Then it's not fully investigated. That should put any assessments to rest.

I don’t, and don’t see how it could possibly be construed to be logical to trust them.

I definitely trust a non-profit open source alternative a whole lot more. Perception can be different than reality but that’s what we’ve got to work with.

Because if you had, you would realize how ridiculous it is to state that app security can't be assessed until you have read 100% of the code

That's like saying "well, we don't know how many other houses in the city might be on fire, so we should let this one burn until we know for sure"

This must mean that you have been paid not to understand these things. Or perhaps you would be punished at work if you internalized reality and spoke up. In either case, I don't think your personal emotional landscape should take precedence over things that have been proven and are trivial to demonstrate.

I'd much rather not have blind faith on WhatsApp doing the right thing, and instead just use Signal so I can verify myself it's key management is doing only what it should.

Speculating over the correctness of E2EE implementation isn't productive, considering the metadata leak we know Meta takes full advantage of, is enough reason to stick proper platforms like Signal.

Not quite true with Signal's double ratchet though, right? Because keys are routinely getting rolled, you have to continuously exfiltrate the new keys.

Last time I checked, by default, WhatsApp features no fingerprint change warnings by default, so users will not even notice if you MITM them. The attack I described is for situations where the two users would enable non-blocking key change warnings and try to compare the fingerprints.

Not saying this attack happens by any means. Just that this is theoretically possible, and leaves the smallest trail. Which is why it helps that you can verify on Signal it's not exfiltrating your identity keys.

This DCL could be fetching some forward_to_NSA() function from a server and registering it to be called on every outgoing message. It would be trivial to hide in tcpdumps, best approach would be tracing with Frida and looking at syscalls to attempt to isolate what is actually being loaded, but it is also trivial for apps to detect they are being debugged and conditionally avoid loading the incriminating code in this instance. This code would only run in environments where the interested parties are sure there is no chance of detection, which is enough of the endpoints that even if you personally can set off the anti-tracing conditions without falling foul of whatever attestation Meta likely have going on, everyone you text will be participating unknowingly in the dragnet anyway.

https://developer.android.com/privacy-and-security/risks/dyn...

I wonder if that would deter Meta.

Yeah I'd imagine it would have been found by know. Then again, who knows when they'd add it, and if some future update removes it. Google isn't scanning every line for every version. I prefer to eliminate this kind of 5D-guesswork categorically, and just use FOSS messaging apps.

So the point other commenters are making is that you can verify all you want that the encryption is robust and secure, but that doesn't mean the app can't just send a copy of the info to a server somewhere after it has been decoded.

Why do you think you get a breakdown of governmental fees in your electric or phone bill, but not the tax subsidies?

- The chips still need to fly back to Taiwan to be packaged as there are no facilities here with such a capability.

Made in america is a hard sell. But at least showing the glaring STEM field gap in the U.S. is a start to finally addressing the brain drain.

I myself was an electrical engineering (EE) major until I switched to computer science in my third (junior) year of college because like a friend of mine at the time told me, "<my name>, if you don't major in computer science, you will not be able to find a job easily after graduation". He was right. All of my former college friends in EE ended up pursuing programming jobs (a few of them now works for FAANG; I used to work for one but left a year ago due to RTO). That is why the US has no sufficient personnel to do traditional engineering jobs and we have shipped off a lot of those to foreign countries.

1. Became web developers

2. Work in Defense or some other regulated industry that has protections from being outsourced to China

How much electrical engineering is there in these jobs? I knew a few electrical engineer at university (weirdly they outnumbered the software engineers 3 to 1) and some of them told me they could get work for a local power company, but it was mostly looking at spreadsheets and not really using anything that they'd learned.

It is true (I'd wager this is true in most engineering fields) that very few actually use a lot of what you learned in school as it has all been put into fancy software packages. For example, my wife uses some kind of drafting software to design things like roads that she learned all the math to understand in college. It is the same in my industry where yeah, you use a lot of spreadsheets and Python scripts and SQL to help automate software and analyze the results. In a lot of cases you don't really need an engineering degree, but it helps a lot in understanding what is going on when the results don't make sense. Getting the engineering degree is also just really good training for the kind of rigorous thought processes needed for solving open problems.

There are also plenty of jobs in power that are closer to what you would consider engineering. For example, you might have to go to the substation switch yard, help supervise a crew installing new transformers, help design a microgrid...etc.

I'll add that it is pretty common for engineers to have some kind of existential crisis once you graduate and you realize what you thought you'd be doing once you graduated (in my case crawling around Jefferies tubes and fixing the warp reactor) is totally different in the real world. It's kind of similar in computer science where most graduates are basically just gluing library code together instead of writing their own software from scratch in C. I recall reading somewhere that the famous SICP course moved from Scheme to Python precisely because of the change in how people coded now.

Thank you for saying this out loud. It took me years to recover from this, and I "recovered" mostly by giving up and accepting that, unlike fiction, real world doesn't have to make sense or offer interesting, fulfilling work.

Now I just dream that one of these days, I'll build a house, and I'll design it with a Jefferies tube, just to scratch my itch.

I work a lot with electricity markets though and find it to be very interesting and challenging as the field is surprisingly vast and incredibly dynamic. It requires knowledge of power fundamentals as well as economics, operations research, and honestly history. It isn't at all what I thought I would do back when I was in highschool, but a pleasant surprise all the same. I do sometimes get the itch to be like the guy that invented the lotus office software who lived in a cabin in the woods somewhere and implemented his own product, but the software market is already saturated in this space. Also, I have a family now which prevents my hermit dream and that is yet another wonderful surprise and has been very fulfilling as well as maddening at times :)

I've often wondered if that's some kind of industry inertia issue, or if there's some underlying additional cost to build in the US.

Likely multitudes of factors at play all of them in favor of China

PCB production should be one of those things that is or can be mostly automated if it isn't already. Assembly is definitely already a mostly automated process. This is all existing tech. Thus the cost differential doesn't seem justifiable.

I have to think that this is very much "build it and they will come" territory if you can get within 1.5x to 3x the price, so it continues to boggle my mind that nobody has managed to make it happen.

The only blocker I can truly identify is the magnitude of the initial investment. That doesn't explain why the prices at domestic board houses seem to have remained pretty much exactly the same for the last couple of decades, though.

As far as I can tell, they just don't want the business.

It's more likely that the Chinese companies are offering prototyping at a loss, because they know people won't switch to a different board house, once the prototyping phase is over.

https://www.statista.com/chart/30815/top-destination-countri...

https://news.gallup.com/poll/468218/nearly-900-million-world...

It might, but how do you measure that?

I am kinda surprised to see it so far on the top

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_sector

America stills gets a lot of immigrants.

For all I shit relentlessly on this country and its culture, it's still an extremely attractive place to live if you're well-situated to make money. (Most people are not—hence my contempt for how the society functions. This presumably DOES apply to an "Einstein", if indeed this Einstein wants money.) China still has a way to go in catering to and granting citizenship (or some amenable equivalent) to foreigners.

China is the only country that pays even remotely competitively. Yes, even including all the nice benefits of living in a european welfare state, yes including the other anglo colonies.

Still, their culture basically does make it so certain types of people simply can't exist there. And I hear there's a healthy dose of racism as well. Nothing unique to China, sadly.

so basically, like everything else, you make a lot of money but it isn't a great place to live unless you make ALL the money.

Except many of us can trace our family lines to immigration. On one side I have to go back to the early 1800's to see when they immigrated, but this is literally a country of immigrants. (other half of the family is late 1800s/early 1900s immigration)

Even today I would assume the average American doesn't have to trace back more than 100-150 years to see when part of their family moved here.

>We scoured the country's public school system for the sharpest young minds, sent them to institutions of higher learning with rigorous curricula, and found them positions in industry, government, or the military which made good use of their talent.

Don't even get us started on ahistorical nonsense when you just want to make things up. Not when talented folks[0] had to work through system that didn't want them so they could eventually make all the difference.

[0]https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/hidden-no-more-...

The brain-drain from the rest of the world to US started only after WW2 when US became the only industrialized country with a viable student -> employee -> citizen path and even that only works for a very small set of people.

I would love to hear about programs where the newcomers are treated better than you as a native citizen when both of you are equally qualified.

Most of those native-born Americans were the children or grandchildren of immigrants.

I'm American, so I've never lived in this kind of nation.

> no empire nor state organized as the former can endure.

Looking at many of the longer-lived nations and empires of the past—having a shared language, lineage, culture, history, faith, common destiny? They had none of those. They were a conglomeration of people speaking different languages, from different lineages, with different cultures, different histories, and practicing different faiths.

"What is water?", said the fish

The USSR would like a word.

  A total of $50.1 billion (equivalent to $672 billion in 2023 when accounting for inflation) worth of supplies was shipped, or 17% of the total war expenditures of the U.S.

  In all, $31.4 billion went to the United Kingdom, $11.3 billion to the Soviet Union, $3.2 billion to France, $1.6 billion to China, and the remaining $2.6 billion to other Allies.

  Material delivered under the act was supplied at no cost, to be used until returned or destroyed.

  In practice, most equipment was destroyed, although some hardware (such as ships) was returned after the war.

  Supplies that arrived after the termination date were sold to the United Kingdom at a large discount for £1.075 billion, using long-term loans from the United States, which were finally repaid in 2006.

  Similarly, the Soviet Union repaid $722 million in 1971, with the remainder of the debt written off.

Both sides needed each other. From a US perspective, trading money for lives likely seemed worth it.

The USSR was an objectively terrible regime, and most the Russian governments that have followed on from it have been too. Underestimating the deaths Russian leadership is willing to tolerate has proven unwise a few too many times.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

Canada has proven that importing punjabis for almost two decades and ignoring the local people is not effective. So yeah there is a meaningful difference and saying native born in this context allows us to steer the conversation towards taking care towards those in the country already, which is something that neolib governments have not done in the last decades.

I say this as a person that was not born in the country he resides in now, but saying "calling yourself "native born" doesn't mean a thing " is a dishonest way to try to dissuade and delete necessary words that work towards more fruitful conversatons about how to improve th esytems in North America.

Curious, that's what Americans once said about the Irish and the Italians and the Germans and the French and the Poles and the Chinese and Jews and Catholics and Muslims and so on and on ad nauseum.

It's just a generational crab mentality born from xenophobia. Every new wave of immigrants decides they're "native" as soon as the next wave shows up. None of them are any more native than the others.

And the Ellis Islanders were at least mostly Christian, white, European. They shared a common cultural, historical, religious, and racial frame with native-born Americans. They could and did meaningfully assimilate. Despite this, that wave of migrants almost broke us. Anarchy, terrorism, riots, organized crime, et cetera. The Johnson-Reed Act was passed in response in 1924 and it slowed immigration to a crawl until the 1960s.

Today we have immigrants who speak utterly alien tongues, with no shared history or civilized tradition, arriving at breakneck pace, and who barely learn English because they can scrape by with apps and translation services, who stay in the cultural bubble of their country of origin, who don't see an American culture worth assimilating to. Especially among so-called high skill immigrants, they pick up a US passport and immediately see me as a worse or lesser "American" than they are. That's nuts. The melting pot, if one ever existed, has broken down. What's happening now is something quite different, and it's not good for me or my fellow Americans.

That is simply not the intention of the comment, if you read correctly you will note that what I meant is that you need to take care of your own people, something that the United States ACCOMPLISHED from the fifties until before Reagan.

I am just not more native than an Indian or Italian person that just like me came a few decades ago. However to pretend there is no difference between me and someone whose family has been here for decades or centuries... that is dishonest.

Why do you call Xenophobia to prioritize giving good jobs to the local population ? It seems like your reading comprehension as well as your definition of Xenophobia is deeply, deeply flawed. We can have immigration that makes sense. Like what Canada used to have...

We should prioritize those that have been for decades in a country and those whose families have paid taxes for multiple generations, there is absolutely nothing xenophobic about that.

At the beginning, there was Purusha. From his face, born was the Brahmin, the priestly caste, the tooling creator, one who develops programming languages, compilers and standard libraries.

From the arms of the Purusha, Kshatriya, the warrior caste, was born. Kshatriya is the developer of systems software; operating systems, database engines, graphics drivers and high performance networked servers.

Then comes the Vaishya, the merchant caste, the Application developer, who was born from the knees of Purusha. From the feet of Purusha, the fourth varnā, Shudrā, the system administrator, was born. Shudrā serves the above three Varnās, his works range from administrating computers in bureaucratic organizations to replying to support requests.

Both degrees can be made super hard, as hard as the school desires them to be...

I never studied the hard sciences very seriously, although I feel like in retrospect I could have done so at much lesser proficiency than someone with much more encouragement, discipline, and interest, so my path of starting with web/software and then diving into electronics and EE would feel quite different

(A) Skills are fairly transferable. (B) There is a lot of employers competing for workers. (C) An awful lot of value is created along the way.

If you specialize in some tiny part of chip manufacturing, there aren't many places you can transfer your skills.

Even if, in the future, you have multiple chip vendors. They won't all use the same processes, and you might only fit into one role at each of these businesses.

Maybe it's not that simple. But few chip companies have to compete against startups for workers. And that probably won't change.

Not saying the jobs can't be well paid, just that it's not unlikely that it won't be absurd SV level salaries.

It seems like what EE needs is something similar to open source, so that does happen.

The way things like Google or AWS got started is they started with Linux and built something on top of it, so it could be a startup because they don't first have to build the world in order to make a contribution, and they're not building on top of someone else's land.

There isn't any reason that couldn't inherently work in EE. Get some universities or government grants to publish a fully-open spec for some processors that could be fabbed by TSMC or Intel. Not as good as the state of the art, but half as good anyway.

Now people have a basis for EE startups. You take the base design and tweak it some for the application, so that it's a startup-sized job instead of a multinational-sized job, and now you've got EE startups making all kinds of phone SoCs and NVMe drives and Raspberry Pi competitors and whatever else they think can justify a big enough production run to send it to a fab and sell it to the public.

An interesting license for this could be something along the lines of: You can make derivative works, but you have to release them under the same license within five years. In other words, you get five years to make money from this before it goes into the commons, which gives you the incentive to do it while keeping the commons rich so the next you can do it again tomorrow.

There is probably also a lot fewer customers.

There is no shortage of businesses and private people who need a CRUD app to track something. We probably won't run out anytime soon :)

And even then, there is probably also a long list of factories that would like to automate something using robots and software.

How many use cases for custom SOCs are there really? It's a lot cheaper to customize the software, than it is to customize the hardware. Which is kind of the point.

It's just maturity. You can't invent the op amp twice.

Absolutely, it can't go one forever. But it might go on longer than you think ;)

To be fair, we've already seen things change: today most entry level jobs are gated by degree requirements.

It's no longer enough to just be computer savvy. Probably because there increasingly a lot of computer savvy people today.

The most critical shortages of STEM graduates are in roles requiring advanced degrees. Your median undergraduate education (~$40k) and median graduate education (~$60k) saddles students with approximately $100k in unforgivable student debt! Never mind the years lost that one could otherwise be working. So it’s no wonder students are motivated by the ROI of their degrees, it’s why I chose Computer Engineering over Electrical Engineering.

These are expensive STEM degrees which students on visas are all too willing to pay for a chance at a residency and a pathway to citizenship. So no wonder the majority of undergraduate and graduate STEM students are foreign born in the US. The ROI is not worth it for the debt. We don’t have enough need based scholarships available to finance the STEM graduates this country claims it needs.

Nothing against you looking out for your future, but this is exactly what I describe to people when I say the industry has changed. It used to be nerds who were very passionate. Now it’s full of people who are just doing a job.

Compare that to having all the degrees of freedom as a computer science student to start up a niche mobile app or internet based niche service after working at FAANG for 5-6 years. Even AI infrastructure will eventually go down in price making niche AI first startups a possibility. In finance its the same, as a post i-banker you have the option to start a boutique fund, a niche fintech or just invest your own savings.

US PhDs typically have other options and would consider this sort of work a waste of their time.

They are each assigned one tool to maintain as you said. They each make around 100K and 3 12hr days per week.

They were working in the automotive industry before these jobs. Sounds pretty damn good to me, but I suppose that’s one reason American companies cannot compete with TSMC.

But not for 50k, lol.

This works in Taiwan. It doesn’t in America. The Taiwanese workers will help transfer knowledge to American workers; it will be the joint responsibility of them both to come up with how those processes are adapted for American preferences. (Probably more automation, rotation between machines or possibly even not being under TSMC.)

Being on call 24/7 to troubleshoot million dollar pieces of equipment sounded like a poor life choice, so I didn't take it. But Intel also hasn't exactly done great since then...

Not sure. What has changed in recent years is the quality of industrial automation, particularly in semiconductors.

I'm unconvinced the only way to make these chips is for highly-trained engineers to caramelise onions on the stove. (At the very least, they could be allowed time to conduct experiments into new production methods, et cetera. Similar to how universities let professors do research in exchange for putting in teaching hours.)

did they mean that literally or just that an expert was assigned to it? What kind of PhD would even be relevant to maintaining machinery on an assembly line? Perhaps a PhD on the operations of that specific machine but even then, the person's knowledge would be so focused on whatever physics/chemistry/science is being used that i find it hard to believe a PhD would know what to do when something broke without tons of specific training on the hardware.

There’s likely little real world difference in capability between someone with first class honours and a year in industry, than first class honours plus a PhD.

Yes.

"It’s the Most Indispensable Machine in the World—and It Depends on This Woman"

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/asml-euv-machine-lithography-chi...

No one should be forced to work those kinds of hours. It's unreasonable to call Westerners/Americans lazy if they refuse to work 996.

But yes, most Americans do not want to work on a death march. And employers don't want to pay it. I doubt they can argue 50k as exempt so that's a lot of overtime. They may as well be salaried 6 figures at that point.

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17a-overtime

Median US Salary is $59,384. Half of workers make less.

Men with a bachelor's degree who work full-time have a median income is ~$89k - (basically the entire demographic of these TSMC workers).

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf

They will indeed burn themselves out, but that's their choice of work/life balance vs. pay.

That's why manufacturing offshored in the first place, companies feel they're receiving better value for money on wages elsewhere for this kind of work (and these days not to mention more & larger facilities, proximity to component sources, and a strong ecosystem of supporting and complimentary facilities).

It would be interesting to see how much of the economic advantage of off-shoring is due to lower wages due intrinsic to lower cost of living vs stuff like ignoring/bribing foreign officials or non-existent environmenta/safety standards that objectively should exist.

Besides, the US loses know-how on manufacturing, eliminating potentially hundreds of thousands of high-paying engineering jobs - it will also be a pipe dream that we can keep the so-called high-end jobs by sitting in an office drawing boxes all day. Sooner or later, those who work with the actual manufacturing processes on the factor floor will out compete us and grab our the cushy "design" jobs.

you can feel free to buy american, i don’t care so i would prefer if it were not mandated and you get your individual choice to pay more for your goods if you want

To be blunt: yes, slavery is cheap, isn't it?

Unfortunately housing is super overpriced, due to the Asian mentality resulting in high property ownership.

Real estate is always the monkey wrench in the gears of capitalism because of high necessity yet limited supply.

I have no clue what this means and in countries like Japan, housing is a depreciating asset vs. an investment, so…?

Japan's urbanization stopped long ago, and it's not taking in immigrants fast enough, so the urban areas have stopped growing.

The mentality refers to East Asia's deep agrarian root that places high value on owning land that can be passed down the generations (the alternative was often quasi-servile farm labour that locks families in poverty). Property purchases are usually multi-generational efforts, so families can generally take the brunt of overinflated prices.

  1. Japan's urbanization stopped long ago,   
  2. and it's not taking in immigrants fast enough,   
  3. so the urban areas have stopped growing.

1 is 50/50. Urbanization is growing because the small town life is shrinking.it's wrong at face value, but there is a cost to this in the overall economy, since the country overall isn't growing.

I think GP is finding concept of land scarcity non-intuitive for some reason.

This only happens when the government becomes captured by land owners to constrain the supply, since otherwise you can build up. But governments getting captured by land owners happens a lot.

* updated to reflect newer article that Amkor's facility is delayed beyond late-2025

Packaging facilities cost ~20% of a fab, right?

Naively, I'm assuming packaging is also not as complicate and difficult as fabrication.

Surely if they can build a fab in the US, they can build packaging facilities, too.

Rome wasn't built in a day.

Why?

If the packaging facility was ready early it would have sat idle losing money.

If it's ready late, products from the fab can obviously easily be shipped off to be packaged.

Tight coordination of timelines adds needless cost when there is an easy alternative.

It just illustrates it is really quite cheap and so won't be that expensive in the grand scheme of things.

(Also not certain the GP's comment is necessarily correct even.)

A tick can contain a lot of blood, doesn't mean it produced that blood.

Things like Google and Facebook cannot be parasitic, every dollar gained is a voluntary exchange with no threats. People choose to use Google and gain something from doing so.

Remember kids – thousands dying from lack of healthcare isn't a bug of the system, it's a feature. This has been determined as necessary, nay even beneficial, by market forces that can never be wrong.

Especially if it's an ecommerce business.

Regardless of which side of the camp you fall on, you can’t argue that ads are “good” just because some businesses need them to survive. In fact, I’d wager if a business NEEDS ads to survive, it’s probably a net negative on society as a whole.

I won’t die on that hill, but that’s my hunch.

The tech is fine. The toxic parts (data collection, spying, etc) aren't even in the ad tech divisions and aren't done for advertising purposes.

They collect data because it gives them bargaining power and a seat at the table with state-level actors.

It’s not even debated that advertising as it exists with Google, for the sake of profit at all costs is a net-negative in society.

It’s not the same as putting a sign by the road.

The problem with advertising is that a little bit done honestly is actually good and fine. What we actually have way, way too much, and it's often dishonest and manipulative.

It's a similar thing with finance. It's necessary, but way too many talented people are spending their energies on it.

Black and white thinking doesn't really capture the situation, and ends up creating a lot of noise (BAN IT ALL vs. IT'S ALL GOOD AND YOU LOVE IT, FIGHT!).

Honestly, I think it might be a good thing to put caps on the number of people that can work in sectors like that (and further limit the number of very smart people working in them), to direct talented people to more productive and socially beneficial parts of the economy.

At the end of the day, if most of company's income is from ads, it can be safely assumed that whatever else it does is somehow about ads even if it doesn't contribute directly. Well, or else Google is incredibly inept.

Aka does advertising as a whole increase total consumption or is it a zero sum game (aka send bigger slice of the same pie to a competitor)

From what I know advertising does increase total demand aka more things/services need to be produced and sold on aggregate.

But most ads are trying to convince you to buy their brand’s version of a product that you already know of, or (even worse!) a new version of an old product. Any demand induced there is just wastefulness.

If Amazon can figure out that I’m interested in headphones, I already know more actual information about headphones than their ads will give me.

An alternative explanation is that prospective tech CEOs who are willing to overlook morals are scarcer and thus mandate higher salaries. ;)

There is good and bad advertising.

I'd want to receive ads for things that I'm really interested in.

The problem with prohibiting ads is how to prevent (or even define) payed hidden promotions. But tracking and targeted ads could be prohibited, which would already make things much more civil and less relevant as a tech profit center.

Maybe the ad is good when you arent even aware that you were influenced by it?

like Cola vs Pepsi, McDonald vs KFC, etc.

People want to buy things, especially the ones that make their life easier, but you got to get to know them somehow, right?

There may be other services that might be better if not for network effects, but it is trivially true that a search engine is better for most people than no search engine at all. And that is what is produced.

Imo, profits != productive or to a benefit of society.