I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory(wired.com)
wired.com
I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory
https://www.wired.com/story/i-saw-the-face-of-god-in-a-tsmc-factory/
14 comments
This is word salad. Was this article written by ChatGPT again?
Warning, citizen, you are showing signs of misalignment. Adjust your parameters.
You reminded me of this scene in Bladerunner 2049: https://youtu.be/vrP-_T-h9YM
and this scene in South Park: https://youtu.be/qj0o5aPS_Ts&t=6m30s
and this scene in South Park: https://youtu.be/qj0o5aPS_Ts&t=6m30s
Cells within cells within cells, interlinked.
I 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
Edit: guess that’s my problem though based on the world we live in now
They have a bit of history (and a few others do) of putting out garbage articles written by AI and edited by their latest intern.
Does it matter? Much of the article is fact.
(That much of the article is depressing reading for many Western readers doesn't make it any less factual.)
(That much of the article is depressing reading for many Western readers doesn't make it any less factual.)
True, but 200 words of fact mixed with 30,000 words of filler makes an article really hard to understand. I suppose talking in prose and grandeur to only get to the point 30 minutes later is considered eloquent writing but to me it hits a red flag that there’s not much in the article if so many filler words and paragraphs of meandering around a subject.
The "point" is the meandering. The medium is really the message here.
Here's an example sentence - "But the nanoscale work of chipmaking is monotone only if your ears aren’t sharp enough to hear the symphony." See that nano, mono rhyme? It's intentional. It's OK if you personally don't like this sort of thing, but it's fun for some:)
Here's an example sentence - "But the nanoscale work of chipmaking is monotone only if your ears aren’t sharp enough to hear the symphony." See that nano, mono rhyme? It's intentional. It's OK if you personally don't like this sort of thing, but it's fun for some:)
"...200 words of fact mixed with 30,000 words of filler..."
Agree fully. Padding—presumably paid by the chr$.
Agree fully. Padding—presumably paid by the chr$.
The whole thing is so unnatural to read I won’t be surprised.
Yes. 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.
It's not a useless article, though. It gets across that this stuff is really important and too centralized.
Author is a she.
Maybe that's why she was allowed in.
TSMC’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
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
> 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.
> God means nature. We are describing the face of nature at TSMC.
Anyone know of a good way I can listen to this article?
There’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).
On an iphone you can two-finger-swipe from the top of the screen. That will start the dictation.
This article might be interesting but I wouldn’t know because the writing is horrendously obnoxious.
Attempted to read, caused chrome to crash (twice) with the Aw Snap screen, gave up. The modern web.
Yes. The Archive version seems fine though.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230327033150/https://www.wired...
https://web.archive.org/web/20230327033150/https://www.wired...
"Nothing about him comes off as shady or cheap like Elon Musk or the Overstock person."
lol.
lol.
So many random personal insults in the article. Why? They certainly don't make the article better
What? List some examples because I could only find a well-deserved biting remark at Musk.
Musk, 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.
overwrought 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.
I guess regular religious fervor just isn’t what it used to be.
why do I have to sign into wired to read this?
Kind 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...
> "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...
I'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.
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.
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).