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...
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.
> Of course, now that I’m on the bullet train to Hsinchu, I realize that the precise hazard against which the Sacred Mountain offers protection is not to be uttered.
This article seems overly dramatic. I've been living in Taiwan for over a year now, it's not like you can't utter the word "China."
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:)
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).
Not sure why everyone is complaining this is badly written - it's prose, written for dramatic effect with TSMC as the idk, plot? It should be read for beauty and word-taste, not just the story.
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).
I suspect that a lot of people here are not used to this style of journalism, in which the writer foregrounds what they experienced and felt while reporting the story. Such writing used to be common in Harper's, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and similar magazines. I enjoyed it when I was young, but, despite the occasional insights--such as the uselessness of semiconductor fabs in Taiwan to China if China invades--this article wore me out before I got very far.
I'm sure GPT didn't write it, but I would be happy to read GPT's summary of it.
Yeah looks like folksy can’t comprehend actually reading for the sake of reading… I found it a fun read. Dramatic? Big words? Religion? Sounds like it was the point.
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.
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.
But they lump them together to contrast an American-centric viewpoint with what the author perceive as Taiwan/TSMC rigor/gentleness/focus/invisibleness. Which is interesting imo, though maybe a bit overdone, but given the title...
> The article "I Saw the Face of God in a TSMC Factory" describes the author's experience visiting a TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) factory and observing the advanced technology and processes involved in producing computer chips. The author marvels at the complexity of the machinery and the precision required to create chips that are smaller than a human hair. They also reflect on the spiritual experience of witnessing such advanced technology and how it can make one feel small in comparison. The article concludes by discussing the societal implications of technological progress and the need to balance technological advancement with ethical considerations.
> The article is an opinion piece where the author reflects on her visit to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's (TSMC) semiconductor factory in Taiwan. She describes the factory's massive scale and advanced technology and compares it to a religious experience, calling it a "secular cathedral". The author notes the incredible amount of human ingenuity and effort that goes into producing semiconductors and suggests that the factory's operations and technology have a spiritual significance in modern society. She concludes by arguing that the TSMC factory embodies humanity's creative and innovative potential.
Not even close. Maybe you could find something like that in the last 1/6th of the article.
This summary would neglect the discussion on Taiwan's history, how TSMC convinced US to offshore it's fabs, the trust that went into this, the geopolitical position it and TSMC hold, talk of UMC. Not including all the interesting little details
"At a think-tank forum in Taipei in 2021, Chang shrugged off competition from Intel, declaring, "No one in the United States is as dedicated to their work as in Taiwan."
No doubt, cultural differences are the reason why the East is forging ahead in technology. For the US to catch up it would have to return to the ways of research and manufacturing methods it adopted during WWII as well as adopting the attitudes it held back then that enabled that remarkable level of development and manufacturing output.
Much of the East works as if it's on a war footing, the US hasn't done so since 1945. One poignant illustration of that is the cultural clash of US engineers with their Taiwanese counterparts when they visited Taiwan as mentioned in the article.
"Careful attention to education over the last 30 years has begun to pay dividends,” Wang said of Taiwan in 1982."
There's a lesson here too for the US and the West. In recent decades many Western universities have allowed themselves to be torn apart by politics, education has suffered thus.
48 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] thread> "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...
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.
lol.
This article seems overly dramatic. I've been living in Taiwan for over a year now, it's not like you can't utter the word "China."
The article: “I arrive in Taiwan brooding morbidly on the fate of democracy.”
It's not a useless article, though. It gets across that this stuff is really important and too centralized.
Edit: guess that’s my problem though based on the world we live in now
and this scene in South Park: https://youtu.be/qj0o5aPS_Ts&t=6m30s
(That much of the article is depressing reading for many Western readers doesn't make it any less factual.)
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:)
Agree fully. Padding—presumably paid by the chr$.
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
> God means nature. We are describing the face of nature at TSMC.
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).
I'm sure GPT didn't write it, but I would be happy to read GPT's summary of it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230327033150/https://www.wired...
> The article "I Saw the Face of God in a TSMC Factory" describes the author's experience visiting a TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) factory and observing the advanced technology and processes involved in producing computer chips. The author marvels at the complexity of the machinery and the precision required to create chips that are smaller than a human hair. They also reflect on the spiritual experience of witnessing such advanced technology and how it can make one feel small in comparison. The article concludes by discussing the societal implications of technological progress and the need to balance technological advancement with ethical considerations.
> The article is an opinion piece where the author reflects on her visit to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's (TSMC) semiconductor factory in Taiwan. She describes the factory's massive scale and advanced technology and compares it to a religious experience, calling it a "secular cathedral". The author notes the incredible amount of human ingenuity and effort that goes into producing semiconductors and suggests that the factory's operations and technology have a spiritual significance in modern society. She concludes by arguing that the TSMC factory embodies humanity's creative and innovative potential.
This summary would neglect the discussion on Taiwan's history, how TSMC convinced US to offshore it's fabs, the trust that went into this, the geopolitical position it and TSMC hold, talk of UMC. Not including all the interesting little details
> can you summarize an article from a url
> Yes, I can summarize an article from a URL. Please provide me with the URL of the article you would like me to summarize.
Funny, it seems to be making it up, when I ask to provide a quote for the first sentence or the last paragraph, it provides gibberish.
> you can't read url-s can't you?
> As an AI language model, I do not have the ability to view or access URLs, so I rely solely on the information that you provide me.
So you're absolutely right, it fooled me.
No doubt, cultural differences are the reason why the East is forging ahead in technology. For the US to catch up it would have to return to the ways of research and manufacturing methods it adopted during WWII as well as adopting the attitudes it held back then that enabled that remarkable level of development and manufacturing output.
Much of the East works as if it's on a war footing, the US hasn't done so since 1945. One poignant illustration of that is the cultural clash of US engineers with their Taiwanese counterparts when they visited Taiwan as mentioned in the article.
"Careful attention to education over the last 30 years has begun to pay dividends,” Wang said of Taiwan in 1982."
There's a lesson here too for the US and the West. In recent decades many Western universities have allowed themselves to be torn apart by politics, education has suffered thus.