I'm honestly rather envious. I guess my 'sour grape' is that the lack of funds and opportunity for me to do this is what lead me to go into software and then on into Machine Learning which I do think turned out for the best. Making electronics like this, while still difficult, is far easier than it used to be and I do enjoy it as a hobby in a way that I probably would not have as a career.
It is no doubt an incredible achievement. I don't like the 'anyone can do this' when that clearly isn't true - it comes across as a humble brag and seems to be a strong part of hustle culture. I would much prefer 'anyone with a decent amount of money and a high enough intelligence can do this', or 'this is now far easier to do than it has ever been'.
I do like the idea of MIT being a beacon to the best and brightest and I do think that the lack of a level playing field means that many otherwise talented people miss out on that opportunity. Perhaps what I would really like is for the world to have more MITs but I don't know if that is possible and I worry that attempts to do this would undermine the quality of MIT. So perhaps I should be content that MIT exists as is and that some people get to go there even if I did not - we all benefit from the fruits of their labor. My university was a top tier university renowned for harsh grading and I was still rather disappointed by the quality of my peers and I worry that the quality at universities in general has since declined further.
Cheap and high quality small batch electronics and hardware fabrication is rapidly changing the world in a way that I think few people understand. It used to be that you had to have a decent size company to do this kind of stuff and that company needed capital investment, layers of management etc. So the cost of bringing a widget into the world was really expensive, risky, and took a long time. The only way to make that money back was to do things in bulk and sell a lot of them which meant you had to be sure there was a sufficient target market. These days a single person can design and fabricate a single item for comparatively very little. And if they want to make it accessible to the rest of the world there is no need to build a factory, just upload the plans. If it's a popular design in all likelihood someone in China will produce it in bulk at commodity prices. The speed of commodification has become so fast that it's practically instant. There is a bit of a phenomena going on at the moment with 'high tech overproduction' where it is claimed that China is intentionally over producing high tech goods to undermine Western markets - it's my view that they're ahead of us on the commodification curve. As manufacturing also manufactures the manufacturing tools the commodification process is a self reinforcing cycle.
It is no doubt an incredible achievement. I don't like the 'anyone can do this' when that clearly isn't true - it comes across as a humble brag and seems to be a strong part of hustle culture. I would much prefer 'anyone with a decent amount of money and a high enough intelligence can do this', or 'this is now far easier to do than it has ever been'.
I do like the idea of MIT being a beacon to the best and brightest and I do think that the lack of a level playing field means that many otherwise talented people miss out on that opportunity. Perhaps what I would really like is for the world to have more MITs but I don't know if that is possible and I worry that attempts to do this would undermine the quality of MIT. So perhaps I should be content that MIT exists as is and that some people get to go there even if I did not - we all benefit from the fruits of their labor. My university was a top tier university renowned for harsh grading and I was still rather disappointed by the quality of my peers and I worry that the quality at universities in general has since declined further.
Cheap and high quality small batch electronics and hardware fabrication is rapidly changing the world in a way that I think few people understand. It used to be that you had to have a decent size company to do this kind of stuff and that company needed capital investment, layers of management etc. So the cost of bringing a widget into the world was really expensive, risky, and took a long time. The only way to make that money back was to do things in bulk and sell a lot of them which meant you had to be sure there was a sufficient target market. These days a single person can design and fabricate a single item for comparatively very little. And if they want to make it accessible to the rest of the world there is no need to build a factory, just upload the plans. If it's a popular design in all likelihood someone in China will produce it in bulk at commodity prices. The speed of commodification has become so fast that it's practically instant. There is a bit of a phenomena going on at the moment with 'high tech overproduction' where it is claimed that China is intentionally over producing high tech goods to undermine Western markets - it's my view that they're ahead of us on the commodification curve. As manufacturing also manufactures the manufacturing tools the commodification process is a self reinforcing cycle.