notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #216

In the roughly 15 years it took the US to finish its first two Westinghouse AP1000 reactors at Vogtle, China built four of them, then they reverse-engineered the design into its own Hualong One, and now they have 10 Hualongs running with at least 37 more on the way. China knows that the way to make nuclear cheap is to make a lot of reactors over and over.

whyisthisinteresting

The Century Edition

Toyota built it with no assembly line, and no robots, only craftsmen. Wood paneling was cut so the grain runs continuously across the cabin, the dashboard clock was crystal glass. Under the hood sat the only V12 Toyota has ever put in a passenger car, a decision Toyota took for its smoothness.

dwarkesh.com

What will computer chips look like in 2045?

What we've learned is that you don't want to do too much innovation in one node, because the more innovation that you do, the more complex it becomes. While you'll be able to get that to work, you need to hit a certain schedule, and that's the schedule that your customer ultimately wants.

notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #214

engineers coaxed those few devices out of a toolset built for chips, and each one takes years of process work to get up and running. Atomic Machines wants to go after a whole new swath of sci-fi products now that they've made it easier: gears the size of a grain of sand, robots that work inside the body, cooling built into AI chips, even a device that runs instant blood tests — Holden argues that her dream was possible, but needed a manufacturing technology that didn't exist yet.

noahpinion.blog

Roundup #89: It isn’t X, it’s Y

The key here is that China doesn't mine most of these minerals — it refines them. Other countries dig up the ore and ship it to China, and China uses a bunch of chemical engineering to turn them into usable materials for industry. Most of the world shipped their metal refining to China, because it's a dirty, capital-intensive, low-margin industry. But now as a result, China controls a bunch of key industrial chokepoints.

ai-supremacy.com

The State of Chinese Physical AI

Half a century ago China was among the poorest countries on earth. Today its companies ship more humanoid robots than the rest of the world combined, supply many of the components other robot makers need, and are spending billions to teach these machines to think.

whyisthisinteresting

The Streaky Vinyl Edition

This is a much smarter idea than inventing another artificial flavor. The company takes the unavoidable residue of production that's normally discarded or cleaned away, and sells it as a mystery. A transitional record is the same thing, except it gets listed on Discogs, with somebody claiming that 'the black streaks make it sound warmer...'

whyisthisinteresting

The Saturday Selection, Vol. 116

An American engineering student spent months visiting the heads of German factories ("the masters") to understand how they think.

notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #205

All of which means that Elon seems to be going after ASML and TSMC at the same time by building a particle accelerator. Now that's vertical integration.

notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #202

A system built by a four-year-old startup went from prototype to a live combat mission, a month after another Corsair performed the first known rescue of downed pilots by an autonomous boat. Proving that a startup can build autonomous boats that are useful in combat is huge, but proving that they can build a great American shipyard again might be even bigger.

notboring.co

Senra Systems: Harnessing Human Skill

Within skilled assembly, wire harnesses are perhaps the trickiest to get right, or at least the trickiest that we need a lot of, the trickiest without which nothing else turns on. So if you've been trained to heatseek bottlenecks at the system level and throw everything you've got at them until they're knocked out and you can move on to the next one, then wire harnessing is the logical place to start. And it turns out you can't automate it, yet.

notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #201

Getting any one advanced reactor to criticality by July 4, 2026 would have been considered a minor miracle, but getting four with more to come means that there's going to be competition. Whoever can deploy most quickly, with a product that customers want, at the best price, will win. The field shifts from science to manufacturing.

whyisthisinteresting

The Real McCoy’s Edition

The goal was never to deliver a replica, but rather each style's ideal final form: The piece the wartime factory would have made if it hadn't been racing to meet a quota.

notboring.co

America Spins on Westmag

In the Electric Era, maintaining design leadership without manufacturing leadership is not a coherent strategic position, and one that gets less coherent the better you believe AI will get.

wired.com

Foxconn Ransomware Attack Shows Nothing Is Safe Forever

Famous for helping build Apple's iPhones, Foxconn just suffered another cyberattack, highlighting the perils of warehousing some of the world's most valuable data.

noahpinion.blog

No, America is not in a "stealth manufacturing boom"

What I do see is the continuation of a decades-long stagnation in American manufacturing.