3 ms·

Hmmm... you don't seem quite up to date on Silicon Valley. You seem to forget the older achievements as well. Intel (you seem impressed with them) are right in

Hmmm... you don't seem quite up to date on Silicon Valley. You seem to forget the older achievements as well. Intel (you seem impressed with them) are right in the heart. Cisco, same. Google seems to be unimpressive to you, but they are producing some pretty solid (and new) technology at a pretty high rate. There are plenty of mediocre folks here as well, but there are also plenty of sharp ones. (My background, btw, was DoE and NSF funded research. I came to work on California startups when things got much more interesting technically in the private sector)

graycat 11y ago
> My background, btw, was DoE and NSF funded research. Mine was US national security, computing, applied math, and associated research around DC. When I saw commercial technology, I upchucked. As Betty Davis said, "What a dump." > much more interesting technically in the private sector Hope so. But I don't have much hope, as I explained, due to the backgrounds of the VC partners and CEOs. In blunt terms, around DC, I could always get a competent technical review of my technical work; in the commercial world, I've never been able to. Another explanation for the sick-o climate of innovation in the US commercial sector is that the decision makers, i.e., VC partners and CEOs, picked some "high payoff" projects, tried them, saw the projects fail, and gave up. So, Silicon Valley has adopted some rules: Regard anything beyond middle school level material as blue sky, academic game playing, nonsense and give up. Of course the problem was that the VC partners and CEOs didn't give competent technical evaluations of the technical parts of the projects, and that because they were incompetent technically, and, thus, they picked poor projects. Simple as that. Again, those decision makers just did not know how to evaluate technical projects; plenty of people in the US do know how do such evaluations well. So, now the norm is, don't evaluate technical projects. Just don't do it. Instead, evaluate projects much like an accountant would, that is, based on assets. The main difference is that accountants count in dollars, and the Silicon Valley decision makers are also willing to count data from ComScore, Google Analytics, etc. about traction. The crucial, core technical internals, if any, they don't care and don't look. Intel? I picked them because their work at 14- nm and their path down from 1 micron has been so easy to notice. Maybe much of the credit goes to their vendors for, say, UV sources, optics, photosensitive materials, positioning systems, etc. I used to be impressed with Cisco, but now I wonder. Google? For their search engine, they have written some quite nice code. I don't see much serious innovation, e.g., like a drag-free satellite, the P&W engines for the SR-71, the Bertsekas polynomial algorithm for an important assignment problem, what I mentioned that Breiman did, but a lot of really nice code. For their self-driving cars: My guess is that mostly they are in effect using electronic tracks and that people will give up when the rates of accidents and/or traffic jams are too high. Then the hope will be to change the roads to make Google's efforts with self-driving cars practical, and my view is that the roads won't change and self-driving cars will go the way of turbine engine cars. At times, driving as it is done now by humans takes some actual intelligence, and I don't believe that anyone knows how to program that. To me the self-driving cars look like mostly a publicity stunt, a head fake with a lot less to it than meets the eye. For Silicon Valley's innovation, I would ask: What is new, correct, significant, useful, powerful, and valuable and well beyond a bright, self-educated high school student and, hopefully, well beyond essentially any efforts outside the US. With that, an example was the SR-71, especially its engines. Why? The Soviets also had the MIG 25 that could go that high and fast but only for a few minutes before its ordinary turbojet engines overheated. Meanwhile the SR-71 kept going along, 80,000+ feet, Mach 3+, for another 1500 miles or so, no problem, never got shot down. Why? The turbojet engines converted to ram jet engines starting near Mach 2 or so and, thus, didn't overheat. I'm not sure the USSR ever figured that out. Nice. In the commercial world, we get innovation drip, drip instead of wild, raging rivers like we should. Actually take away what came from high quality work for US national security, and there would be not much left of the computer industry or Silicon Valley. No such thing is true for medical innovation. Yes, US national security and progress in medicine (the guys in Congress who vote for the NIH budgets are old and want better medical care!) are the main reasons NSF and NIH research grants fund ballpark 60% of the budgets of Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Cal Tech, etc. Okay. Fine. Terrific. But for the rest, there is still too much dependence on US national security. US national security is a great goal, but the commercial world also needs to take the results of the research and create wild, raging rivers of powerful, valuable innovation instead of the present drip, drip. As it is, Silicon Valley is doing next to nothing that a determined effort in England, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, China, South Korea, etc. can't do. Bummer. Really big bummer. Big time bummer. Threat to the US economy bummer. Might put US workers in direct competition with the 17 cent an hour workers in China. Did I mention bummer? So, how to get ahead? Really, there's only one way -- great, leading edge exploitations of great, original research. Sorry 'bout that. To do that, need the decision makers able to judge the research efforts, the research results, and promising exploitations and make the possibilities real. For that, the usual MBAs, LLBs, business devs, marketers, self-taught C++ coders, UI designers, unicorn CEOs, need not apply. Or did we notice that Microsoft, China, and Russia were all able, apparently quite routinely, to duplicate Google search? So, where's the unique, world-class leadership, which the US very much needs? We don't have it and are becoming just one more of the pack of 10 or so countries that can do nearly anything the US does. Bummer. We need to get going. For that, we need project decision makers who know what the heck they are doing in innovation. I feel like I'm trying to explain the importance of medical research and innovation to a country doctor in 1850, the importance of a drag-free satellite to an auto mechanic in 1910, the importance of quantum mechanics to a radio engineer in 1930, etc.

graycat 11y ago

> My background, btw, was DoE and NSF funded research. Mine was US national security, computing, applied math, and associated research around DC. When I saw commercial technology, I upchucked. As Betty Davis said, "What a dump." > much more interesting technically in the private sector Hope so. But I don't have much hope, as I explained, due to the backgrounds of the VC partners and CEOs. In blunt terms, around DC, I could always get a competent technical review of my technical work; in the commercial world, I've never been able to. Another explanation for the sick-o climate of innovation in the US commercial sector is that the decision makers, i.e., VC partners and CEOs, picked some "high payoff" projects, tried them, saw the projects fail, and gave up. So, Silicon Valley has adopted some rules: Regard anything beyond middle school level material as blue sky, academic game playing, nonsense and give up. Of course the problem was that the VC partners and CEOs didn't give competent technical evaluations of the technical parts of the projects, and that because they were incompetent technically, and, thus, they picked poor projects. Simple as that. Again, those decision makers just did not know how to evaluate technical projects; plenty of people in the US do know how do such evaluations well. So, now the norm is, don't evaluate technical projects. Just don't do it. Instead, evaluate projects much like an accountant would, that is, based on assets. The main difference is that accountants count in dollars, and the Silicon Valley decision makers are also willing to count data from ComScore, Google Analytics, etc. about traction. The crucial, core technical internals, if any, they don't care and don't look. Intel? I picked them because their work at 14- nm and their path down from 1 micron has been so easy to notice. Maybe much of the credit goes to their vendors for, say, UV sources, optics, photosensitive materials, positioning systems, etc. I used to be impressed with Cisco, but now I wonder. Google? For their search engine, they have written some quite nice code. I don't see much serious innovation, e.g., like a drag-free satellite, the P&W engines for the SR-71, the Bertsekas polynomial algorithm for an important assignment problem, what I mentioned that Breiman did, but a lot of really nice code. For their self-driving cars: My guess is that mostly they are in effect using electronic tracks and that people will give up when the rates of accidents and/or traffic jams are too high. Then the hope will be to change the roads to make Google's efforts with self-driving cars practical, and my view is that the roads won't change and self-driving cars will go the way of turbine engine cars. At times, driving as it is done now by humans takes some actual intelligence, and I don't believe that anyone knows how to program that. To me the self-driving cars look like mostly a publicity stunt, a head fake with a lot less to it than meets the eye. For Silicon Valley's innovation, I would ask: What is new, correct, significant, useful, powerful, and valuable and well beyond a bright, self-educated high school student and, hopefully, well beyond essentially any efforts outside the US. With that, an example was the SR-71, especially its engines. Why? The Soviets also had the MIG 25 that could go that high and fast but only for a few minutes before its ordinary turbojet engines overheated. Meanwhile the SR-71 kept going along, 80,000+ feet, Mach 3+, for another 1500 miles or so, no problem, never got shot down. Why? The turbojet engines converted to ram jet engines starting near Mach 2 or so and, thus, didn't overheat. I'm not sure the USSR ever figured that out. Nice. In the commercial world, we get innovation drip, drip instead of wild, raging rivers like we should. Actually take away what came from high quality work for US national security, and there would be not much left of the computer industry or Silicon Valley. No such thing is true for medical innovation. Yes, US national security and progress in medicine (the guys in Congress who vote for the NIH budgets are old and want better medical care!) are the main reasons NSF and NIH research grants fund ballpark 60% of the budgets of Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Cal Tech, etc. Okay. Fine. Terrific. But for the rest, there is still too much dependence on US national security. US national security is a great goal, but the commercial world also needs to take the results of the research and create wild, raging rivers of powerful, valuable innovation instead of the present drip, drip. As it is, Silicon Valley is doing next to nothing that a determined effort in England, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, China, South Korea, etc. can't do. Bummer. Really big bummer. Big time bummer. Threat to the US economy bummer. Might put US workers in direct competition with the 17 cent an hour workers in China. Did I mention bummer? So, how to get ahead? Really, there's only one way -- great, leading edge exploitations of great, original research. Sorry 'bout that. To do that, need the decision makers able to judge the research efforts, the research results, and promising exploitations and make the possibilities real. For that, the usual MBAs, LLBs, business devs, marketers, self-taught C++ coders, UI designers, unicorn CEOs, need not apply. Or did we notice that Microsoft, China, and Russia were all able, apparently quite routinely, to duplicate Google search? So, where's the unique, world-class leadership, which the US very much needs? We don't have it and are becoming just one more of the pack of 10 or so countries that can do nearly anything the US does. Bummer. We need to get going. For that, we need project decision makers who know what the heck they are doing in innovation. I feel like I'm trying to explain the importance of medical research and innovation to a country doctor in 1850, the importance of a drag-free satellite to an auto mechanic in 1910, the importance of quantum mechanics to a radio engineer in 1930, etc.