Before anyone says that Moore's law is dead, remember that transistors are still getting smaller and more dense (not to mention more expensive, which was another part of his prediction).
In every thread people confuse Moore's law with Dennard scaling (which states roughly that, as transistors get smaller, their power density stays constant, so that the power use stays in proportion with area; both voltage and current scale (downward) with length.)
Moore himself said (mentioned in the link) that the “law” was just supposed to convey that the way to cheaper electronics at the time was to focus on transistors, I don’t think he ever meant it was supposed to be a law of physics that stays true 50 years or 100 years later. In fact he said it would be true for 10 years
This is interesting, I never knew this. Is there somewhere I can read more on his thoughts? I was under the impression (naively so) that this was some invariant that had been somehow proven to an extent.
I searched on "Moore's law is not a law" and found [1], "Moore’s Law Is Not Really A Law But It Is Still Obeyed", from someone who was a semiconductor engineer at Intel 40 years ago. As he says, Moore's law was more a roadmap than a law. Companies strove to keep it going for fear their competitors would succeed while they failed; sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Dennard scaling died 2 decades ago. Moore's law is dead for less than a dexade. It took 4 years for density to double(from N7 to N3). And with density doubled the cost. It will get only worse from here.
Actually Moores law is dead. His prediction was not transistors would get smaller. His prediction was initial that for 10 years was that density would double every year. And then later that it would double every 18 month.
And this held longer then even he thought. But it has ended. While things still get denser, its no longer on that same trend.
Smaller transistors is one way to get more transistors per chip. Chips could also get bigger, or the transistors could be packed in more densely (my VLSI is rusty, but not all transistors are minimally sized; a wider transistor can be used to push more power for example).
And how sustainable is making chips bigger or packing transistors more densely without making them smaller as a solution to getting chips with more transistors?
This is more of an engineering question than a physics one I think.
GPU dies are quite large compared to CPU, ballpark 2X to 3X, so I guess we could get a generation to generation and a half of transistor doubling out of increasing the size of the chips at least.
But the question is, do workloads benefit from all these transistors? Server workloads, I guess so, you can get some pretty big Xeons, or lots of transistors per package with AMD and multi-chip packaging. Consumer workloads, I think the issue is more that consumers don’t have these massively parallel workloads that servers and workstations have. Consumers have stated their preference by not paying for more than a handful of cores per chip.
The obvious way to get more transistors per core is fewer, bigger cores per chip. But changing the cores is a big engineering project. And yield issues are already a big problem, which would only become worse with more complex circuits. But until we end up with one core per chip, I think we have hit an engineering/economics problem rather than a physics one.
And the engineering/economics problem is a really big one, I mean AMD has had great success by going in the opposite direction; breaking things up further with multi-chip packages.
But the question is, do workloads benefit from all these transistors?
That's not the question at all, this was about transistors getting smaller. Now you're way out in left field talking about how gpu chips being bigger than cpus somehow means that transistors don't need to get smaller, benefits, workloads, cores per chips and a lot of other irrelevant strange goal post shifting.
All I said was that transistors are still shrinking and density is increasing, I don't know where all this other stuff is coming from.
Chips are not getting bigger really. Its just very large 'chips' are multible chiplets package in on bigger part. And that's not what Moore was talking about.
I’m just saying it is possible to follow Moore’s law. Physics didn’t limit us, engineering and economics did. Multi-chip packaging is a fantastic response to the engineering/economic problem of low yields.
The prediction wasn't that density would double. It was that "number of transistors on a chip" would double every year, and it was basically just marketing. That actually held up somewhat longer than the density doubling did, since chip area grew to fill the gap.
Moore's Law has been dead for a while. The most common confusion I see is that people don't understand he was referring to economical scaling. These days we're getting more density and bigger chips but prices are going up a lot too. More for more instead of more for less.
Eve if Moore’s law is dead, it lived way longer than any law claiming a doubling every two years has a right to. Compound annual growth of 41% per year for 40+ years is astonishing.
I think the spirit of Moore's Law (the context in which it is most often used) is better referred to as the Law of Accelerating Returns [1] [2] (e.g. by Ray Kurzweil). Moore's Law is a sub-section (in time and technology) of the Law of Accelerating Returns.
Naw, this is from a quarter century after Moore’s predictions, and Moore’s law had already started slowing down by then. Kurzweil was also selling snake oil (immortality) here, and the proof is in the final figure in the article, it’s 100% misleading and has left me with mistrust for all the rest of what Kurzweil said. Why did he leave out all the population data between 1920 and 2000, data which we have available at our fingertips? Because then he couldn’t have drawn a completely fabricated plot showing continuous lifespan acceleration, acceleration that doesn’t exist. Why does he conflate life expectancy with longevity to imply to the reader that genetics are improving as opposed to, say, the truth about poverty, wars, sanitation, and medicine? Because then it wouldn’t tell an amazing sounding (but completely untrue) story about humans being able to live longer and see the “singularity”. This article proved to me that Kurzweil is a charlatan, which is disappointing because I loved his keynote at Siggraph right around this time where he was pitching these ideas.
Really? I thought the exponential growth of calculations per second per dollar was rather well-established at least from 1900 through 2010 [1], a period of time that is much broader than Moore's Law?
Yes really, there is no law of accelerating returns as far as I’m concerned. Kurzweil clearly tried to opportunistically generalize Moore’s law and take credit for what he thought was a bigger idea, but sadly doesn’t produce a compelling argument, given that 1) Moore’s law died a decade ago, it no longer holds, and cost of calculations per second is no longer decreasing exponentially, and 2) Kurzweil claimed that things like US GDP and human life expectancy are evidence of his so-called law, and these claims are clearly bullshit. And not just wrong but intentionally misleading, that’s the part that bothers me. Did you look at the final figure? It’s not possible to make that diagram or write the accompanying text without knowing you’re lying. How about the first or second ones, wtf even are they? The majority of plots in Kurzweil’s piece, some 20-odd figures, are direct byproducts of Moore’s law from after Moore observed/predicted it, and nothing more.
In case you missed it, my point is not that flops didn’t increased exponentially for most of the last century, it’s that Kurzweil wasn’t the first to observe it, and didn’t add anything rigorous to what Moore & others had already done. Kurzweil only made a mockery of it by fabricating some of the data and using the larger argument to claim we’re headed toward immortality, joining an illustrious list of people who get attention by hawking the fountain of youth.
BTW feel free to re-read Kurzweil’s predictions about computation growth in the article and ask yourself whether they’re true. One of his scheduled predictions is up this year. He’s off by a few orders of magnitude according to his own definitions, and furthermore his definitions are off by a few more orders of magnitude according to other researchers, and on top of that his claim that enough flops equal human brain capability are, to date, false. These things put the remainder of his predictions really far behind schedule, and possibly slipping at an exponential rate, which kinda undermines the whole point, right?
Wow, we have lost a true legend. As I get older, I marvel a bit at the giants I once shared time on the earth with. Sometimes it feels like we don't have giants in the 21st century in the same way.
I think it is hard to see giants when they are just innovators.
To everyone around them and especially themselves, they were just pushing the ball forward day-by-day; they weren't heroes or insanely prescient, they were just doing the next logical thing to do. It's only after they've climbed the mountain that you can appreciate what they did.
That's probably the hardest thing about innovation. To everyone who wants to innovate, they only see the mountain. They have the grand idea of where they will end up, when the reality of innovation is just pushing the ball forward one step at a time. It's not heroism or being a genius necessarily, it's persistence and being able to think on the fly.
I think "genius" knows where the general destination is but I feel like most aren't doing it for the destination, they are doing it because they feel it is a calling and what they must do.
I sometimes make myself a mental list of famous people who are expected to die soon. The following people will all die in the next few years: Jimmy Carter (98), Henry Kissinger (99), Dick Cheney (82), Pope Francis (86), Paul McCartney (80), John Williams (91), William Shatner (92), and Ali Khamenei (83).
"Sometimes" is the right word. Usually, it's just inferior. B+W was used for artistic purposes only rarely, the rest of the time it was because it was cheap and easy.
A kid in this house has started an appreciation for the original Twilight Zone, and enjoyed Casablanca before that. Gotta start early I guess. TV is scarce in this house, which promotes reading and feeling lucky to see a great movie, no matter the era.
I think it'd take more than picture quality to make classic films accessible. Acting styles and pacing especially have changed a ton since the b&w era. It's not to say they're not good, but they're a bit of an acquired taste.
Peter Parker for one.
> Hey guys, you ever see that really old movie, The Empire Strikes Back
As a kid I watched many films from my parent's generation. Mary Poppins (1964) or Great Escape (1963) come to mind as being staples every christmas -- Great Escape on boxing day especially
A generation before that people watched "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) for much the same reason.
I've subjected my kids to a few old films from well before they were born, but they were films from my youth -- Bill and Ted, Back to the Future, Men in Black, Muppet Christmas Carol etc. And yes they've seen Star Wars, which was from before I was born (just), but that's an ongoing franchise.
I don't see them watching films from the 1960s like I did though, and I doubt they'll make their kids sit through films from the 90s.
> A generation before that people watched "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) for much the same reason.
Some of us still watch it!
Of course the vast majority of old movies are long forgotten (and no great loss), just as the vast majority of what we're producing today will be. But there are a minority of classics that endure. Just as there's still a market for Shakespeare, Dickens, and Mozart, despite all the plays, books and music that have been written since.
Attenborough. That will be the end of our planet's conscience, symbolic of the era where we discovered how truly incredible a place we live in, and what we are doing to it.
I think this is tautological - this is how it must always be, and I would guess has been the common view at any given point of time in history.
You can only properly assess and appreciate the impact sufficient to assign 'legend' status to an individual or institution retroactively, decades hence from the actions that elevated them there.
Not at all. Moore himself has been recognized and celebrated for decades.
But many other such figures achieved 'legendary' status while they were very much alive and in their prime: Edison, Ford, Bell, Wright Bros, Disney, Carnegie, Einstein, Oppenheimer, etc.
Moore himself was a member of an elite crew and one of Shockley's (the inventor of the transistor) "Traitorous Eight" which spun out from their former mentor to join Fairchild Semiconductor before all of them spun out from that enterprise to found their own companies and in the process create Silicon Valley proper.
A giant typically means famous. There are many giants that we will never know the name of. For me, I’d rather die famous with my friends and family and have changed the world in my silent way. I’ve been fortunate enough to do it a few times already, and I hope I’ll get another chance before I die as most people never get the first chance. That’s I think a better goal - when a chance comes to change everything, jump into it head first. But don’t bother trying to be famous. It’s meaningless.
Regardless, I bid Dr Moore a fond farewell. He lived to see the horizon of his law.
> There are many giants that we will never know the name of.
And sadly, there are millions living out their lives in poorer parts of the world who might have become giants, if only they'd had access to nutrition, good parenting, education, connections, etc.
I've thought about that a lot. Right now, I think it's just not what drives me. I'm motivated by novelty and certain types of experiences. Not really by years-long projects trying to break new ground.
But my comment doesn't come out of a sense of desire to emulate. Just out of a sense that especially in the early-to-mid 20th century, we had these titanic characters: Einstein, Tesla, Von Neumann, The Beatles, and so forth.
In a lot of ways, I think it comes down to these folks existing in the beginnings of the information age, and how many advances were unlocked by the increase in communication speed.
That was probably a lot more groundbreaking than the digital revolution. For all the progress we've seen since I was born in the 80s, there's not a lot of things that have fundamentally changed in terms of human capability. Although, we may see in the next decade or two the same sort of paradigm shift.
they'll survive due to geopolitics if nothing else, the US government has no choice but to make sure they stay viable due to the potential issues in Taiwan
This, anything happening to Taiwan will shaken IT and electronics industry severely. We are ahead of "chip-covid" event in my opinion as IT wasn't enough shaken by SARS-Cov2 or Ukraine, I hope I am wrong. Intel stock price would sky rocket then.
It takes time to understand who is the true giant. Robert Metcalfe just received the ACM Turing award last week and his contributions where from the 70's. It's the same with Nobel laureates, it takes year for your work to be recognized.
Not really, no. He may have just recently received an award (he's received many awards) but Metcalfe has been recognized for his achievements for decades. He got the ACM Grace Hopper award in 1980: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Murray_Hopper_Award
People attempted to use dog sleds to traverse up the antarctic plateau, which is nearly the same altitude as Tibet, and reach the pole.
Many died in the process, their names are remembered (though slid out of public discourse as its over a century ago).
In our industry fortunately people don't die, but trailblazer had to do a similar thing - they used the proverbial dog sleds to build a camp in the middle of antarctic plateau.
A true legend and a giant in the foundations of multiple tech industries and devices all using semiconductor technology and the co-creator and center of "Silicon Valley" and the creator of Moore's Law.
Though the basic point that computers keep increasing in processing power still seems to hold, even if it's not just by having more transistors per area.
I don't understand what you linked. Don't they believe in technological singularity?
I would think a intelligence capable of self modification could use the scientific method to increase it's performance (even if it means scaling in size like a matrioshka brain).
> Don't they believe in technological singularity?
“ In fact, in a 2005 interview, Moore personally stated that his prediction of exponential growth would not hold indefinitely, simply due to "the nature of exponentials."
Can you please make your substantive points without name-calling? It's not hard, and we're trying for something a bit different from internet default here.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
(a bit more explanation if anyone cares: aggressive pejoratives tend to poison curious conversation and are easy to cut, so this isn't a hard one. I think mostly people write like that online because it's how many of us would talk in person with people we're friendly with—and there it's totally normal, because there's already a 'contract' that takes care of understanding each other's good intention. That's absent online, so many commenters are on a hair trigger with this kind of thing and will react in ways that take the conversation to less interesting, more conflictual places.)
I was thinking the same thing. I'm surprised it's taking this long, honestly. He's such an icon and major player in the history of the computer industry.
Edit>> Though I suppose there's a confirmation process HN goes through before sporting the black band.
dang is not permitted to sleep and it can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead!
Wow, you downvoters are harsh. Okay I learned my lesson not to assume someone has a phone or PC next to them and can simply flip a switch in a matter of 30 seconds. Cool.
I once had a nightmare that Knuth died, and at first there was a thin black bar on the HN site. Clicking around, suddenly the whole topcolor turned black. Lastly the entire HN page turned black text on black background. I was just like "it's cool, they're taking this seriously". It was just so weird and believable at the same time.
Well, for me getting started it was Zilog (but the Z80 was based on the Intel 8080), Mostech and Motorola. But Intel had a big input too, and of course an overwhelming influence with the 8086.
When you zoom out on the timeline of humanity, this man, among others, will have left a huge spike in our technological progress. When I look back at the last 50 years and compare it to all known previous human history, I'm quite humbled to be alive during this timeline with them, despite some things I also greatly abhor.
It has probably just always been an exponential and any curve can be a straight line if you zoom far enough in and Moore's law was just that. Now we've got some perspective and are starting to see the actual exponential.
Moore admits as a kid he had an explosives lab at home (unlicensed) back in the day. Even Elon Musk admitted he made pipe bombs as a kid.
Wonder how many similar promising science kids today would be / have been arrested and imprisoned today by the goons at Homeland for experiments like these ?
249 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] threadIn every thread people confuse Moore's law with Dennard scaling (which states roughly that, as transistors get smaller, their power density stays constant, so that the power use stays in proportion with area; both voltage and current scale (downward) with length.)
[1] https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/moores-law-is-not-real...
And this held longer then even he thought. But it has ended. While things still get denser, its no longer on that same trend.
This interview with Moore explains it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtcLzokagAw
History by Cantrill:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM9h89Vo_Qo
David Patterson perspective:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFT54hO1X8M
Opposing point of view Jim Keller:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc
Patterson response to Keller:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz0eJA1TP3Y
There are talks by David Patterson, Jim Keller and
I'm not a physicist, but I think they need to get smaller to do that.
GPU dies are quite large compared to CPU, ballpark 2X to 3X, so I guess we could get a generation to generation and a half of transistor doubling out of increasing the size of the chips at least.
But the question is, do workloads benefit from all these transistors? Server workloads, I guess so, you can get some pretty big Xeons, or lots of transistors per package with AMD and multi-chip packaging. Consumer workloads, I think the issue is more that consumers don’t have these massively parallel workloads that servers and workstations have. Consumers have stated their preference by not paying for more than a handful of cores per chip.
The obvious way to get more transistors per core is fewer, bigger cores per chip. But changing the cores is a big engineering project. And yield issues are already a big problem, which would only become worse with more complex circuits. But until we end up with one core per chip, I think we have hit an engineering/economics problem rather than a physics one.
And the engineering/economics problem is a really big one, I mean AMD has had great success by going in the opposite direction; breaking things up further with multi-chip packages.
That's not the question at all, this was about transistors getting smaller. Now you're way out in left field talking about how gpu chips being bigger than cpus somehow means that transistors don't need to get smaller, benefits, workloads, cores per chips and a lot of other irrelevant strange goal post shifting.
All I said was that transistors are still shrinking and density is increasing, I don't know where all this other stuff is coming from.
I’m just saying it is possible to follow Moore’s law. Physics didn’t limit us, engineering and economics did. Multi-chip packaging is a fantastic response to the engineering/economic problem of low yields.
[1] https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns
[2] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-05642-4_...
[1] https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/1*vlmZ_Y3a-PGsK0S...
In case you missed it, my point is not that flops didn’t increased exponentially for most of the last century, it’s that Kurzweil wasn’t the first to observe it, and didn’t add anything rigorous to what Moore & others had already done. Kurzweil only made a mockery of it by fabricating some of the data and using the larger argument to claim we’re headed toward immortality, joining an illustrious list of people who get attention by hawking the fountain of youth.
BTW feel free to re-read Kurzweil’s predictions about computation growth in the article and ask yourself whether they’re true. One of his scheduled predictions is up this year. He’s off by a few orders of magnitude according to his own definitions, and furthermore his definitions are off by a few more orders of magnitude according to other researchers, and on top of that his claim that enough flops equal human brain capability are, to date, false. These things put the remainder of his predictions really far behind schedule, and possibly slipping at an exponential rate, which kinda undermines the whole point, right?
To everyone around them and especially themselves, they were just pushing the ball forward day-by-day; they weren't heroes or insanely prescient, they were just doing the next logical thing to do. It's only after they've climbed the mountain that you can appreciate what they did.
That's probably the hardest thing about innovation. To everyone who wants to innovate, they only see the mountain. They have the grand idea of where they will end up, when the reality of innovation is just pushing the ball forward one step at a time. It's not heroism or being a genius necessarily, it's persistence and being able to think on the fly.
I think "genius" knows where the general destination is but I feel like most aren't doing it for the destination, they are doing it because they feel it is a calling and what they must do.
Point being: they only serve the generation who survive them, Moore, will outlive us all, in fact and in legacy.
Edit: What I said isn't true, music, movies and arts will outlive us. We have different lists.
Will they? Who watches old movies?
Often they're right. They'd be much more watchable with an AI that could sharpen the picture and colorize it.
Hard disagree on the colorization bit. I don’t see how color would improve some thing like Psycho or Citizen Kane
As a kid I watched many films from my parent's generation. Mary Poppins (1964) or Great Escape (1963) come to mind as being staples every christmas -- Great Escape on boxing day especially
A generation before that people watched "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) for much the same reason.
I've subjected my kids to a few old films from well before they were born, but they were films from my youth -- Bill and Ted, Back to the Future, Men in Black, Muppet Christmas Carol etc. And yes they've seen Star Wars, which was from before I was born (just), but that's an ongoing franchise.
I don't see them watching films from the 1960s like I did though, and I doubt they'll make their kids sit through films from the 90s.
Some of us still watch it!
Of course the vast majority of old movies are long forgotten (and no great loss), just as the vast majority of what we're producing today will be. But there are a minority of classics that endure. Just as there's still a market for Shakespeare, Dickens, and Mozart, despite all the plays, books and music that have been written since.
"I think youngsters need to start thinking about the kind of world they are going to leave for me and Keith Richards (79)." - Willie Nelson (89)
A huge one for me is Mel Brooks, it is pretty rare for a celebrity death to have an impact on me but that one will.
You can only properly assess and appreciate the impact sufficient to assign 'legend' status to an individual or institution retroactively, decades hence from the actions that elevated them there.
> I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you actually left them. > - Andy Bernard
it's always 5pm somewhere for someone.
But many other such figures achieved 'legendary' status while they were very much alive and in their prime: Edison, Ford, Bell, Wright Bros, Disney, Carnegie, Einstein, Oppenheimer, etc.
Moore himself was a member of an elite crew and one of Shockley's (the inventor of the transistor) "Traitorous Eight" which spun out from their former mentor to join Fairchild Semiconductor before all of them spun out from that enterprise to found their own companies and in the process create Silicon Valley proper.
Regardless, I bid Dr Moore a fond farewell. He lived to see the horizon of his law.
And sadly, there are millions living out their lives in poorer parts of the world who might have become giants, if only they'd had access to nutrition, good parenting, education, connections, etc.
But my comment doesn't come out of a sense of desire to emulate. Just out of a sense that especially in the early-to-mid 20th century, we had these titanic characters: Einstein, Tesla, Von Neumann, The Beatles, and so forth.
In a lot of ways, I think it comes down to these folks existing in the beginnings of the information age, and how many advances were unlocked by the increase in communication speed.
That was probably a lot more groundbreaking than the digital revolution. For all the progress we've seen since I was born in the 80s, there's not a lot of things that have fundamentally changed in terms of human capability. Although, we may see in the next decade or two the same sort of paradigm shift.
Whatever legacy and mature rebranding they attempt wont be apparent until 2070
Only the paranoid survive, one of his colleagues once said, and I guess Intel stopped being sufficiently paranoid.
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/664484-only-the-parano...
He got Parkinson’s and died 7 years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11333402
Somehow it feels like we'll never have legends in an age when GPT-4/5/... are accessible to everyone.
People attempted to use dog sleds to traverse up the antarctic plateau, which is nearly the same altitude as Tibet, and reach the pole.
Many died in the process, their names are remembered (though slid out of public discourse as its over a century ago).
In our industry fortunately people don't die, but trailblazer had to do a similar thing - they used the proverbial dog sleds to build a camp in the middle of antarctic plateau.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtcLzokagAw
What I learned is that I had no idea how semiconductors are actually made and how they made them early on.
Its really interesting interview!
i like this. keeps people guessing as to why it was phrased as such. makes it more mysterious
Yesterday, it was a few days ago.
Today, it was many days ago :)
RIP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
We lost a visionary and a pioneer. I like to think we have people who not only think like he did, but who can get the message across.
I would think a intelligence capable of self modification could use the scientific method to increase it's performance (even if it means scaling in size like a matrioshka brain).
“ In fact, in a 2005 interview, Moore personally stated that his prediction of exponential growth would not hold indefinitely, simply due to "the nature of exponentials."
No.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
(a bit more explanation if anyone cares: aggressive pejoratives tend to poison curious conversation and are easy to cut, so this isn't a hard one. I think mostly people write like that online because it's how many of us would talk in person with people we're friendly with—and there it's totally normal, because there's already a 'contract' that takes care of understanding each other's good intention. That's absent online, so many commenters are on a hair trigger with this kind of thing and will react in ways that take the conversation to less interesting, more conflictual places.)
Edit>> Though I suppose there's a confirmation process HN goes through before sporting the black band.
I'm sure HN is willing to defer that research to someone like Intel in this case.
Please chill with your inane takes on why this "wasn't fast enough"
A big, sincere pressing of the F to pay respects. May he rest in peace.
And as John Donne said:
"any man's death diminishes me"
but some more than others.
Moore admits as a kid he had an explosives lab at home (unlicensed) back in the day. Even Elon Musk admitted he made pipe bombs as a kid.
Wonder how many similar promising science kids today would be / have been arrested and imprisoned today by the goons at Homeland for experiments like these ?
https://www.sciencehistory.org/files/scientists-you-must-kno...
RIP, we will continue to break your law.