Hearted Youtube comments on Asianometry (@Asianometry) channel.

  1. sequence error at 11:00 - multi-layer coated mirrors like this ABSOLUTELY cannot be touched, let alone polished, after being coated. The coating and its reflective properties would be instantly destroyed. All the super polishing has to be done to the substrate BEFORE the multi-layer deposition step. After coating, the mirror is done and must remain absolutely pristine.
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  2. "Like all minerales and people, quartz is influenced by the enviroment in which it's grown". So double true. 👌
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  3. It's good that silicon is such a team player considering the fact that it also happens to be the #2 most abundant element in the earth's crust
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  4. Chafing is one of my most insidious natural hazards too
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  5. Dear Asianometry, It’s videos like these I appreciate the most from creators like you. I worked on a chip integration team for a awhile and I’m truly humbled by how capable modern IC design is. From my desk it just looked like lines of Verilog code but I new someday it would be turned into nanoscopic transistors on a silicon wafer and that’s amazing. It seems today’s generation is more interested in software but few appreciate that hardware has its own story to tell. I hope your content inspires younger people like myself to pursue a career in hardware.
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  6. I love your work, John. I am a computer scientist who works on running symbolic AI (as opposed to just ML, which is generally dense rather than sparse) on GPU clusters. If you ever visit Syracuse, let me know, they say they’re building a memory fab here down the line.
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  7. 10:27 "We discovered something important today" easily qualifies as understatement of the century, possibly the millenium
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  8. The dynamic range for audio is not the range of frequencies it can play but the range of amplitude it can play. More specifically it’s the ratio of the amplitude of noise, and the loudest possible amplitude.
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  9. It's amazing that there are so few views/comments for a subject that literally is about the heart of all the smart devices we use in the modern connected world. I think that most people will zone out after the first minute of technical terminology.
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  10. My father was one of the students to work on the computer projects first in ITA as an undergraduate and later at Politecnica/USP during his doctorate on the ugly duckling. Today he is retired as a professor emeritus, one of the founding members of the Brazilian computer society and a pioneer in Brazil. Amazing to see this here.
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  11. After WWII, many thousands of Japanese immigrated to Brazil. We already had some here since 1908 but their numbers grew exponentially. Currently, we have the largest Japanese population outside Japan, over 1.5M considering Japanese nationals and descendants of those first immigrants. There's even a very cool region in São Paulo called Liberdade (freedom) where you have many Japanese shops, architecture, restaurants, etc. Quite a cool place.
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  12. This channel is so great. I get so excited when I see a new video is up. I'd like to tell you how much I appreciate the time and effort you put into these topics... But first: The Asianometry Newsletter.
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  13. I love the video man, not silly at all. I think people would like more cultural insights into Taiwan.
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  14. From the ultra pure sand used to make silicon wafers to the very-specific-size-grain sand used for concrete... thrown in with a Star Wars sand reference. Yup, Jon, you've become a Sand Nerd :P
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  15. As a integrated IC designer I suppose I should feel a little threatened by such AI technology taking my job. But like all other design tools this will just make the remaining human designers more efficient and accurate. Early in my career I experimented with using the then available "optinmization" engines built into Cadence and ADS design tools and ran into the same problem you describe here: the local minima of the error function is often not the same as the global minimima. So humans still have to figure it out. You can't just go run off for coffee and wait for the solution to pop out. You address the floorplanning (layout) problem here. But as a schematic designer it is an exponentially harder task. If you already have a architecture and process node selected, I do conceed that a machine will be able to size and place devices faster and more efficiently than any human can. The problem is you have a creative step in front of it that is still in the land of human invention, intuition, and judgement. For now, anyway. I'm sure even that will be better done by machines one day. But for now I remain gainfully employed.
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  16. I stayed at bed and breakfast down near Gig Harbor Washington, home to one of the most massive Naval bases on the US West coast. We got inside, and the hostess were a homemaker and a man retired out of the navy. While she was showing my wife the decorating, he took me downstairs to his man cave / bar for a drink. On the bar was a weird item in a glass presentation case. He asked me to guess what it was and me knowing quite a bit about things immediately identified it as a section of an undersea Communications cable. This man was the former commander of the nuclear submarine USS Flounder, in a secret Mission decades ago,his crew located on the sea floor, and removd a section of Russian undersea military communications cable and added a recording device and this was a section of that cable taken on that mission.
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  17. I'm amazed that you made such a detailed video about cows just to be able to talk about TSMC's new fab in collaboration with Sony in Japan
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  18. My first engineering job was designing the "packages" for BAW resonators. Your ability to digest and present highly technical and niche information like this is bordering on savant-like.
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  19. One notable Philippine steel company that's been investing in expanding their capacity in recent years has been Steel Asia, which has invested several billion dollars in integrated steel mills over the past few years. They've offered to revive the Iligan steel plant.
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  20. As a chemist, sodium is 3x the weight of lithium and weight is critical to efficiency. Stationary storage it may work but not transport imho.
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  21. No idea silting claimed that much of a reservoir capacity each year…
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  22. You can pay tax, bills, buy train and concert tickets, send donation money to most charities, call taxi, photocopy/print out/fax, collect all your online shopping items, send parcels, withdrawal cash, and even have your business meetings there. That's why ppl like convenient stores in Taiwan
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  23. The drama of the semiconductor industry is long, wide and varied; not just the interconnection of transistors but the players themselves. Always a good time to get a glimpse into that world.
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  24. How in the world did you get this out so fast
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  25. Philips is such a terribly run and managed company. They have squandered so much that they had in tech and medical.
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  26. Hey I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoy and am informed by your videos - love your choice of topics, sometimes quirky (Venera Program), sometimes highly topical (Hardware for AI) but always insightful. Your level of engagement with the physics and math hits just right for me. Congratulations and best wishes for a prosperous 2023!
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  27. This channel is unbelievable... the content is so detailed and you put out so much content. I literally watch everything you put out religiously... I'm a EE/CS that's a software engineer by the way.
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  28. This is a very similar concept to "prions" which are more stable forms of proteins which can spontaneously change other proteins to the new form. This can be very dangerous, as evident by the mad cow disease outbreaks caused by prions. Additionally, prions are extremely hard to sterilize against, and can last in the environment for decades.
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  29. I'm always so impressed by the quality of your research and story telling. Here's another outstanding video. Thank you!
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  30. That mom joke contrasts so well with the serious tone of the video lol.
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  31. I did not expect to learn how groundwater works from this channel. Love Asianometry.
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  32. Fantastic video, love the extra humor sprinkled in!
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  33. If I were your dad I'd be proud. Nice job.
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  34. World’s hardest working YouTuber. I’m not sure how you manage to create these incredible videos in such rapid succession. I hope the thousands who watch your videos donate generously.
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  35. Another cool thing about FPGAs is their interconnects. Decades ago, we didn't worry too much about how a signal got from A to B, because wire wrapped and FPGAs implemented them for us. Then came along higher speed circuitry. Electromagnetic fields coupled signals in one wire to another wire, especially if those wires ran parallel to each other. We didn't worry about what was inside the FPGAs, because they seemed not to have this cross coupling problem. Finally we decided to characterize this phenomenon to wire interconnects on the boards. We came up with something the RF engineers used - micro strips and strip lines. Most of you will recognize them, because boards are constructed of layers. These layers are GND, then interconnects, then PWR, then interconnects, and so forth. This solved the glitch problem. CPLD and FPGA manufacturers figured this out much earlier, probably because they came from the ASIC world.
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  36. Humans aren't designed perfectly, but we need to develop robots to walk around our buildings. It's like QWERTY: it's not optimal, but it's the standard.
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  37. As a full time verification engineer, I hate shortened chip development cycle (and modern capitalism in general tbh). This is causing an amazing stress on verification team due to limited time constraints (this and increased tapeout queues at fab - if you miss your time slot you would have to wait for another half of year) . Besides, there are times when throwing more team on the project will only cause more problems in a same way as throwing more cores on the processor will not yield expected N time productivity. I sometimes think about switching back to software jobs simply because verification usually ends up being an overtime mess.
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  38. 1:48 Singaporean here, can confirm that the robust supply of cats is one of the biggest drivers of our productivity growth. The advent of cat videos on YouTube in the early 2000s only augmented that growth.
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  39. Unless you knew about ultrapure water treatment, walking through the visitor centre is like going into a science museum (but water!). They had model and interactive displays of the main filtration techniques UF, RO, UV and you can even look into the treatment plant itself. Having kids go on school trips there does also help make it more normalised and acceptable in the younger generation, though we can always have the toilet water joke
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  40. I walk by one of these old round Cray-2s regularly at work. The plaque says they paid $19M for it (in the 80's), and it's something like 1/100 as powerful as an iPhone X.
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  41. This video title has to be the least clickbaity title ever! Love it!
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  42. I got diagnosed with hep c a couple years after this drug was approved by the FDA. I remember the big sigh of relief I experienced when my doctor told me that it seems like it cleared on its own and no further treatment is needed after further and subsequent retestings. Apparently about 20% to 35% of those infected with hep c can spontaneously recover. I consider myself very lucky.
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  43. I met Mr. Cray when he was installing a Y-MP at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque. I was a young Lieutenant and they actually used one of my finite element models as a benchmark.
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  44. As a nation they were very wise to invest in a field where they could become a world leader. Taiwan has come so far from the post-war years of plantations and plastics.
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  45. This discussion of error rates & yields makes me think of DNA transcription. Our cells might only make 1 error per 100,000 base pairs when transcribing DNA, but the genome is complex enough that we still need a massive error-handling infrastructure to keep all those errors from killing us.
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  46. Interestingly just within the past few years, a few small scale gem cutters and dealers have realized that the companies making this material have failed boules and offcuts that they will sell very cheaply which can be turned into highly unique jewelry with stupendous qualities of ultra bright fluorescence, extreme color play due to high index of refraction, and incredibly long lived (many hours) phosphorescence. Specifically House of sylas and Angry Turtle Jewelry in the US are essentially creating a whole new market around synthetic crystal jewelry usually involving things like BGO, lutetium–yttrium oxyorthosilicate, and lutetium aluminum garnet. If you search for these terms or their names on social media you can see examples of some really fantastic material they're making.
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  47. As someone that works on the TEL Cellesta-i systems, it gives me great pride to tell people I am a dishwasher mechanic.
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  48. It's worth noting that ASML's wafers per hour are usually quoted at 20 mJ/cm2. But most processes uses 30-40+ mJ/cm2. Wph decreases linearly. ASML was going to quote numbers at 30 at one point,not sure if they made the jump yet.
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  49. I'm surprised in countries that have deserts there aren't even an prototype of concentrated solar desalination plant. Edit: I see in the replies many people miss understood what i mean, i don't mean solar panels. Concentrated solar is made with mirrors pointed to an object in this example massive glass dome filled with water.
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  50. As a former Sun reseller and support contractor, I'm very happy for you covering my favorite company for your christmas video. Thanks! I'm still working in Solaris support today and have a large collections of systems around. So sad that Oracle has ruined what was once a great company.. but that's what happens when a software guy buys a hardware company and has no idea what they actually do or how to run them. When Ellison swooped in, the first he did was double the system prices and triple the support contract fees, and struck down any special deals that Sun had going with their largest customers for decades. This lead to most of those customers taking the jump over to Linux clusters, that were just about becoming mainstream enough at that time.
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