• @jaybone
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    01 year ago

    Lol I work in software in The Valley. Trust me, we write this shit.

    • @[email protected]
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      -11 year ago

      Yeah, nobody’s saying you don’t write software. This is a history lesson in where the tech comes from.

      Even then, a lot of the work done there is stapling together APIs, right? A lot of those APIs are implementations of tech developed, again, in the public sector.

      And if you are writing novel stuff, I’d bet good money all the interesting stuff comes from research done in universities, right? Most of the interesting things I’ve ever programmed were based on public sector research.

      And even then, the industry got started with public sector money. Maybe your company got its start from VC funding or whatever, but that’s after the whole sector was jump started. Now the big companies in your field don’t pay taxes, in fact a lot of them are paid by your taxes.

      I mean, if you want to explain where I’m wrong, go for it. Right now all we have is “trust me”, which is famously strong evidence.

      • GigglyBobble
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        21 year ago

        You’re overgeneralizing. Government money is in everything. It needs more effort to prove it’s causal for every innovation there is.

        • @[email protected]
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          -11 year ago

          How? What? Explain your objections beyond “needs more effort” please. Your objections need more effort.

          • GigglyBobble
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            11 year ago

            No. You’re the one with the big claims that the whole industry (or in your other reply even the whole capitalist world) doesn’t innovate. So you first provide some actual evidence. So far your arguments are just “trust me” themselves.

            • @[email protected]
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              1 year ago

              The default assumption shouldn’t be that they do something, they very clearly only package existing technology. They clearly don’t have the know-how to make a functioning modem based on existing specifications, much less develop new tech. Why do you believe they do innovate? Because they told you? I’d suggest the evidence against the null hypothesis just doesn’t exist.

              The graphic I linked shows the reality, that all the underlying tech is from the public sector.

              Also, you didn’t even bother to contradict what I said that most of the programming is stapling together existing APIs. That’s true, isn’t it?

              • @AlotOfReading
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                11 year ago

                You have no idea how modern technology is produced. Any particular product is usually the result of dozens to thousands of iterations, some funded with public money and many not. Let’s take an example from your chart: DRAM. I actually don’t know when DARPA “developed” DRAM (since DARPA usually funds private companies to do development for them), but it must have been before 1970 when Intel designed the 1103 chip that got them started. Do you think that pre-1970s design is remotely similar to the DRAM operating on your device today? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not.

                And no, modern device development does not consist of gluing a bunch of APIs together. Apple maintains its own compilers, languages, toolchains, runtimes, hardware, operating systems, debugging tools, and so on. Some of that code had distant origins in open source (e.g. webkit), but that’s vastly different than publicly funded and those components are usually very different today.

                They’re failing to produce competitive modems because modern wireless is one of closest things humans have to straight up black magic. It’s extremely difficult to get right, especially as frequencies go up, SNR goes down, and we try to push things ever faster despite having effectively reached the Shannon limit ages ago.

                • @[email protected]
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                  01 year ago

                  So you’ve vaguely waved your hands in the direction of innovations that you think are different now than in the 1970s but not explained how they’re different or where those innovations came from.

                  You aren’t actually pointing to any serious innovations silicon valley have done.

                  Modern device development consists of more than gluing a bunch of APIs together, but it largely does consist of that.

                  Apple maintains those things not for innovation purposes, but so they can keep a walled garden. If they maintain objective C and iOS and MacOS on their own terms then they can keep people locked into their ecosystem and overcharge them for devices they will then overcharge for repairs in order to upsell people into the next model. They are notorious for this shitty behaviour. It’s not real innovation.

                  And when you say wireless is straight up black magic… you mean it’s a real technology that was developed by researchers, not capitalists, because real R&D is expensive, so capitalism socialises the costs and privatises the rewards.

                  • @AlotOfReading
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                    11 year ago

                    I haven’t explained what the differences are because almost everything is different. It’s like comparing a Model T to a Bugatti. They’re simply not built the same way, even if they both use internal combustion engines and gearboxes.

                    Let me give you an overview of how the research pipeline occurs though. First is the fundamental research, which outside of semiconductors is usually funded by public sources. This encompasses things like methods of crack formation in glasses, better solid state models, improved error correction algorithms and so on. The next layer up is applied research, where the fundamental research is applied to improve or optimize existing solutions / create new partial solutions to unsolved problems. Funding here is a mix of private and public depending on the specific area. Semiconductor companies do lots of their own original research here as well, as you can see from these Micron and TSMC memory research pages. It’s very common for researchers who are publicly funded here to take that research and use it to go start a private company, usually with funding from their institution. This is where many important semiconductor companies have their roots, including TSMC via ITRI. These companies in turn invest in product / highly applied research aimed at productizing the research for the mass market. Sometimes this is easy, sometimes it’s extremely difficult. Most of the challenges of EUV lithography occurred here, because going from low yield academic research to high yield commercial feasibility was extremely difficult. Direct investment here is almost always private, though there can be significant public investments through companies. If this is published (it often isn’t), it’s commonly done as patents. Every company you’ve heard of has thousands of these patents, and some of the larger ones have tens or hundreds of thousands. All of that is the result of internal research. Lastly, they’ll take all of that, build standards (e.g. DDR5, h.265, 5G), and develop commercial implementations that actually do those things. That’s what OEMs buy (or try to develop on their own in the case of Apple modems) to integrate into their products.