Awesome! I wouldn't have thought that it is possible to make ICs in a garage. Of course it requires a lot of knowledge, etc. But still, not a multi-billion dollar clean room with specialist equipment.

You could make in a garage some decent analog integrated circuits, e.g. audio amplifiers or operational amplifiers or even radio-frequency circuits for not too high frequency ranges.

However you cannot make useful digital circuits. For digital circuits, the best that you can do is to be content to only design them and buy an FPGA for implementing them, instead of attempting to manufacture a custom IC.

With the kind of digital circuits that you could make in a garage, the most complex thing that you could do would be something like a very big table or wall digital clock, made not with a single IC like today, but with a few dozen ICs.

Anything more complex than that would need far too many ICs.

Not true. You are confusing "digital" with "microprocessor". You wouldn't be able to do any single-chip microprocessor, of course, but something like 74181 is very doable at this scale, and building a 1970s-era computer out of a few dozen of these is something enthusiasts still do. The main problem isn't logic, it's memory - memory needs density (thin film magnetics anyone?).

Then, of course, if by "useful" you mean "commercially viable", it is indeed not going to be competitive against either TSMC or your local 500nm foundry ever.

A CPU made with ALUs like 74181 would take alone a PCB of ATX or eATX size densely populated with integrated circuits and consuming much more power than an entire computer consumes today, while being slower than a tiny microcontroller with a cost of less than a dollar, which also includes enough memory for a practical application.

I call such a CPU as not useful.

It can be a very useful experience to design such a CPU, but you can simulate the design in a logic simulator and you gain nothing by building it.

As a valuable computer building experience, it is more useful to use much older components than digital integrated circuits, where you can see nothing without special instruments, e.g. you can build interesting computer blocks, like adders, registers, counters etc., made with electromechanical relays or with neon glow lamps, where you can see with your eyes how they function.

What are the factors you expect to limit the integration scale in a garage fab?

Variance, data rate/cost, and lithography.

You can do lithography small but slow and expensive. But small means you need a stack, which is even more expensive. At small sizes, defectivity/variation are really difficult.

So if you want a paradigmatic shift, you need low cost patterning, and the best way I can see is to use clever chemistry and a much different design style.

Don't you think that a lot more improvement in variability and integration can be achieved with better optics? (for the photolithography, of course. I don't remember what they used for plasma etching and ion implantation.) I don't believe that they have explored a lot on that front yet.

> So if you want a paradigmatic shift, you need low cost patterning, and the best way I can see is to use clever chemistry and a much different design style.

Is that a speculation, or do you have a more concrete idea about what needs improvement and how? I'm especially curious about the 'much different design style' part. Could you elaborate that?

I heard of one intriguing alternative to photo lithography. Microfluidic channels in a plate (injection molded). I saw a couple research papers in 2021.

I think that long, tedious, vapid text is AI written. Pithy, deeply insightful materials I assume are written by humans.

These days, I just delete and move on if the "article" doesn't deliver interesting and meaningful content within the first half page or so.

I think Deno's management have been somewhat distracted by their ongoing lawsuits with Oracle over the release of the Javascript trademark.

I started out with Deno and when I discovered Bun, I pivoted. Personally I don't need the NodeJS/NPM compatability. Wish there was a Bun-lite which was freed of the backward compatability.

Ironically, this was early Deno - but then adoption required backwards compatibility.

I'm in a similar position.

I use Hono, Zod, and Drizzle which AFAIK don't need Node compat.

IIRC I've only used Node compat once to delete a folder recursively with rm.

In regards to Deno, to me that means their business is not really flying and they need this kind of distractions instead.

Amount of people at big corps that care about their lawsuit, and would switch their IT guidelines from node to Deno due to such heroic efforts?

Zero.

What do you dislike about having node compatibility?

The bloat. I prefer lean designs with plug-in modules for additional functionality. Not only do unused sub-systems take up memory, but they also increase the potential attack surface.

Removing the licence and/or authors from a FOSS project would generally be a violation of the licensing terms. The tool(s) you use don't change the legal principles.

Of course, the big AI companies blithely ignore moral and legal issues.

RGB LEDs (e.g. WS2812) connected to an ESP8266 and running microPython are great for experimenting. I have several "installations" that respond to broadcast datagrams (UDP). Let your imagination run riot. Add sensors, even MIDI interface.

I do doubt that you could actually discern 16M colors. But even many thousands is entertaining.

Vibe coding in the hands of competent, experienced developers provides amazing leverage. For example, whipping together utilities to perform domain specific tasks. Of course, it could be done the conventional way but why bother when your AI "junior dev" can whip it up in minutes.

Instead of downloading various open-source utilities and finding none does exactly what you require, you can have AI build a bespoke program, just for your specific needs.

Is the consulting company actually named somewhere?

If you are a government procurement manager, you certainly would want to know where the biggest kickbacks come from.

Using Advance72 (made by Sonova) has BlueTooth which makes using a phone a breeze. The Hearing Remote app allows me to override the audiologist configured settings for volume, listening modes and equalizer.

IMHO rechargeable models are not worth the extra cost. With a typical 5 year replacement cycle the batteries will no longer hold the early levels of charge. 312 batteries are cheap and easy to carry spares.

I struggled with C++ after coming from C.

Then I read Alan Kay: "When I invented OOP I didn't mean C++". So I explored Smalltalk, loved the environment, hated that deploying apps is a pain.

Tried Go, because Google ...

Now mostly JS because it's everywhere and Python for the batteries.

I continue to find it staggering that managers in corporations have so little understanding of information technology. Hubris and the Dunn-Kruger effect have totally eclipsed any critical thinking abilities.

The silver tongued sales persons who wine and dine the decision makers continue to make out like bandits selling snake oil.