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I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory
- mrandish 4y agoKind of disappointed to find an obvious error in the first paragraph of a feature in Wired. > "produces, by one analysis, a staggering 92 percent of the world’s most avant-garde chips—the ones inside the nuclear weapons, planes, submarines, and hypersonic missiles" I'm no expert on semiconductors or even hardware but even I know that the vast majority of chips designed into such critical military systems are based on quite old designs and process nodes for multiple reasons (TEMPEST rating, fully characterized, proven reliable at long duration, guaranteed availability, etc). This is the kind of thing I'd expect competent editorial review even in a 'pop-tech' magazine to catch. I'm pretty sure that over the years even Wired itself has run articles about the "gray hairs" needed to still maintain old code on old CPUs running in military hardware...
- monocasa 4y agoI'm not sure that is an error. Military spec chips a long time ago gave up on special processes/chips a while ago as it was self defeating at the end of the day. Most chips get a reliability economy of scale that you miss out on if you divorce yourself from the commercial market. For most of the other use cases where there isn't an of the shelf chip, an FPGA on a commercial (but high spec/reliability) process is better than a custom ASIC. Then there's only a small sliver left where you truly gain from very custom military processes. That's why the DoD basically paid for that TSMC 5nm fab in Arizona; getting all of those chips destined for defense applications fabbed on US soil again.
- jacknews 4y ago"Nothing about him comes off as shady or cheap like Elon Musk or the Overstock person." lol.
- sovietswag 4y agohttps://archive.is/0Jojw https://archive.is/0Jojw
- yellow_lead 4y ago> Of course, now that I’m on the bullet train to Hsinchu, I realize that the precise hazard against which the Sacred Mountain offers protection is not to be uttered. This article seems overly dramatic. I've been living in Taiwan for over a year now, it's not like you can't utter the word "China."
- raincole 4y agoThe title is "I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory". I think the dramatization is expected.
- yellow_lead 4y agoFair enough
- textninja 4y ago> This article seems overly dramatic The article: “I arrive in Taiwan brooding morbidly on the fate of democracy.”
- hilbert42 4y agoWell, it's been in much better health.
- gabereiser 4y agoThis is word salad. Was this article written by ChatGPT again?
- trustingtrust 4y agoThe whole thing is so unnatural to read I won’t be surprised.
- Animats 4y agoYes. He's one of the very few outsiders ever allowed to enter an TSMC fab. What does he write about? The air shower. The ceiling lights! It's not a useless article, though. It gets across that this stuff is really important and too centralized.
- selimthegrim 4y agoAuthor is a she.
- xg15 4y agoMaybe that's why she was allowed in.
- dieselgate 4y agoI agree it’s not a well written article but also find calling out “is this written by ai” to be a very low effort and much overdone comment as well Edit: guess that’s my problem though based on the world we live in now
- gabereiser 4y agoThey have a bit of history (and a few others do) of putting out garbage articles written by AI and edited by their latest intern.
- SanderNL 4y agoWarning, citizen, you are showing signs of misalignment. Adjust your parameters.
- userbinator 4y agoTSMC’s headquarters are across the street from a rival UMC fab The story of UMC is interesting too. They designed and made tons of PC chipsets and even their own x86 CPU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMC_Green_CPU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMC_Green_CPU
- bottlepalm 4y agoAnyone know of a good way I can listen to this article?
- therealdrag0 4y agoThere’s many TTS tools out there. I use ListenLater.FM to send them to a private podcast feed. For more UX focused there is Speechify and the like. (I’ve also coded up my own python script to use Google API to TTS text to mp3 and out on podcast feed, but don’t do it manually anymore myself).
- rad_gruchalski 4y agoOn an iphone you can two-finger-swipe from the top of the screen. That will start the dictation.
- 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago> Our ability to do this stuff at nanoscale is us up against the face of God, in a sense. > God means nature. We are describing the face of nature at TSMC.
- hzay 4y agoNot sure why everyone is complaining this is badly written - it's prose, written for dramatic effect with TSMC as the idk, plot? It should be read for beauty and word-taste, not just the story. If AI can produce this, that's only good news since that means we can have more fiction-like nonfiction (for these who want it).
- tkgally 4y agoI suspect that a lot of people here are not used to this style of journalism, in which the writer foregrounds what they experienced and felt while reporting the story. Such writing used to be common in Harper's, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and similar magazines. I enjoyed it when I was young, but, despite the occasional insights--such as the uselessness of semiconductor fabs in Taiwan to China if China invades--this article wore me out before I got very far. I'm sure GPT didn't write it, but I would be happy to read GPT's summary of it.
- baq 4y agoYeah looks like folksy can’t comprehend actually reading for the sake of reading… I found it a fun read. Dramatic? Big words? Religion? Sounds like it was the point.
- lastangryman 4y agoAttempted to read, caused chrome to crash (twice) with the Aw Snap screen, gave up. The modern web.
- twhitmore 4y agoYes. The Archive version seems fine though. https://web.archive.org/web/20230327033150/https://www.wired.com/story/i-saw-the-face-of-god-in-a-tsmc-factory/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230327033150/https://www.wired...
- brothrock 4y agowhy do I have to sign into wired to read this?
- temptemptemp111 4y ago[dead]
- frankluntzPOLLS 4y agooverwrought melodrama from a partisan hack. will be avoiding wired with twice the religious fervor going forward. pseudo-humanist garbage from a big dope who asked chatgpt to sound "smart" and "like she had a fucking clue" but with a panache for extraordinarily self-indulgent and stupid prose.
- ilkkal 4y agoI guess regular religious fervor just isn’t what it used to be.
- unpopular42 4y agoSo many random personal insults in the article. Why? They certainly don't make the article better
- baq 4y agoWhat? List some examples because I could only find a well-deserved biting remark at Musk.
- unpopular42 4y agoMusk, Byrne, maga and a couple of heads of state. Maybe some of them are not great people in your or author's opinion, but it just reads unnecessary and petty.
- cobertos 4y agoBut they lump them together to contrast an American-centric viewpoint with what the author perceive as Taiwan/TSMC rigor/gentleness/focus/invisibleness. Which is interesting imo, though maybe a bit overdone, but given the title...
- dsego 4y agoSummary via ChatGPT: > The article "I Saw the Face of God in a TSMC Factory" describes the author's experience visiting a TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) factory and observing the advanced technology and processes involved in producing computer chips. The author marvels at the complexity of the machinery and the precision required to create chips that are smaller than a human hair. They also reflect on the spiritual experience of witnessing such advanced technology and how it can make one feel small in comparison. The article concludes by discussing the societal implications of technological progress and the need to balance technological advancement with ethical considerations.
- dsego 4y agoAnother take: > The article is an opinion piece where the author reflects on her visit to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's (TSMC) semiconductor factory in Taiwan. She describes the factory's massive scale and advanced technology and compares it to a religious experience, calling it a "secular cathedral". The author notes the incredible amount of human ingenuity and effort that goes into producing semiconductors and suggests that the factory's operations and technology have a spiritual significance in modern society. She concludes by arguing that the TSMC factory embodies humanity's creative and innovative potential.
- cobertos 4y agoNot even close. Maybe you could find something like that in the last 1/6th of the article. This summary would neglect the discussion on Taiwan's history, how TSMC convinced US to offshore it's fabs, the trust that went into this, the geopolitical position it and TSMC hold, talk of UMC. Not including all the interesting little details
- jcoder 4y agoChatGPT can’t fetch URLs, right? Is this just extrapolation based on the title, or did you paste the article into chat?
- dsego 4y agoJust the URL, but it says it can read it. > can you summarize an article from a url > Yes, I can summarize an article from a URL. Please provide me with the URL of the article you would like me to summarize. Funny, it seems to be making it up, when I ask to provide a quote for the first sentence or the last paragraph, it provides gibberish. > you can't read url-s can't you? > As an AI language model, I do not have the ability to view or access URLs, so I rely solely on the information that you provide me. So you're absolutely right, it fooled me.
- hilbert42 4y ago"At a think-tank forum in Taipei in 2021, Chang shrugged off competition from Intel, declaring, "No one in the United States is as dedicated to their work as in Taiwan." No doubt, cultural differences are the reason why the East is forging ahead in technology. For the US to catch up it would have to return to the ways of research and manufacturing methods it adopted during WWII as well as adopting the attitudes it held back then that enabled that remarkable level of development and manufacturing output. Much of the East works as if it's on a war footing, the US hasn't done so since 1945. One poignant illustration of that is the cultural clash of US engineers with their Taiwanese counterparts when they visited Taiwan as mentioned in the article. "Careful attention to education over the last 30 years has begun to pay dividends,” Wang said of Taiwan in 1982." There's a lesson here too for the US and the West. In recent decades many Western universities have allowed themselves to be torn apart by politics, education has suffered thus.
- avazhi 4y agoThis article might be interesting but I wouldn’t know because the writing is horrendously obnoxious.