> Underscoring this momentum, Samsung and UT announced a plan to formalize a years-long partnership between the two organizations to support a semiconductor manufacturing talent development pipeline.
I think this is a fantastic plan. Having an actual employer who will more-or-less take you by default is a much better value proposition for college than some other paths...
The proximity of the university campus to the existing A2/S2 lines should allow for quality field trip opportunities. I know how Samsung's management feels about strangers up on the catwalk, but that was the #1 thing that inspired me - Seeing the actual starship with my own eyes.
Reliable water and electricity, as well as geology, are really important too.
It's worth checking into those first two, but it's probably fine for the next 10-20 years.
Is that supposed to be reassuring? Why not choose a state with better energy management, so "recently survived an energy crisis" isn't even part of the conversation?
They've had multiple power crises recently in which survival was in question, so the particular outcome in the last one says less than the expected frequency for more borderline events in the future.
There will be more such events because temperatures that used to top out at 103 now top out at 110 F.
There is some silliness with the state government around renewable power, but it isn't like they've banned it. And if they did it would take #2 California a long time to catch up.
The question then is really whether Texas has a better chance of expanding capacity fast enough to meet its needs than other states that are famously more restrictive around new construction and environmental impacts. I don't like the politics here and I still think the answer to that is clearly yes for this purpose.
UT needs a wider incubation, financing, and entrepreneurial (undergrad/grad-student/community) ecosystem like Stanford. Critical mass of players brings with it more interested parties, and with it, that elusive "innovation". It should be okay to make money, okay to turn a PhD thesis into a startup, okay to launch side projects, and cool to fail and learn lessons. Not all paths must lead to a "corporate career".
Is this your diagnosis? That things are more corporate in terms of outcome? Genuinely curious, as a Bay Area native, why UT/Texas can’t begin to compete given how many issues face SF currently.
If you visit Texas universities 5 years ago, there are many China students there. Their PhD candidates are mostly non white and non Americans. Fast forward today, these have significantly drop. Foxconn had to shutdown their silicon plant because of severe constraint skilled labor. Also, China has just mass produce all the lucrative 14+ nm at a fractions pricing which have started to decimate American revenue income in that market. Already many tech workers in Cali unable to find jobs after layoff 6mths ago. Good luck if Texans able to defy all these ecobomics fundamentals and achieve boom. I know solar and Solyndra failed badly. Even Tesla energy divisions now start to fizzle out.
Wasn't this the same claim made back when officials were hyping up SEMATECH, formed in 1987? SEMATECH just kind of fizzled, moved to NY and became part of SUNY Polytechnic in 2015. I wouldn't say that was much of a 'boom'.
Not really, hysteresis is definitely a thing for hugely expertise and capital intensive projects like ramping up bleeding edge semiconductor fabrication.
I have a student who uses a TI-84. She's a high schooler taking university courses. Hers has a backlight and a USB-rechargeable battery, but it's basically the same machine otherwise.
The downstream costs of how we do standardized tests are bonkers.
Yeah, even before LLMs, the more advanced TI calcs like the TI-nspire can have Calc and Physics apps loaded on them that make tests trivial to cheat on.
That's why they were banned back when I took the tests. Have they loosened the restrictions on the n-spire?
The standard back in the early 2010s was still definitely TI-84 being about the most powerful calculator you could use for most tests that mattered. Those calculators are intentionally kept slow by TI because of these requirements.
My impression of the n-spire was that it had always been marketed much more towards professionals. The first one I saw in person was at an electrical engineering internship where my boss had just bought one.
No, they're still banned, but I got one early on when they were first released before they were consistently banned, and I realized shortly after that you could load some apps on there that basically allowed you to plug questions in and get the answer, since many problems are formulaic.
We're probably better off doing away with calculators for standardized tests.
There's a nice profit margin on those calculators, but there's also a floor price for electronics at play because at some point, making outdated chips, LCDs, PCBs, etc. doesn't actually get cheaper. So graphing calculators will always cost $30-$100.
While they're wildly outdated, it doesn't make sense to arm kids going into standardized tests with Chat GPT, or even Wolfram Alpha.
Standardized test math is pretty simple. Either design the test so a scientific calculator is enough, or better, keep the numbers small enough that it doesn't matter and have answers as simplified expressions, e.g. 6*sqrt(2).
In my freshman E&M physics course, there was no calculus prerequisite, so when we had to answer a question on a quiz or test that would be solved with an integral, the professor said we could just put the integral without needing to evaluate it and he'd mark it as correct. I think this approach makes a lot of sense; understanding the concept of "summing" the value of an expression across a range by using an integral is much more important than being able to do the actual calculation.
That's ridiculous. When I took the entire undergrad physics series for scientists and engineers, it absolutely required calculus, vector math, and diff eqs.
Why is it ridiculous for an intro-level course to not require people to manually compute integrals? I'm open to the idea that maybe I'm wrong about this being reasonable, but "I had to do it so everyone else should have to too" is not a very convincing argument.
To be clear, I had already placed out of the calculus course that would have taught how to evaluate these integrals, so I wouldn't have been disadvantaged by it being required. There definitely weren't any differential equations in the course though; it seems like you might be overestimating the intensity a 100-level physics course required for people like me who never did physics again after.
For the same reason not grinding out the code by hand and copying from your LLM is going to result in you being a less competent programmer in the long run.
I really believe there is something to be said for putting yourself through the mental strain of evaluating the integrals (or code) and that doing so contributes to you having a better feel for how it works on a conceptual level as well, you don't just get better at calculating by doing things the hard way.
If you can easily see the solutions and manipulations you can make to an integral by hand, then you are more able to quickly get a feel for what it represents just by looking at it. If you are not as experienced doing them by hand, just reading them is going to sap some of your brain power and energy, and you will be less able to reason about them abstractly as a result.
I think the whole "just learn the concepts" approach to almost anything is fundamentally misguided and not at all how representative of how humans really learn.
I guess I just fundamentally disagree with you on this one. To me, spending time manually calculating integrals in a timed exam is less similar to copying code from an LLM and more similar to manually translating the source code you write into machine code instead of using a compiler; it might have value, but the amount of work it would take a student in an intro class to do that would drown out their ability to retain anything else.
I think in Asia though it's expected of highschool students to evaluate the integral without a calculator. Education in the US should at least match what they do in Asia to stay competitive.
There is a lot of rote in Asia, and an over emphasis on classic geometric proofs that have little relevance in today’s world. Yes, we should try as hard as Asia in math, but blindly copying Indian or Chinese education practices isn’t the right way forward.
Well, with the current state of mathematics in the US education system... blindly following Asia is a step up.
I do agree with you that in theory we can do better than asia, but that is too high of a milestone given that we are basically currently significantly worse than Asia on all fronts.
(Shrug) It depends on what you "master." Mastering symbolic integration isn't going to do much for your career or your country's industrial prospects. Life is short, and there are too many more-useful things to learn.
You are almost guaranteed never to have to another Euclidean geometric proof again after you take the gaokao. It’s like the LeetCode for chinese college admissions.
A lot of tests do a little of both-- no calculators and questions that are simple numerically... and then functions that are pretty intractable and require effective use of the calculator for a little bit (but a good understanding of what you're manipulating/trying to find).
> have answers as simplified expressions, e.g. 6*sqrt(2)
This is obviously the right way to do applied math. Then whatever engineer is building whatever the thing is that depends on the math can compute to whatever precision is necessary to keep the bridge from falling down or whatever.
It's debatable if it'll be much of a boom anywhere in the US.
Most uses of chips are in cheap consumer junk overwhelmingly made overseas for bottom dollar.
Second after that is actual serious uses for cars, not $1 electronics and more. And once you get into that category you have a finite market that is pretty much mature in terms of consumer reach. For all intensive purposes, the "EV demand surge" is over and existing semiconductors have caught up.
There's also a real fear that US sanctions have caused China and other countries to intensify investment in their own semiconductor manufacturing (the EU definitely is), which will ultimately hamper the demand for US fabs.
Just an idiom note: It's "intents and purposes" not "intensive purposes". Easy to mis-hear, but something you want to remember before it makes you look ill-educated in a work memo.
It's also exactly the kind of humor I love. Intentional misuse of idioms, homonyms, intentional dangling modifiers, and the like. It's ok if people think I'm stupid, I can always prove them right!
It may be debatable but the idea the chip surge is “basically over” is laughable. By your logic no nation should ever try to do anything economically because the economy is already done forming, the end of history is here.
Hey - no poking holes in this line of reasoning allowed. It’s a major tent pole of the global boiling religion - pesky human innovation blows too many holes on the “we are doomed - sacrifice your rights to fix it” narratives.
I'm not really sure how these are related at all. Technical innovations for electric vehicles are totally different than the technical innovations required for fighting climate change. We can be poised to make progress in one sector and skeptical about progress in another. Blindly hoping that some breakthrough will happen to fix all our problems and just barreling along carelessly is worse than what you're describing.
History has plenty of examples of nations and economies completely ending. In fact it's so consistent that it's basically a guarantee that the current economy you're living in will be "done" eventually. Therefore it's not a laughable conclusion but a valid possibility. We've seen two major economies descend into this "done" zone with no hope for recovery: Russia and Japan.
Additionally no one is saying to "not to do anything". Try all you want he is simply predicting the outcome of trying.
The primary motive is to have redundant fabs for defense critical infrastructure that is vulnerable to Chinese attack. That's why Micron is being gifted a new fab for DRAM production on the other side of the country in the midst of ongoing layoffs. Boosting production isn't the goal and CHIPS act will be a net money loser.
> Most uses of chips are in cheap consumer junk overwhelmingly made overseas for bottom dollar
I don't understand your point. While true, those chips are made at historical process nodes using antiquated equipment. The plan isn't to buy antiquated equipment and try to compete. Friendly nations with low cost of labor and low geopolitical risk (ie., other than Taiwan) are perfectly capable of meeting our demands for old chips, given sufficient ramp time.
The lion's share of the value in semiconductors is at the leading edge. These are the chips that are used in phones, laptops, PCs, servers, GPUs, et cetera. The United States has never been interested in competing on volume.
We already are the world leader in producing (including manufacturing!) the cutting edge equipment that makes leading edge chips -- that is what we have denied China access to. The open question is whether we can "onshore" the actual manufacturing of leading edge chips again.
Strictly speaking, Intel has always kept their most cutting edge manufacturing onshore (Oregon), but I understand that has more to do with IP and cycle time reasons than cost.
An additional note: it is not necessary that a leading edge fab built today becomes a trailing edge fab in 5 or 10 years. There is a lively secondary market for used equipment specifically because of demand for the commodity chips you mentioned, so given that US labor costs are high, the old equipment would likely be sold and shipped to a low cost nation, and the US fabs repopulated with new equipment.
I can assure you that the Chinese strategists are. Wang Huning is way to smart not to have and he's just one that's somehow famous enough to be known in the West. I'm sure there are many more strategists of if not equal at least similar caliber working on furthering China's (hopefully) peaceful rise.
It's too chaotic. There are many who want peace but there are many who want war and there are many who will flip their opinion and this is on both sides of the line, the US and China. Anything can occur.
What we saw in Ukraine is that arguments about geopolitics, economy, military readiness etc can be completely negated by the person in charge acting on a strategic or emotional whim.
Like all the experts in the world can concur that China is better off with peace in the Pacific, but if Xi wants a war, he's getting a war.
You realize the top of the line chips are coming from Asia right now? The US right now does not have the ability to fab top of the line chips. Only Asia does.
I mention this because it's basically one of the biggest hurdles for a boom other than cost which you didn't mention. The US has to exceed Asia in terms of cost AND raw technological prowess if it wants a boom because it is currently behind by a huge margin.
I think this is a fantastic plan. Having an actual employer who will more-or-less take you by default is a much better value proposition for college than some other paths...
The proximity of the university campus to the existing A2/S2 lines should allow for quality field trip opportunities. I know how Samsung's management feels about strangers up on the catwalk, but that was the #1 thing that inspired me - Seeing the actual starship with my own eyes.