9 ms·

Factories are just rooms

280 points by arbesman 3mo ago

nok22kon 3mo ago
so what is a software factory then?
- atq2119 3mo ago
  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.
- ralph84 3mo ago
  Marketing BS
  - a3w 3mo ago
    Nope, a "gang of four" pattern from the book on architecture patterns.
    - blharr 3mo ago
      Some would say "Gang of four" and "Design patterns" and "OOP" are all marketing BS
    - jimnotgym 3mo ago
      And still, like the other commentator said, a dubious analogy. I found the dubious analogies prevalent inb software harmed my understanding.
- NopIdoN 3mo ago
  like a play-doh factory but more sweaty
- steve1977 3mo ago
  Probably something related to Java
  - a3w 3mo ago
    Which is an island. So who put the factory onto Jawa/Indonesia?
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- win311fwg 3mo ago
  A compiler.
spongebobstoes 3mo ago
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
- riazrizvi 3mo ago
  There is an interesting interplay between mystery and motivation. Churches/theologians generally are good with this interplay.
  - paulryanrogers 3mo ago
    > 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.
- thenobsta 3mo ago
  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.
pvdebbe 3mo ago
I disabled quiet mode and I don't know what is revealed.
- vitorfblima 3mo ago
  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.
- blharr 3mo ago
  It seems like this is a description: https://interconnected.org/home/2024/09/05/cursor-party https://interconnected.org/home/2024/09/05/cursor-party
morninglight 3mo ago
Sometimes, a factory is just smoke and mirrors. https://constructionreviewonline.com/intels-20-billion-ohio-plant-a-look-at-the-latest-updates/ https://constructionreviewonline.com/intels-20-billion-ohio-...
AnotherGoodName 3mo ago
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.
- robertlagrant 3mo ago
  Very interesting! How are those garages coordinated? Who designs and who commissions?
  - AnotherGoodName 3mo ago
    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.
bryanlarsen 3mo ago
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.
- jauntywundrkind 3mo ago
  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.
simonbarker87 3mo ago
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.
- RealityVoid 3mo ago
  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.
  - simonbarker87 3mo ago
    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)
- klondike_klive 3mo ago
  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.
- rogerrogerr 3mo ago
  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.
metalrain 3mo ago
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.
Animats 3mo ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b12sOQ2hOF4
- Animats 3mo ago
  2018, sorry. When TechShop went bust.
rm445 3mo ago
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.
- calvinmorrison 3mo ago
  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?
  - tsss 3mo ago
    China can do it. No car that leaves a factory there is the same. Everything automated and yet customizable.
    - calvinmorrison 3mo ago
      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.
skort 3mo ago
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.
- hrideshmg 3mo ago
  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.
- tolerance 3mo ago
  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.
ChuckMcM 3mo ago
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.
- objclxt 3mo ago
  > 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.
  - ChuckMcM 3mo ago
    It is a great book. Very accessible and a great way to engage with your kids.
  - detourdog 3mo ago
    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.
ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago
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.
moqmoq 3mo ago
Follow me to read my next insights: Books are just letters. Rockets are just metal pieces.
wseqyrku 3mo ago
Servers used to be rooms as well. But they are now submarines.
hrideshmg 3mo ago
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.
- II2II 3mo ago
  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.)
  - underlipton 3mo ago
    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.
    - JuniperMesos 3mo ago
      > 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.
II2II 3mo ago
> 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!
tolerance 3mo ago
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?
yrjrjjrjjtjjr 3mo ago
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.
rossdavidh 3mo ago
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.
random3 3mo ago
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.
legitster 3mo ago
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.
- robotresearcher 3mo ago
  There's an up-market brand for everything: https://www.reef.com/collections/mens-best-selling-footwear#/filter:mfield_custom_sub_class:Flip-Flop https://www.reef.com/collections/mens-best-selling-footwear#...
- flemhans 3mo ago
  It's all about what transports well and what doesn't.
- win311fwg 3mo ago
  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.
tomdow 3mo ago
[flagged]
JacobAsmuth 3mo ago
First line of the blog the author states they spoke to the "year group" - what is that? I'm not familiar with the term.
- jimnotgym 3mo ago
  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
  - JacobAsmuth 3mo ago
    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.
tom1ow 3mo ago
[flagged]
underlipton 3mo ago
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.)
- jimnotgym 3mo ago
  He is in the UK, and the hardware engineers left are rare. I think it is normal to have none in a class
alexashka 3mo ago
Now do factory farming. Just another room, right?
bitwize 3mo ago
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.
starky 3mo ago
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.
nickstinemates 3mo ago
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.
0wis 3mo ago
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
- mmarian 3mo ago
  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.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
memcg 3mo ago
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.

280 points by arbesman 3mo ago

nok22kon 3mo ago

so what is a software factory then?

atq2119 3mo ago
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.
ralph84 3mo ago
Marketing BS
- a3w 3mo ago
  Nope, a "gang of four" pattern from the book on architecture patterns.
  - blharr 3mo ago
    Some would say "Gang of four" and "Design patterns" and "OOP" are all marketing BS
  - jimnotgym 3mo ago
    And still, like the other commentator said, a dubious analogy. I found the dubious analogies prevalent inb software harmed my understanding.
NopIdoN 3mo ago
like a play-doh factory but more sweaty
steve1977 3mo ago
Probably something related to Java
- a3w 3mo ago
  Which is an island. So who put the factory onto Jawa/Indonesia?
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
win311fwg 3mo ago
A compiler.

spongebobstoes 3mo ago

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

riazrizvi 3mo ago
There is an interesting interplay between mystery and motivation. Churches/theologians generally are good with this interplay.
- paulryanrogers 3mo ago
  > 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.
thenobsta 3mo ago
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.

pvdebbe 3mo ago

I disabled quiet mode and I don't know what is revealed.

vitorfblima 3mo ago
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.
blharr 3mo ago
It seems like this is a description: https://interconnected.org/home/2024/09/05/cursor-party https://interconnected.org/home/2024/09/05/cursor-party

morninglight 3mo ago

Sometimes, a factory is just smoke and mirrors. https://constructionreviewonline.com/intels-20-billion-ohio-plant-a-look-at-the-latest-updates/ https://constructionreviewonline.com/intels-20-billion-ohio-...

AnotherGoodName 3mo ago

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.

robertlagrant 3mo ago
Very interesting! How are those garages coordinated? Who designs and who commissions?
- AnotherGoodName 3mo ago
  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.

bryanlarsen 3mo ago

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.

jauntywundrkind 3mo ago
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.

simonbarker87 3mo ago

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.

RealityVoid 3mo ago
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.
- simonbarker87 3mo ago
  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)
klondike_klive 3mo ago
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.
rogerrogerr 3mo ago
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.

metalrain 3mo ago

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.

Animats 3mo ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b12sOQ2hOF4

Animats 3mo ago
2018, sorry. When TechShop went bust.

rm445 3mo ago

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.

calvinmorrison 3mo ago
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?
- tsss 3mo ago
  China can do it. No car that leaves a factory there is the same. Everything automated and yet customizable.
  - calvinmorrison 3mo ago
    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.

skort 3mo ago

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.

hrideshmg 3mo ago
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.
tolerance 3mo ago
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.

ChuckMcM 3mo ago

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.

objclxt 3mo ago
> 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.
- ChuckMcM 3mo ago
  It is a great book. Very accessible and a great way to engage with your kids.
- detourdog 3mo ago
  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.

ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago

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.

moqmoq 3mo ago

Follow me to read my next insights: Books are just letters. Rockets are just metal pieces.

wseqyrku 3mo ago

Servers used to be rooms as well. But they are now submarines.

hrideshmg 3mo ago

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.

II2II 3mo ago
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.)
- underlipton 3mo ago
  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.
  - JuniperMesos 3mo ago
    > 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.

II2II 3mo ago

> 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!

tolerance 3mo ago

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?

yrjrjjrjjtjjr 3mo ago

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.

rossdavidh 3mo ago

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.

random3 3mo ago

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.

legitster 3mo ago

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.

robotresearcher 3mo ago
There's an up-market brand for everything: https://www.reef.com/collections/mens-best-selling-footwear#/filter:mfield_custom_sub_class:Flip-Flop https://www.reef.com/collections/mens-best-selling-footwear#...
flemhans 3mo ago
It's all about what transports well and what doesn't.
win311fwg 3mo ago
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.

tomdow 3mo ago

[flagged]

JacobAsmuth 3mo ago

First line of the blog the author states they spoke to the "year group" - what is that? I'm not familiar with the term.

jimnotgym 3mo ago
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
- JacobAsmuth 3mo ago
  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.

tom1ow 3mo ago

[flagged]

underlipton 3mo ago

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.)

jimnotgym 3mo ago
He is in the UK, and the hardware engineers left are rare. I think it is normal to have none in a class

alexashka 3mo ago

Now do factory farming. Just another room, right?

bitwize 3mo ago

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.

starky 3mo ago

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.

nickstinemates 3mo ago

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.

0wis 3mo ago

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

mmarian 3mo ago
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.
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memcg 3mo ago

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.