the city of Yueqing is because I did a project with pushbuttons once and that is the pushbutton city in China.
There's 'sourcing agents' whose job is to coordinate the garages. They don't work for any of the garages but as a westerner you'll get in touch with the "electric motor guy" who knows all the factories to contact for that particular purpose. They'll meet you at the airport gate and you essentially pay them as a guide to negotiate the shanghai business environment.
Yay and nay. That's only for very small manufacturing stuff. To assure the quality control and lower the price, it will eventually head to the large scale factory. The difference between what happened before and now is that, the minimum order quantity has gotten so low (thanks to CNC and computerization etc), now bigger factories can even handle MOQ down to 100.
I would advise you against going to those smaller factories -- QC is a nightmakre. Problems will arise. When you go to Canton fair or Yiwu for trade shows, I always, always, always recommend you to make a factory visit, and for the first batch, have a reliable Chinese person you trust to fly there and do the QC (if you hire someone that you barely know for QC, the other side might just bribe him off) and you will end up getting garbage when it gets to Long Beach port.
That's what Naomi Wu really did while producing influencer type maker videos.
"She knows Shenzhen like the back of her hand." Someone who bought her services describes her leading them confidently into sketchy alleys and up back stairs to unmarked doors, behind which were people making the thing they wanted.
She has a book about how to get electronics done in Shenzhen.[1] There was a previous edition published by a westerner, but Wu, a Shenzhen native, updated it.
In ten years, Shenzhen changed a lot.
It's not really so much a book on how to get electronics done, more sort of an electronics specific phrase book, full of the names of things you can point at when looking for stuff in the markets.
The original was written by Bunnie Huang (a name to be sneezed at in his own right) who (I assume) grew up speaking Mandarin at home. Naomi is a local though and probably has broader local knowledge.
The original Shenzhen markets are still there (I've been going for a decade or so, they haven't changed that much), they're getting a bit crowded out by consumer electronics - I can still go and buy great tools in HQB at same places I was 10 years ago, reels of resistors at the same places, people will still sell you cut tape from part reels on the street - the big change are the electric bikes, you take your life in your hand each time you turn around :-)
Probably the first factory you walk into? That one would become the prime contractor that manage suppliers and subcontractors - I think those are the terms they use in multimillion aerospace and defense programs, but I believe the concepts are the same.
For aerospace programs, you sign a contract with e.g. Boeing for a 787 to be delivered 5 years for $500m, to be delivered to your company pilot at the Boeing Everett facility to be signed off and flown to accepting aircraft maintenance facility for your fleet. They then start dispatching fuselages and wings and parts to various aerospace kilo-corporates. They occasionally call you for confirmations and approvals for important items like engines and small overruns.
I guess the same in Shenzhen happens as a mostly-verbal order for a motor against Shenzhen Suchandsuch LLC in 3 days for $15k delivered the back of the factory on a shop table, with their chief machinist there to get you through the artifact and to help you with bubble wraps and duct tapes. But the overall structure is the same.
Certain industries such as film adjacent industries definitely remind me of what you are describing. Small scale, small shop, profound expertise, able to immediately work and iterate. And the way they solve healthcare is simple. They don’t offer health insurance benefits at all. Employees buy it for themselves from Covered California.
Yeah I have a friend who does this as a livng, and it sounds insane. They do stuff like where a director approves a piece of concept art for a prop, before he gets on the plane for a 12 hour flight for the shoot.
In the available time, they have to model, 3D print, paint and wire up every piece art, so by the time the director gets there, its ready for the shoot. There's no room for mistakes, as each of these processes takes long enough that a repeat is not feasible.
Yet everything he does works, and he does it every time. Even if I pulled off that stuff once in the amount of time given, it would be something I kept bragging about for the rest of my life.
China scales its approach to demand. It can build mega- factories or it can build small batches. Small batches require the dextrous artisans you mention.
A recent story I heard. A mega factory, highly automated, and making 1000 units an hour offered to make niche products at 1000 units every 3 months. They didn't change their line, they added a new one that was manual. No MOQ, no long term commitment. No long delays. Just got in with it
I don't think awe demoralizes children the same way it does adults. Kids want to be an astronaut, president of the United States, et cetera. They're still dreamers.
If done incorrectly, this message could backfire. At that age, the worst label a job can have is "boring". If anybody can do it, it's no longer interesting.
Not that the author is doing it incorrectly -- letting kids play with pieces of the factory process is very much the opposite of boring.
It's only later on in life to kids get hammered into them that they can't do hard things.
I do think though that the astronaut, president, etc roles are imaginable. And that seeing the crazy automated factory with all manners of machines drillings stamping etc, that that is much harder to imagine oneself doing. The making of that factory is not on display, just the output of the human. Trying to emphasize the human, the role itself, is I think what Matt is getting at, and that needs to be imaginable.
I've traveled all around Asia visiting different factories for projects over the years. After some time, factories just tend to blend together, big rooms filled with machines where materials come in one end, and are modified to be more like the final product at the other end. The rooms might look/feel different, whether it is the dirty floors and heat of a die cast grinding room, the green floors of an injection molding factory, or even a clean room you have to squeeze yourself into a bunny suit for (They never have large enough suits for me), its all just equipment in a room to transform material.
A factory is also a set of people and processes, which is what truly matters. If you don't have good people with expertise and the processes in place you don't have a chance at getting good product. You build relationships with the people at the companies and they will move mountains to help you. You build a truly excellent relationship with a factory, and they will anticipate your requirements and sometimes ship you perfect parts at T0.
I've got plenty of examples of factories that are fantastic, and ones that have been horrible from my time in working. The good ones all have the same differentiator, people that we have built a good long term relationship with. The bad ones almost always have a constant rotation of different people you have to talk to.
When I was 17 I took a summer job at a printed circuit board shop that was all in one 1500 sq ft room. Twenty five years later we had 11 bays each 1500 sq ft filled with smaller rooms. I tore down all of the rooms that I helped build using a forklift and a sledge hammer, and was the last employee to walk out when we closed.
Neat, but sort of ironic their main product is an "AI clock" that takes an intrinsically human act, writing a poem, and pulls the human out of the loop.
It's nice that they explained the process to a bunch of kids, helping to de-mystify something quite abstract to many of us (where does all the stuff come from?).
I just think that perhaps we have over-indexed on STEM and this is a prime example of that. The article mentions talking about industrial designers, which is cool.
> I want these kids to become designers, engineers, inventors, factory owners, and all the rest.
but what about the poets?
It's the sort of thinking that I've seen all over tech, where people are so focused on/obsessed with using technology to solve problems they seem to forget and lose appreciation for all the people that make their lives possible and enjoyable.
Anyway, cool article but don't buy the slop-flinging e-waste please.
To make it worse, I feel like the idea is really good, but I have no clue why on earth this requires 'AI'
I've seen similar clocks (software) that work by just storing a bunch of quotes and sentences from all kinds of different literature and then randomly picking one to show (with credits)
You get the same effect and (bonus) you get exposed to some piece of art that you may not have known about before.
I get where you're coming from.
I think that the clock sounds dumb too.
But what makes life "possible and enjoyable" in the most mundane sort of way that every human being can agree with relies on STEM. Before that though is the role that religion has in making life possible and enjoyable in ways that are beyond cold reason and material exploits.
Great stuff! Great! However, the issue is not, and has likely never been, that young people aren't willing to believe "they can do that". It's that most people, of necessity, are not good at both inventing, manufacturing (how to efficiently make that invention many times), and sales (how to get someone to buy it). Therefore, they will need to find someone willing to hire them to do one part of that process. And the modern labor market is not interested in training people on the job, they want someone who's already done the job somewhere else.
Not saying you shouldn't go tell kids about how things work! Just that the reason kids don't do that as much, is not primarily anything to do with education or the kids, but rather because the modern labor market has done its best to avoid ever having to give anybody a chance to do something they haven't already done many times before.
> I want these kids to become designers, engineers, inventors, factory owners, and all the rest. Makers of any kind; participants in the ongoing making of our world.
Thank you for going into the classroom and offering the kids a glimpse into the world that makes our world tick.
I am the odd one out at HN since I run after school programs. Yet I remember my past and I am constantly looking for ways to shoehorn enrichment activities into the program, things that expand the child's world view beyond what the see at home or are exposed to in the classroom. Things like: this is the infrastructure that makes society work. It is encouraging to hear about parents stepping up to the plate and helping out with those efforts!
I do think that this blog post is quaint and I find it hard to hate on a guy showing up at his kid's school and giving a talk—oh boy, remember when your parents came to school? Or anyone's parents. Especially a dad? Woowee.
The cynic in me can't resist remarks like "the children yearn for the mines".
Then another part of me thinks...how much of a factory is "just a room" to the people who are not its engineers, designers and owners.
Does the sweaty work in a factory net you the same sort of socioeconomic leverage that it used to? The other day I had a thought that a lot of 2000s sitcoms had dads who managed factories. George Lopez. Damon Wayans. Jim Belushi? Doug Heffernan drove for UPS.
You know, just think, in about 20 years some of these kids in that classroom may just be supervising the young adults of today who failed to make the right pivot in the labor market. The Lindy effect suggests that this blog will be around long enough to show those old guys this post to see if they agree.
I think it's appreciation of the world and people to look and think, "some people did that". So many people working together globally to produce anything you see, sometimes over decades and many lives.
Gonna be a bit of a downer and say, "The kids who need to hear what this guy was saying aren't in school with the kids whose parents are engineers." (Well, not all of them.)
The group of children who are the same age. How that is organised into classes depends on how many kids there are. There may be several classes in each year, or like my little rural village school where each class had 2 year groups in it.
In the UK state system you normally enter primary school at year 1, go to secondary school for year 7, leave secondary in year 11 (aged 16, or 15 if your birthday is before the start of the new school year in September). This is when you take your General Certificate of Secondary Education exams. You are then supposed to go to Further Education, academics go to study A levels, either at same school, or in my case a Sixth-form college, which hilariously keeps it's name from when year groups were named from the start of secondary (so modern year 7 is old year 1). You may also go to a vocational college teaching everything from hairdressing to car mechanics or book-keeping. You can also do an apprenticeship with day release to said college.
From A levels (year 12 and 13, or 6 and 7!) you can apply for university. You can also continue vocational studies to the same level. This is known as Higher Education. It used to be that Universities were academic and took A level students, and vocational students would go to a Polytechnic college, but they are all called universities now. The vocational colleges also tend to offer HE courses now.
It is a bit of a mess at HE due to a turn of the century push to get more kids to degree level and it is suffering a reset, too many courses, not enough students. Some cynics feel this was more about managing unemployment numbers down, than producing more talent...
One interesting effect is that professions that were often vocational in their entry (some engineering, the non-audit side of accountancy) switched to being degree first. This lead to frustrations as 20 something year old finance grads entered the workforce to find they were 5 years behind their cohort that did an apprenticeship when they were 16, kept up their studies and were already climbing a ladder they had no foot on!
That would make sense if the author specified a specific year's "year group" - e.g. if they had said "I spoke to the 6th year group". But they said they spoke to "THE year group" - which is very confusing to me, even more so after your explanation.
Factories are places for the mass production of identical or nearly identical widgets.
There are some kinds of mass produced software, like the low value apps that lots of businesses want to have for some reason and that should have been websites instead.
But actual progress comes from software that isn't mass produced. So choose your ambitions wisely.
The American education system seems to have taken a serious turn for the worse in the past 30 years, but when I was in junior high we had a class called Industrial Arts, aka "shop class". We made stuff, using real industrial processes including things like injection molding, on real equipment. High school offered more variety and specialization, including wood shop, electrical shop, and auto shop.
But we're far away from that world, and getting farther. There's a good chance that by 2030, 3D printers and CNC machines will be considered "firearms" for federal regulation purposes.
I find it interesting how far we've come so far from the mindset of "You can do that." There was a hilariously funny reddit post about someone who discovered that you could just blend peanuts and it would make peanut butter. But there was sadness there too. All of my kids spent hours pouring over a book we had called 'The Way Things Work' with a delightfully funny Mammoth and a good description of how things actually work. But I've always augmented that with "okay and this is how we'd make something like that." As a result my kids, now adults, always start with the mindset of "Somebody made this, so I could too if I had to." and that really unlimits the kinds of self constraints people put on themselves. When I was a kid I was amazed that people like Edison and Tesla had labs not filled with gear from some lab manufacturer, but stuff they built themselves from first principles. And when I see someone building tools out of the abundance of capabilities that are out there I say, "Yup, they get it." 3D printing, inexpensive miniature milling machines and lathes, libraries full of books about making stuff. Its all doable, you don't have to buy it from a store and the one you make yourself will work exactly the way you want it to.
This is an incredibly impactful childhood. I'm from Honduras, a developing country where there is practically zero investment in science or the arts, and I was fortunate enough to also have gotten a similar book. One thing that struck me is how not a single person around me ever conceived of the things we use and consume on a daily basis as having been created by someone...another human being with our same physical faculties. I found all kinds of tech fascinating as something one could create, but my culture is too preoccupied with petty gossip of what others think and third world consumerism traps that prevent any kind of development. I felt like a fish out of water telling everyone about water and them not noticing it growing up over there
I wonder if this is why so many fantasy narratives lean on the trope of a long-dead precursor civilization which had greater knowledge and capabilities than our own. To most people, real historical innovators are in effect members of some mysterious and magical "precursor civilization", rather than "just people" they could identify with, or feel any kind of continuity with.
> but my culture is too preoccupied with petty gossip of what others think and third world consumerism traps that prevent any kind of development
Your culture is the outcome of colonization, dictatorships propped up by first world powers, and being ruled by the same families that came with the Spanish 500 years ago.
Might be worth it to also invest time in reading another book, like "Open Veins of Latin America", to understand the realities of what happened to Latin American countries in general, so you stop repeating stuff like that.
This kinda sounds like some middle ground between forced modernization of Eastern European countries (this isn't our tech but we could make it ourselves if we wanted to but we don't want to because it would be inferior) and the cargo cults of the Pacific islands (technology literally comes from the sky).
I kinda wish somebody made some study of how different ways societies acquire technology impacts the given society's making/tinkering culture. I wonder what patterns would emerge.
While difficult to control (as a study) it would probably be a solid basis for a PhD in anthropology or sociology. If you could compare two cultures, one which was exposed to the knowledge of how the technology came to be, and one which was simply allowed to buy the technology they wanted, over the next 30 - 50 years how does it change the group. If we ever were visited by extra-terrestrials this would probably be something they had already studied :-).
> When I was a kid I was amazed that people like Edison and Tesla had labs not filled with gear from some lab manufacturer, but stuff they built themselves from first principles.
Edison did not build his stuff himself. Edison had people building stuff for him. More people as his career progressed. His lead machinist was John Kreusi.[1] Kruesi personally built the first Edison light bulb and the first phonograph.
Kruesi started as a locksmith (which meant actually making locks in those days) and ended his career as the chief engineer at General Electric in Schenectady, the world's leading electrical works at the time. If you go to Greenfield Village in Detroit, you can see Edison's lab, moved from New Jersey and rebuilt. Ask which was Kruesi's bench.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kruesi
Both your points hold.
The distinction is rather that the device was made next door, from raw materials, with them possibly watching. Certainly acknowledging the craftsmanship, but still while understanding your tools.
Today, labs are filled with expensive machines and you are not able to peek inside. You need something? Only from a catalog, made in a mystical factory, without you knowing what's inside.
This abstraction speeds up your process (the tool you bought is fully qualified for what you plan to do) but also detaches you from the low level inner workings. Kids are fascinated if you take an everyday object apart with them (but maybe only if it was already broken)
Taking apart modern day “advanced” objects is way less fulfilling than those from the past. Miniaturization/integration and the increased complexity puts things beyond what even an adult can easily and visually grasp, let alone a kid. It’s mostly “black box” chips now.
Those advanced lab tools were built by many very skilled people. We’re past the time where a single person could hold it all in their head. One man could build a modern lathe back when they were a new thing, one man can’t build a modern lithography machine today.
One man could not make an ordinary #2 pencil. A modern lathe was already out of reach.
I wanted to say that lathes have been around for over 2000 years and for most of that time a single well trained man could build one. In fact I’d wager that most lathes and indeed maybe even every part of that lathe up until the industrial revolution were built by a person working alone.
The advanced machines of today are no longer within reach for almost any single well trained man. Now it takes an army of people with non-overlapping skills and knowledge.
200 years ago a basic component was wire or a metal sheet, you’d get them “pre made”. Today the basic component is a chip with millions of transistors and thousands of lines of firmware code that do 99% of the job.
At least you can understand every part of a pencil even without having one in front of you, what it does, and a bit of experimentation would get you an absolutely terrible but technically functioning pencil. Make the tiny leap to a pen and you already lost everyone.
Could build a lathe from parts they could purchase, but not from scratch. The simple ballpoint pen is an absolute marvel of precision engineering that we take utterly for granted. That ball in the tip? Not something you could knock out in a weekend by hand. Even wire itself as a basic component is freaking impossible to feasibly do from scratch compared to going down to the hardware store and spending $5 for a spool. That I can also get a microcontroller devkit that's impossible for me to recreate from a local store is mind-blowing, if we stop to think about it.
2000 years ago the person who was capable enough to think of and build a lathe didn’t go to order the pieces. They modeled the raw materials (wood, metal, stone) into what they needed. But let me give you a less debatable example. Watch makers or even the people who built the Antikythera mechanism didn’t go to the cog and sprocket store to get the parts. They manufactured the components from the raw material or as close to it as possible. They probably built their own tools to for the longest time.
And when I said pen I meant fountain pen. It’s counterintuitive but probably more people today can draw a conceptual diagram of a ballpoint than a fountain pen. Ballpoints are a very simple design limited only by the very tight tolerances need to make them work.
But that was my whole point, complexity got so high that most things around us cannot be built without specialized tools, specialized building blocks, and specialized knowledge that takes years to gather. And this needs to be repeated for almost every object. Different tools, building blocks, and knowledge.
A highschooler today knows more chemistry than Mendeleev but that doesn’t help because the complexity in each field or product increases faster than one person’s ability to keep up with learning.
>Edison did not build his stuff himself.
Edison did not start his career as a successful businessman. He built things, he sold patents, and later in life he lead teams that did the same.
You’d be surprised how much that still happens. In my research clean room in grad school we used to have to build machines ourselves all the time. Not from first principles mind you, but we did have a machine shop and had to make all sorts of stuff. When it’s never been done before, you’re kinda on your own, machine wise.
In industry, you usually have professional machinists and toolmakers doing much of that. They're better at it than grad students.
I once worked at an R&D facility for heavy hydraulic equipment. It looked like a factory with an office section, but only made and tested prototypes. The production plants were elsewhere. About three quarters of the workforce were factory workers, good ones. Engineers did not operate lathes. That was prohibited by union rules.
> All of my kids spent hours pouring over a book we had called 'The Way Things Work' with a delightfully funny Mammoth and a good description of how things actually work
I grew up with this book - I have vivid memories still of the pages about a nuclear reactor - and I was pleasantly surprised to visit a bookshop recently and find it still in print, updated with new things like LIDAR, 3D Printers, MoCap, etc.
The author David Macaulay taught illustration at my college. His original series started with buildings like “Castle”. The way things work was a breakout hit.
I was also a childhood lover of Castle and Vikings :)
Those books were captivating and I was really surprised when I showed up at College and met the source.
This book is probably 90% of my understanding of how why so many transistors can add up to a CPU, and I didn't learn any programming for a good ten years after I pored through that book as a kid (for me it was "The new way things work", updated for the computer age).
It’s cloudy now but I think I also remember hours spent in a CD-ROM version of that book.
Bring back CD-ROMs.
It is a great book. Very accessible and a great way to engage with your kids.
Yup it's my 6yo favourite book.
> When I was a kid I was amazed that people like Edison and Tesla had labs not filled with gear from some lab manufacturer, but stuff they built themselves from first principles.
Most chem labs re still like this — ours certainly is. Certain instruments you might buy (gas chromatograph, micrometer) but it’s hardly unusual to find them adapted as well. There’s lots of blue tape in the fume hood too.
And our prototypes are all hand made because it’s simpler. Once we’ve worked out the physics of the device (with lots of tweaks along the way) we can then start to think about DFM. You’ve seen a picture of one of those prototypes: the boards were sent out but mostly we did the welding, bending, assembly, firmware etc all ourselves.
And as a startup a small team can move faster and more flexibly than a bigger organization when making these kinds of things.
Yeah, research in general. Sometimes the thing you want just doesn’t exist. The story of the blue LED is like one guy with a CVD machine he could adapt with great precision because it was the only thing it had.
I agree with your premise, but I think it’s also important to reconcile this with the idea that nothing is simple. Everything that’s made is usually much more complex than it appears in the surface
Suggestion for parents: Prepare jam for the children in front of them to make them realize how much sugar they are eating.
What happens when the low-hanging fruit is gone? Of course the first sets of people to build something aren't buying it off the shelf... but the reward for the millionth person to be able to do the same thing from scratch is also gone.
How useful is it to know how to spend 5 times as much time and money to make your own piece of equipment that is now a commodity and readily-available?
For instance: 3d printers and automated metal and woodworking tools. Yeah, they exist. Yeah, it's never been more accessible to make your own tools and gadgets and toys with them. But no, they aren't tools that let you have even a 1-in-ten-thousand chance of being the next Tesla or Edison.
I've re-soldered shit in Xbox controllers, I've fixed stuck mechanisms in motorized Christmas decorations, I've saved thousands on labor for car repairs, I've built my own furniture, I've re-wired speakers and installed conduit at home.
But knowing how to do those things in the 2000s is not the same as inventing how to do those things or even knowing how to do those things as a well-compensated career before things were so completely consumerized and commoditized.
I'm still limited by the state of the world I'm playing in. It's worth learning those things if they strike your fancy, if you want to be able to do it for the love of the game, if you value knowledge generally (and I think you should!). But. It's also a something of a luxury hobby at this point.
I can't fab a new high-performance CPU. I can't even realistically learn enough to even compete design-wise with the teams upon teams of people already standing on the shoulders of giants in that industry, or in any other highly-technical highly-advanced one.
> What happens when the low-hanging fruit is gone?
Depends on why it's gone? For example, before the shocker of Facebook buying Oculus, there was an active community of side-gig businesses selling kits around VR, large touch panels, haptics, and such. What couldn't exist, was scaling that beyond hobby kits. No VARs, no integrators or assemblers, no OEMs, no contract or bespoke manufacturing, no searching for viable niche products. Because "it's merely a kit" was the only way the US patent system allowed the stuff to exist at all as a business. The gap between what you could make, and what you're allowed to sell, is large. Even now, we can't reasonably search for those niche market fits, because such scales are beneath the notice of big patent-holding companies. So absent FRAND reform or some such ("you're required to let me use it and pay you"), no fruit for you.
CA lacking non-competes, "Stealing IP!", grew software fruit in CA. But the US has lacked the growing conditions for Shenzhen fruit. So, what happens when the low-hanging fruit is gone, from the US? Fruit is grown, and enjoyed, elsewhere.
Simple money. If you already have a scrap motor and some lumber from somewhere (or even if you have to buy new, in many cases) the cost can be more affordable to build some tools at home, especially if the commercial market for that tool is not competitive.
I would strongly disagree with the idea that 'low-hanging fruit' is gone.
> But knowing how to do those things in the 2000s is not the same as inventing how to do those things or even knowing how to do those things as a well-compensated career before things were so completely consumerized and commoditized.
Two things; First those skills are more useful than you can imagine when you're using commoditized things to do something new and second, it isn't "low hanging fruit to recreate something you can buy anywhere.
If you look at today's software (as an example) we have programs that waste the crap out of resources. Is making them more efficient a win? Yes if you can re-purpose the resources you freed up for other things. I've thought long and hard about things people use "computers" and the "internet" for today that could be built more securely on simpler hardware with ironclad privacy guarantees and more utility. That is a low hanging fruit.
What I'm hearing when I reading your comment is that you feel that all the value has been sucked out of the market and there isn't anything left. And in that I think you'll find that enshittification has polluted the value so much that new opportunities have opened up for unpolluted value. There are many things that are currently "solved" with an existing and and over priced solution which creates opportunities to re-imagine the solution with something less expensive and come in underneath the market. The IBM PC/AT completely displaced minicomputers at small to medium businesses, you can build a PC/AT equivalent today for $6, not $6,000.
The thing here is that 'technology' isn't the same thing as 'value.' Just like knowledge is not the same thing as wisdom. As the author in the linked article writes, it doesn't take a whole lot to stand up a manufacturing line to make a new thing these days, and if that thing has value because it solves a problem, then people will pay to enjoy that value. And to pair that with the earlier metaphor, if you wanted to start a local newspaper (high value) you could with a printing press, some newsprint, and a journalist or two. But without the experience of how newspapers are valuable to their readers, you might be unsuccessful even though you know everything you need to know about writing news stories and printing them.
I'm not trying to be pedantic here, yes there are lots of things going on, and it can seem hopeless, but it isn't. And if you do want to design a high performance CPU you can get a kick ass FPGA to host it for cheap. Variants on RISC-V are pretty impressive and you can make a new one and license it to a chip fab if you choose to. This is WCH's entire business. Don't worry about being the next Tesla or Edison, neither of them knew they were going to be the Tesla or Edison we know today. They were both just trying to create solutions to problems. Look for the problems, think about ways to solve them, and then talk to people who live with those problems day in and day out and see what it might be worth to them to have that problem solved. People love to complain in my experience :-).
I'll start my first job in an engineering role in a few days and I could reach behind to my bookshelf and flip through "The Way Things Work" right now if I wanted to. Fantastic book that really inspired me when I was younger.
I think the mindset is usefull personally. When large complex systems are required and economic pressure is applied it can rapidly turn into an dangerous strategy. You will quickly realize that no you can't just build that.
You'd be missing the point though. The foundational point. All things have their origin story.
(both things are true, yes reality is infinitely more complex and no you're probably not going to be the next President or cure cancer, but that's not the lesson one ought to instill. And I do believe there is a scaffolded way to do it. All things are possible... to explore. The feedback loop of fidelity of lessons, comes incrementally, after.)
> libraries full of books about making stuff
Any standouts you recommend? My 6 year old son loves all those David Macaulay books. Haven't taken that to the next level of "How to build stuff" yet.
> I find it interesting how far we've come so far from the mindset of "You can do that."
Outside of Silicon Valley, most organisations strictly only buy commercial-off-the-shelf (CotS) software. If they do get something developed bespoke, it'll be an isolated thing with very defined boundaries.
This gets absurd after a point, where'd I've seen organisations was millions of dollars to avoid what amounts to an afternoon of scripting... and that was before LLMs!
If you even suggest custom code "an executable" (gasp!) to some people, they'll nearly faint from the stress of even thinking about it.
I've always found this kind of self-imposed constraint a bit odd, but it is surprisingly pervasive.
I worked for a company whose factory really was just a room - the company was a machine-builder, a B2B manufacturer of custom production equipment, but with very little investment in special-purpose machinery for its facilities or even machine tools, just an attitude that the company is the people and we can do or buy anything that our customers need.
In some ways that attitude seemed admirable, but ultimately it didn't help the company win or keep consistent business. You'd have gaggles of smart people building custom prototypes but nothing scaled up. The customers couldn't see the vision of scaling their production there, or just saw that they could get better pricing going to factory which had already invested in the right special-purpose machinery.
That's what a factory is to me - ideally reconfigurable, but a place with capital investment for production. It's good to show kids what's behind the curtain but don't get it mixed up with a prototype shop.
Factories, were like that. Giant Mills, Planing machines, vacuum forming tooling, welding stations, etc. Configurable, yes. Tooling, yes. It's why ford, singer and a hundred other american factories could start making bombs, guns and anything during WW2. You had machinists who could read a drafting diagram, and drafters who could draft anything up.
Today, could we do that? probably not. Not even - we don't have the basic bootstrapping tools in capacities needed, we don't have a wide group of people with the skillset.
So yes, you can make anything in a factory designed to make mostly anything
With specialization, especially like in the auto industry, you'll have one shop in mexico that gets an order 6 weeks ahead of time and has to deliver down to the day on the production schedule of ford to supply say a car headrest, and thats it. So, could we... today... maybe?
China can do it. No car that leaves a factory there is the same. Everything automated and yet customizable.
Right but big robot arms do need to be reprogrammed. In short we traded higher throughput for less flexibility. Tooling and such is expensive and complicated. A sheet brake and a welder and a mill and lathe can produce a LOT of stuff without any expensive tooling.
This has always been the trade off. One of my first design jobs was working for Simco. They made boxes with fans and ionizer and you could design what ever you want as longs as it’s bent sheet metal. I’m trying to develop a small run manufacturing facility. Last step is a 9 month composite construction certification course in September. I think composites will provide freedom in the final form and flexible tooling.
> big robot arms do need to be reprogrammed.
The cost of that reprogramming goes down over time, no?
Custom machine building is a very difficult business to be in. As you mentioned, it's hard to scale. I knew of a particular service provider (custom motion systems) whose philosophy was to break even on the first job and profit on any followups.
>of a particular service provider (custom motion systems) whose philosophy was to break even on the first job and profit on any followups.
It's called Learning Curve Based Pricing / Experience Based Pricing First popularized by BCG (Boston Consulting Group) and Texas Instruments
https://commoncog.com/c/cases/texas-instruments-learning-cur...
Helped Texas Instrument become what it is, and dominate the decade that it implemented this strategy against its peers.
The guy who invented it there, was who later founded TSMC Morris Chang
TIL. Thanks!
I setup and ran a small (10 people) factory many years ago in the UK. Hand assembly and a bit of soldering. It was the most enjoyable work I’ve ever done. I built custom jigs, worked with my team to improve the process, managed inventory, line balancing, work in progress, dispatching, deliveries, built palette racking, learned about kanban and buffers, wrote software to manage it, all working with a team of great people.
If anyone has the opportunity to work in manufacture or adjacent to it I highly recommend.
Its still one of the summer jobs I look back on with a wistful what-if. I worked in a small (10ish employees) factory in the 1990s. I selected, bent and inserted resistors into fire alarm PCBs. If I'd been there longer than 6 weeks I think I'd have learned more about it. But I'd already lined up my next job at the pub a few doors down.
Super cool, what did you make? How large was the factory? How did it work out? One observation from my experience, the closer you are to production, the more stressful things are. But probably scale changes experience. For me, working on stuff that entered automotive production lines, anything that made the line stop or go slow was insanely stresful.
We made a relatively simple fan unit to improve airflow for UK central heating radiators, some fans, an electrical harness with a custom designed control PCB and a mix of injection moulded and extruded plastic parts.
Factory was about 2,500 sqft from memory. Ran the business for 8 years, made and sold 75,000 units but ultimately ended the business due to a lack of poor financing and a lack of business resilience to the weather (when it was unseasonably warm in winter our sales would drop)
Any pointers how to get into that? I think I’d enjoy it. Was at a company that did manufacturing, and I was supporting it, but factories were in China and I was in the US.
I work at a large factory. Most of the senior people started on the shop floor or as engineering interns. It's a long road, but the pattern I see is smart people who are willing to put themselves out, volunteer to run a line, volunteer for continuous improvement projects etc. Most of those positions are advertised internally. In the management team I see many who started in a junior job 20 years ago. There are lots of roles at a large factory, so everything from finance, software development, legal, hr are all ways in. There just aren't as many factories any more
Sadly nothing specific, I founded that company with a friend so I don’t really know if another path in. Automotive production is interesting and there are lots of ways in that don’t require a formal background in the area if you’re willing to start nearer the bottom again, quality engineering is interesting and that brings you near the line without always being on it.
I have an industrial engineer education. My master’s degree was specifically a collection of small projects to demystify (and have the keys understand deeply) all kind of manufacturing processes and the designing that goes with it : machining, soldering, smelting, forging, electrical circuitry.
I ended up working in IT for a large company because of opportunity. Both in terms of interesting projects and pay. All my fellow classmates that went into industry seem to be stuck in heavy internal processes, or working like hell to finish projects that barely recoup their costs. Those who went into hardware entrepreneurship struggle to find clients and investors. The only sector that still seems sexy is the very high end for B2B and luxury.
My analysis is that scale cannot be reached by non Chinese companies except for very specific and high end products (that have a smaller scale by design). Therefore it is impossible to compete on the price/quality ratio of large scale products. And I end up thinking that tariffs could be the solution.
I am based in Europe by the way
Agree job-wise somewhat. With the caveat that you're discounting that you're good at IT, which is why you find it easier; your classmates wouldn't.
On entrepreneurship - the low execution cost and huge capital inflows in software startups actually makes it very hard to succeed in that space because it leads to intense competition. The success stories are the tip of the iceberg.
This makes hardware startups relatively easier to build, believe it or not.
I would argue a fast food kitchen (or any kitchen) is a factory. An incredibly efficient one at that. Things are made and assembled to order from intermediate components.
We take it for granted the amount of labor that goes into our food. There's no reason we could not make other consumer goods in the US at such scale - we just have weird, self-imposed constructs that say assembly line workers get more prestige and protections and food workers don't. Or that we are willing to pay $8 more for a nicer version of a meal, but we won't pay $5 more for a nicer pair of flip flops.
There's an up-market brand for everything:
https://www.reef.com/collections/mens-best-selling-footwear#...
It's all about what transports well and what doesn't.
Zoning and related matters is what really holds the US back. You are allowed to open a restaurant nearly anywhere, but good luck renting out a random office space or garage to start any other kind of small factory without a whole lot of pushback, especially if the process is "dirty".
Unsurprisingly, 70% of the manufacturing that does take place in the US is in rural areas. Trouble is that 80% of the population live in urban areas, so when a factory starts to gain some steam it cannot find anyone around to hire, starving any potential growth.
It's really interesting how the education system works, you walk into a room of 7-year olds and you'd be amazed at the level of curiosity and interest those kids have for everything around them, you can literally see it in their eyes.
Fast forward a few years and all of that is gone, in teenage classrooms. There is no "awe", it has meticulously been sucked out of them.
I really love maker spaces exactly for this reason, it helps keep that spark alive.
By that same logic, you could compare a room full of 7-year-olds to a room full of teenagers and claim that the school system gives people sexual libidos.
It's true that adolescents are very behaviorally different from younger kids, but it isn't clear how much of that is natural biological development, how much is parenting, how much is culture, and how much is the school system.
To be fair: this was a parent stepping up to offer the students something unique. Doing so with children is easier than it is with teenagers, but I think that has more to do with the values we instill than it does with the nature of schooling. While children are still interested in how the world works, while teenagers are more interested in popular culture.
The reason why I say that is because most children seem to be curious about non-school stuff, but even the little ones can lack curiosity about the things they learn in school. Math is the classic example. While you will always have a few who are intensely curious about it, I have to mentally prepare myself to present how amazing math is anytime I say the word in front of children. (In my case, it's not that hard since I grew up fascinated by math-adjacent subjects. For most people though, that would be difficult.)
Being interested in popular culture is being interested in how the world works. It's an interest in how influence and power and money make things move in the rooms that aren't factories, and how to navigate your way into and out of them safely.
We've designed a world where math mostly doesn't hurt you when you're not thinking about it, but boy, oh boy, can your community, social circle, or people you don't even know hurt you if you haven't paid attention to and aligned yourself with the common sentiment.
> We've designed a world where math mostly doesn't hurt you when you're not thinking about it, but boy, oh boy, can your community, social circle, or people you don't even know hurt you if you haven't paid attention to and aligned yourself with the common sentiment.
This isn't the result of anyone's design. In human communities hundreds of thousands of years ago, your community, social circle, or people you don't even know (because they are foreigners from a different 100-person hunter-gatherer band than your 100-person hunter-gatherer band) could absolutely hurt you; and these are the conditions that human beings evolved our social skills in. Understanding math came much later in the history of humanity.
This applies mostly to assembly lines. If you've seen large industrial complexes, you should know factories are not rooms. Instead they are large scale "machines". Tire factories, large pipe factories, chemical plants, etc. are much more complex than most assembly lines.
I agree that awe and accessibility are often opposed, and that children are easily inspired by things that feel tractable but not boring
I like the idea that we can teach children to feel inspiration instead of intimidation when learning how things work
I loooove the idea of teaching children inspiration instead of intimidation. Everything in the built world was made by a person just like you and me. That person may have had special training or unique experiences, but we too can move towards training and experiences and build/do cool things.
One of the ways I try to do this with my kid, is to try to investigate what's behind what we see and interact with -- with technical stuff it's asking how it works and how things fit together, with social stuff it's asking what's going behind the scenes and getting involved with it. Then reflecting on how cool the technical thing or event/social machinery is and what function it serves. This has been generative of tons of great questions from my kid and great discussion with them.
There is an interesting interplay between mystery and motivation. Churches/theologians generally are good with this interplay.
> Churches/theologians generally are good with this interplay.
IME churches and plenty of theologians stop at thought terminating cliches, like "faith is believing without seeing". I've had more satisfaction exploring mysteries by following the evidence and things that can be falsified.
See "Maker Movement", 2005-1018.
Here's a practice factory that GM operates to train new employees to work on an assembly line.[1] There are plywood mockups of cars rolling on conveyors, and the new employees bolt things on.
A useful lesson for kids to get is how you make a hundred of something. The difference between making one and making many is not something most people get. Make something on a 3D printer. Then, for comparison, make a mold, and resin cast a batch of them.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b12sOQ2hOF4
2018, sorry. When TechShop went bust.
This is from someone that has observed Shenzen. A location where much is made in garage sized factories (usually literally a garage space at ground level where people will bang out products by hand).
You might not expect a bespoke 2 ton electric train engine to be made in a series of garages but it really is. One lot of workers will be experts at winding coils. They'll have a rig that spins and a spool of copper to wind on with a practiced skill so that they do it as well as any multi million dollar machine could. Then there will be another shop that forges an engine housing. They'll shape out a cast in sand and pour in molten steel (produced by another nearby shop) into the cast to make the housing. Another shop will make the brushes, another the motor controller, etc.
The end result? You travel to Shenzen to build a bespoke megawatt scale electric motor and you have a prototype delivered in 3 days. Not even kidding. It's not some megafactory where you will never be worth their time for an order of 10 engines to replace aging motors in a custom 20year old fleet. It's a set of people in rooms making things for low price point at exceptional scale that are easily outcompeting the western "bigger is better" style.
The USA seems crazy with it's focus on mega corps or nothing honestly. Every law seems to encourage this - eg. The healthcare system which absolutely harms small business owners who have no ability to negotiate a corporate health care plan. How do you ever develop a Shenzen style manufacturing culture in such an environment? How does a megafactory that makes a billion of one thing innovate rapidly? You need the multitude of garage workshops that collectively fill every niche that Shenzen has. Today if the West was cut off from Chinese goods we'd be stuck in so many ways. We just don't have what China's enabled here.
I admire Chinese industry quite a bit myself, though I haven't yet completed my pilgrimage to Shenzhen. Just a quick clarification about the healthcare plans, though. As a single-person LLC I'm able to get a non-fancy Kaiser Permanente plan here in SF. It's not super cheap or anything but it's there.
I don’t know about health care but a lot of stuff in the US is set up for megacorps and individuals but nothing in between. As an individual you can easily get a self funded 401k plan. As a small business you basically can’t.
Of course the US still biases towards megacorps who get to do things like distribute dividends taxed at capital gains rates instead of ordinary income like sole proprietorships.
The thing is what you can't get a non-fancy Kaiser Permanente in a such places.
Between a fully capitalist American model or a [fully capitalist in all but the name] Chinese one I chose %he one where I can get a basic level without it just by being a citizen.
But is there any reason, other than money and some bureaucratic overheads, why that could only work in China?
I bet you could do it in same timeline in any sufficiently developed country by airdropping a 40ft container full of gold bars to a University front yard, and declaring that first team to deliver the motor gets 2/3 of unclaimed bars included with full legal and tax services plus one bar each for supplier coordinators. Do it in world's top engineering schools like MIT or ETHZ, and professors would come running to it with off the shelf motors in hand, ripped out of some equipment and machined in haste to suit your requirements in matters of minutes.
It's not like that motor would be made using some future tech that only Shenzhen workers truly understand, but it's probably like they're made with basic standard quantum physics taught at any engineering schools that they too were taught. The difference is that they're taking your task with good amount of efforts for the money you pay.
I don't mean to support(or interfere with it in any ways, as I'm not from US however I cut and twist it and I'm not supposed to) the current US admin, but they kinda-sorta have a point with its weird tariff and exchange rate insistences. There is no free market competition possible with the brain-hour cost China is charging unless some completely insane countermeasures were taken, whether it's million percent tariffs or currency exchanges based on physical mass of bank notes.
The shop calling shops and working together story is the same as how industrial zones in Japan were described, in the past. Same probably can be said about 20th century US or 19th century German industrial towns. That's not the source of the Chinese superpower.
This is China's massive differentiator than anywhere else. They have impeccable supply chain management. You will find that certain items are almost always made in the same city. Shenzhen (and surrounding area) is just the hub for electronics manufacturing. Within the city there is the main output, and then a bunch of smaller manufacturers making all the input components within driving distance of that factory which allows it all to work incredibly efficiently. This makes manufacturing in China so much faster than elsewhere.
I'd even go so far to say that Shenzhen is probably the wrong place to build the electric train motor above. I bet there is some 2nd or 3rd tier city somewhere in China that specializes in just that. For example, the only reason I'm aware of the city of Yueqing is because I did a project with pushbuttons once and that is the pushbutton city in China.
Very interesting! How are those garages coordinated? Who designs and who commissions?
There's 'sourcing agents' whose job is to coordinate the garages. They don't work for any of the garages but as a westerner you'll get in touch with the "electric motor guy" who knows all the factories to contact for that particular purpose. They'll meet you at the airport gate and you essentially pay them as a guide to negotiate the shanghai business environment.
Yay and nay. That's only for very small manufacturing stuff. To assure the quality control and lower the price, it will eventually head to the large scale factory. The difference between what happened before and now is that, the minimum order quantity has gotten so low (thanks to CNC and computerization etc), now bigger factories can even handle MOQ down to 100.
I would advise you against going to those smaller factories -- QC is a nightmakre. Problems will arise. When you go to Canton fair or Yiwu for trade shows, I always, always, always recommend you to make a factory visit, and for the first batch, have a reliable Chinese person you trust to fly there and do the QC (if you hire someone that you barely know for QC, the other side might just bribe him off) and you will end up getting garbage when it gets to Long Beach port.
That's what Naomi Wu really did while producing influencer type maker videos. "She knows Shenzhen like the back of her hand." Someone who bought her services describes her leading them confidently into sketchy alleys and up back stairs to unmarked doors, behind which were people making the thing they wanted.
She has a book about how to get electronics done in Shenzhen.[1] There was a previous edition published by a westerner, but Wu, a Shenzhen native, updated it. In ten years, Shenzhen changed a lot.
[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/machinery-enchantress/the-new-es...
It's not really so much a book on how to get electronics done, more sort of an electronics specific phrase book, full of the names of things you can point at when looking for stuff in the markets.
The original was written by Bunnie Huang (a name to be sneezed at in his own right) who (I assume) grew up speaking Mandarin at home. Naomi is a local though and probably has broader local knowledge.
The original Shenzhen markets are still there (I've been going for a decade or so, they haven't changed that much), they're getting a bit crowded out by consumer electronics - I can still go and buy great tools in HQB at same places I was 10 years ago, reels of resistors at the same places, people will still sell you cut tape from part reels on the street - the big change are the electric bikes, you take your life in your hand each time you turn around :-)
Probably the first factory you walk into? That one would become the prime contractor that manage suppliers and subcontractors - I think those are the terms they use in multimillion aerospace and defense programs, but I believe the concepts are the same.
For aerospace programs, you sign a contract with e.g. Boeing for a 787 to be delivered 5 years for $500m, to be delivered to your company pilot at the Boeing Everett facility to be signed off and flown to accepting aircraft maintenance facility for your fleet. They then start dispatching fuselages and wings and parts to various aerospace kilo-corporates. They occasionally call you for confirmations and approvals for important items like engines and small overruns.
I guess the same in Shenzhen happens as a mostly-verbal order for a motor against Shenzhen Suchandsuch LLC in 3 days for $15k delivered the back of the factory on a shop table, with their chief machinist there to get you through the artifact and to help you with bubble wraps and duct tapes. But the overall structure is the same.
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Certain industries such as film adjacent industries definitely remind me of what you are describing. Small scale, small shop, profound expertise, able to immediately work and iterate. And the way they solve healthcare is simple. They don’t offer health insurance benefits at all. Employees buy it for themselves from Covered California.
Yeah I have a friend who does this as a livng, and it sounds insane. They do stuff like where a director approves a piece of concept art for a prop, before he gets on the plane for a 12 hour flight for the shoot.
In the available time, they have to model, 3D print, paint and wire up every piece art, so by the time the director gets there, its ready for the shoot. There's no room for mistakes, as each of these processes takes long enough that a repeat is not feasible.
Yet everything he does works, and he does it every time. Even if I pulled off that stuff once in the amount of time given, it would be something I kept bragging about for the rest of my life.
China scales its approach to demand. It can build mega- factories or it can build small batches. Small batches require the dextrous artisans you mention.
A recent story I heard. A mega factory, highly automated, and making 1000 units an hour offered to make niche products at 1000 units every 3 months. They didn't change their line, they added a new one that was manual. No MOQ, no long term commitment. No long delays. Just got in with it
I don't think awe demoralizes children the same way it does adults. Kids want to be an astronaut, president of the United States, et cetera. They're still dreamers.
If done incorrectly, this message could backfire. At that age, the worst label a job can have is "boring". If anybody can do it, it's no longer interesting.
Not that the author is doing it incorrectly -- letting kids play with pieces of the factory process is very much the opposite of boring.
It's only later on in life to kids get hammered into them that they can't do hard things.
I do think though that the astronaut, president, etc roles are imaginable. And that seeing the crazy automated factory with all manners of machines drillings stamping etc, that that is much harder to imagine oneself doing. The making of that factory is not on display, just the output of the human. Trying to emphasize the human, the role itself, is I think what Matt is getting at, and that needs to be imaginable.
It depends on how you look at it.
I've traveled all around Asia visiting different factories for projects over the years. After some time, factories just tend to blend together, big rooms filled with machines where materials come in one end, and are modified to be more like the final product at the other end. The rooms might look/feel different, whether it is the dirty floors and heat of a die cast grinding room, the green floors of an injection molding factory, or even a clean room you have to squeeze yourself into a bunny suit for (They never have large enough suits for me), its all just equipment in a room to transform material.
A factory is also a set of people and processes, which is what truly matters. If you don't have good people with expertise and the processes in place you don't have a chance at getting good product. You build relationships with the people at the companies and they will move mountains to help you. You build a truly excellent relationship with a factory, and they will anticipate your requirements and sometimes ship you perfect parts at T0.
I've got plenty of examples of factories that are fantastic, and ones that have been horrible from my time in working. The good ones all have the same differentiator, people that we have built a good long term relationship with. The bad ones almost always have a constant rotation of different people you have to talk to.
When I was 17 I took a summer job at a printed circuit board shop that was all in one 1500 sq ft room. Twenty five years later we had 11 bays each 1500 sq ft filled with smaller rooms. I tore down all of the rooms that I helped build using a forklift and a sledge hammer, and was the last employee to walk out when we closed.
A word I heard a lot some decade ago but never anymore: social construction.
But I think it fits incredibly well here. A factory is just a social constructions. A room where everyone agrees something is produced.
Neat, but sort of ironic their main product is an "AI clock" that takes an intrinsically human act, writing a poem, and pulls the human out of the loop.
It's nice that they explained the process to a bunch of kids, helping to de-mystify something quite abstract to many of us (where does all the stuff come from?).
I just think that perhaps we have over-indexed on STEM and this is a prime example of that. The article mentions talking about industrial designers, which is cool.
> I want these kids to become designers, engineers, inventors, factory owners, and all the rest.
but what about the poets?
It's the sort of thinking that I've seen all over tech, where people are so focused on/obsessed with using technology to solve problems they seem to forget and lose appreciation for all the people that make their lives possible and enjoyable.
Anyway, cool article but don't buy the slop-flinging e-waste please.
To make it worse, I feel like the idea is really good, but I have no clue why on earth this requires 'AI'
I've seen similar clocks (software) that work by just storing a bunch of quotes and sentences from all kinds of different literature and then randomly picking one to show (with credits)
You get the same effect and (bonus) you get exposed to some piece of art that you may not have known about before.
I get where you're coming from. I think that the clock sounds dumb too.
But what makes life "possible and enjoyable" in the most mundane sort of way that every human being can agree with relies on STEM. Before that though is the role that religion has in making life possible and enjoyable in ways that are beyond cold reason and material exploits.
Poets come last.
Great stuff! Great! However, the issue is not, and has likely never been, that young people aren't willing to believe "they can do that". It's that most people, of necessity, are not good at both inventing, manufacturing (how to efficiently make that invention many times), and sales (how to get someone to buy it). Therefore, they will need to find someone willing to hire them to do one part of that process. And the modern labor market is not interested in training people on the job, they want someone who's already done the job somewhere else.
Not saying you shouldn't go tell kids about how things work! Just that the reason kids don't do that as much, is not primarily anything to do with education or the kids, but rather because the modern labor market has done its best to avoid ever having to give anybody a chance to do something they haven't already done many times before.
> I want these kids to become designers, engineers, inventors, factory owners, and all the rest. Makers of any kind; participants in the ongoing making of our world.
Thank you for going into the classroom and offering the kids a glimpse into the world that makes our world tick.
I am the odd one out at HN since I run after school programs. Yet I remember my past and I am constantly looking for ways to shoehorn enrichment activities into the program, things that expand the child's world view beyond what the see at home or are exposed to in the classroom. Things like: this is the infrastructure that makes society work. It is encouraging to hear about parents stepping up to the plate and helping out with those efforts!
I do think that this blog post is quaint and I find it hard to hate on a guy showing up at his kid's school and giving a talk—oh boy, remember when your parents came to school? Or anyone's parents. Especially a dad? Woowee.
The cynic in me can't resist remarks like "the children yearn for the mines".
Then another part of me thinks...how much of a factory is "just a room" to the people who are not its engineers, designers and owners.
Does the sweaty work in a factory net you the same sort of socioeconomic leverage that it used to? The other day I had a thought that a lot of 2000s sitcoms had dads who managed factories. George Lopez. Damon Wayans. Jim Belushi? Doug Heffernan drove for UPS.
You know, just think, in about 20 years some of these kids in that classroom may just be supervising the young adults of today who failed to make the right pivot in the labor market. The Lindy effect suggests that this blog will be around long enough to show those old guys this post to see if they agree.
Will future sweaty factory work be any good?
Follow me to read my next insights: Books are just letters. Rockets are just metal pieces.
Sometimes, a factory is just smoke and mirrors.
https://constructionreviewonline.com/intels-20-billion-ohio-...
I think it's appreciation of the world and people to look and think, "some people did that". So many people working together globally to produce anything you see, sometimes over decades and many lives.
There is extraordinary in the ordinary.
Gonna be a bit of a downer and say, "The kids who need to hear what this guy was saying aren't in school with the kids whose parents are engineers." (Well, not all of them.)
He is in the UK, and the hardware engineers left are rare. I think it is normal to have none in a class
What a great teacher. We should all be so lucky to have a quality educator that teaches kids to build and create, instead of consume.
That's a great post.
I like the spirit of it.
Even though I am no longer involved in hardware manufacturing, the same thing applies to software development.
I shared it with some friends that own/run factories.
I disabled quiet mode and I don't know what is revealed.
It seems like this is a description: https://interconnected.org/home/2024/09/05/cursor-party
I guess it's showing user's location, maybe simulating their cursor in some way, but I don't know for sure how he's doing this.
First line of the blog the author states they spoke to the "year group" - what is that? I'm not familiar with the term.
The group of children who are the same age. How that is organised into classes depends on how many kids there are. There may be several classes in each year, or like my little rural village school where each class had 2 year groups in it.
In the UK state system you normally enter primary school at year 1, go to secondary school for year 7, leave secondary in year 11 (aged 16, or 15 if your birthday is before the start of the new school year in September). This is when you take your General Certificate of Secondary Education exams. You are then supposed to go to Further Education, academics go to study A levels, either at same school, or in my case a Sixth-form college, which hilariously keeps it's name from when year groups were named from the start of secondary (so modern year 7 is old year 1). You may also go to a vocational college teaching everything from hairdressing to car mechanics or book-keeping. You can also do an apprenticeship with day release to said college.
From A levels (year 12 and 13, or 6 and 7!) you can apply for university. You can also continue vocational studies to the same level. This is known as Higher Education. It used to be that Universities were academic and took A level students, and vocational students would go to a Polytechnic college, but they are all called universities now. The vocational colleges also tend to offer HE courses now.
It is a bit of a mess at HE due to a turn of the century push to get more kids to degree level and it is suffering a reset, too many courses, not enough students. Some cynics feel this was more about managing unemployment numbers down, than producing more talent...
One interesting effect is that professions that were often vocational in their entry (some engineering, the non-audit side of accountancy) switched to being degree first. This lead to frustrations as 20 something year old finance grads entered the workforce to find they were 5 years behind their cohort that did an apprenticeship when they were 16, kept up their studies and were already climbing a ladder they had no foot on!
Bit of a long answer to your question
That would make sense if the author specified a specific year's "year group" - e.g. if they had said "I spoke to the 6th year group". But they said they spoke to "THE year group" - which is very confusing to me, even more so after your explanation.
Servers used to be rooms as well. But they are now submarines.
so what is a software factory then?
Probably something related to Java
Which is an island. So who put the factory onto Jawa/Indonesia?
A dubious analogy.
Factories are places for the mass production of identical or nearly identical widgets.
There are some kinds of mass produced software, like the low value apps that lots of businesses want to have for some reason and that should have been websites instead.
But actual progress comes from software that isn't mass produced. So choose your ambitions wisely.
A compiler.
like a play-doh factory but more sweaty
Marketing BS
Nope, a "gang of four" pattern from the book on architecture patterns.
And still, like the other commentator said, a dubious analogy. I found the dubious analogies prevalent inb software harmed my understanding.
Some would say "Gang of four" and "Design patterns" and "OOP" are all marketing BS
The American education system seems to have taken a serious turn for the worse in the past 30 years, but when I was in junior high we had a class called Industrial Arts, aka "shop class". We made stuff, using real industrial processes including things like injection molding, on real equipment. High school offered more variety and specialization, including wood shop, electrical shop, and auto shop.
But we're far away from that world, and getting farther. There's a good chance that by 2030, 3D printers and CNC machines will be considered "firearms" for federal regulation purposes.
Now do factory farming. Just another room, right?
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