My colleagues were stolen by vulture capitalists
My colleagues were stolen by vulture capitalists
It’s time to talk about the rotting ecology of the computing industry.
Over the past few weeks, a lot has been coming together in concretely defining a first rendition of the Anodyne computer I have been working on for the past few years, originally with Charles Rosenbauer until his untimely split back in ‘23. I have found many off-the-shelf parts to use and am stepping up to answer all of the engineering questions about this machine to achieve the best feature set I can.
Learning about a new subdomain of one’s field often involves tangential learning, and after watching an absolutely first-class production of an introduction to silicon wafer development by a YouTube channel called Branch Education, my mind was awash in the potentials and implications of some day integrating this part of development into the production of Anodyne as well. I had floated the potential for this a couple of times to Charles when I was still collaborating with him, but was rebuffed each time as he said it would not be practical to get the competitive lithographies he finds necessary in a reasonable timeframe. I remain sceptical about that considering the implications of my theoretical work on this architecture question, and therefore am still open to designs on conventionally uncompetitive lithographies. But I digress.
Clicking around related videos led me to discover the channel of Sam Zeloof, an American electrical engineer who blew up on YouTube in 2021 for making his own integrated circuits in his garage with the help of a few donated dated lithography machines and a lot of booksmarts. It was interesting to me as it made clear the feasibility of doing such things for my own project’s purposes, and my husband and I are seriously considering it as part of a larger second-stage warehouse build that would include civil metalworking tooling and ample floor space, replacing my storage unit workshop that’s only accommodating of basic electronics work now. Then I tried to browse his weblog and wiki, referenced in the descriptions of many videos, only to find they died to link rot. And then I found his socials… and was painfully reminded of all that is wrong with this industry that I began to discover in ‘22 and understood by the end of ‘23.
The unfortunate thing for my readers is that there is nothing to be directly pointed to that you can legibly say, “there, that thing, that was where he went wrong!” The problem we are all facing here – which, to be clear, is the reason why you, the consumer or member of the general public, never see a god damn thing out of tech besides scams and AI slop – is a moral and cultural one.
As I related this unfortunate discovery to my husband on his way to work this morning, I recalled a difference in culture he related to me the other day between Indonesia, his home country, and our country, America. He told me that in Indonesia, younger generations have a much stickier pathos as generations, leading them to promote, favour and exalt each other within their own age brackets as opposed to those who are much older than them. They all seem to understand that old people just aren’t going to get it, and so the future depends on them and no one else, therefore the only sensible thing to do is seize it as a unit. Any kind of deference or compromise to older generations is a betrayal of their own future success.
Indonesians understand this, but strangely, young Americans seem to think it either doesn’t apply to them, or that they aren’t making a bad deal by putting on golden handcuffs from self-styled ‘investors’ with few friends and too much money. Their attitude is of a more solipsistic bent: “of course, but maybe…” and really, this is just thinly veiled greed. Indonesian millennials and zoomers stick together because they know they’re the only ones who will look out for themselves and make any meaning out of their lives. American millennials and zoomers, on the other hand, have been downtrending their planned retirement age where they will supposedly stop working entirely, bringing into question the very meaning of retirement.
I’m not sure how careers became so divorced from life fulfilment in the minds of the West, but it definitely happened here and it spells disaster when you get rich and find out that all the work you need to do to fulfil your dreams still hasn’t been done. That feels a thousand times worse when you realise you sold your shot at those dreams for money long before you had the means, and now you’re not even sure what you want to do anymore. This is going to make for a lot of terminally angry middle-aged people in 20 years.
It also recalled to my mind this 82-second nugget of wisdom from an interview of Jerry Seinfeld:
SEINFELD: In the seventies, this is the tragic turn of American culture. And this was explained to me by Mario Joiner who cracked this puzzle that I could not figure out what the hell happened. That money became everything. What happened because it was not like that in the seventies. In the seventies, it’s how cool is your job? How cool is what you’re doing? If your job’s cooler than my job, you beat me.
BRENNAN: And no one said, how much are you making?
SEINFELD: Oh, you’re doing okay. You’re making this? Yeah. Who cares? And Mario Joiner explained this to me. He said the eighties was the first time that young guys could make a lot of money fast.
Never existed before. Rich guys were Aristotle Onassis, Andrew Carnegie, shipping, iron. You couldn’t make a lot of money fast in those days. All of a sudden, everybody, all sharp eyes, in the 80s, could make a ton.
And it has poisoned our culture to this day. It’s poison.
As our discussion continued and began cutting into the time he had left to get to the time clock without being late, we reached a really strong synergy about what this autodidactic photolithographer amounted to and we began to characterise the nature of the loss inherent to him taking a bunch of investment money and sailing off for his supposed happily-ever-after into the sunset.
There are a lot of obvious problems with this naïve picture of a startup, and if you’re at all experienced with them or are a sceptic you’re probably well aware: lack of mission and direction leading to variously unhinged management styles that never get reality checks due to money being guaranteed by appeasing rich benefactors rather than answering to the general public as customers. The other big issue I noticed is his big name partner, Jim Keller. I know he’s a Jony Ives of silicon manufacturing, but you have to remember that the man is currently 65 years old. Why does a genius in his mid-twenties need him on his CV? Does street cred really count for more than the raw skillsets needed to get things done? Oh yeah, startups don’t have to actually do anything, so that’s right out. What does a 65-year-old man bring to the table besides his name? He’s already done all the great things he was going to do. He should be more of a mentor or coach for this kid, but instead he’s on payroll as a partner. This is contrary to what I was saying earlier about generational fealty being the key ingredient of meaningful success. The option here is more meaningless success that has to be dressed up with social fiat, because you can’t fake your way out of the fact that Jim Keller was doing simple stuff like this 40 years ago and his latest contributions were for architectures at companies that haven’t the slightest structural resemblance to anything that could be started up today. And therefore he just doesn’t know a lot about how to wrangle the industry from the outside as it exists today. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it makes you ask, “why is he here?”
A perusal of his company’s website reveals a very typical situation. As an ignorant outsider I am left wondering, “what do these people make? Is there any product or service?” The website mentions nothing of the sort. It just talks about how great they are, and then there’s a page with 11 job openings. Since I’ve worked at a startup before, I can take an educated guess and state they probably don’t even know what to work on, and also whatever clients they have had are too small or sporadic to be worth bragging about as successful startups love to do further down their landing page carousel. This all makes sense considering the computer hardware industry already has deep pipelines for ASIC designers to go from FPGA to pure play foundry contracts in a single step – their fast turnaround in highly dated lithographies has no market, especially when you factor in that major firms like GlobalFoundries aren’t even a part of the cutting edge anymore with EUV being the exclusive purview of Intel, TSMC and the Asian memory foundries.
No, it’s pretty clear to me that Sam’s foundry is probably supposed to be creating Anodyne, or something like it. This is not obvious to most people, but it’s pretty obvious to me. Anodyne is critically different enough from the existing incumbent technology that it has relatively limited potential to interact synergistically with the existing industry in the horizontally integrated way it must be. Anodyne is the kind of computer where it is so comparatively alien in design that it may be fruitful to have a free hand in larger lithographies rather than simulating an FPGA like everyone else does. And wouldn’t you know it, but this is the exact same tragic story with Charles. His profile claims he is working on “beating Intel at performance by 1000 times”, but just as with Sam’s Atomic Semi company, the evidence this is actually happening is scant. Charles is, however, getting paid to write a fantasy publication by the local tech mafia, and of course Sam has been handsomely bankrolled to have a cushy office in San Francisco proper, with tons of lithography machines at his disposal to make… nothing. By the way, for any native San Franciscans reading this, his office is located in Hunter’s Point. Laugh here.
This is where the poison Seinfeld was describing is coming to bear its nasty fruit. I was left at an impasse with Charles about why he was so hellbent on getting money by his own scraps, and there were points where I was somewhat alarmed as he got introduced to ‘investors’ who wanted to rope WebAssembly into the project as it would have synergy with their other investments. Louis Rossmann has a great personal story on why that kind of thing is usually a terrible idea, although I can’t find it at the moment. It’s about when he took investment money for his online business long before Rossmann Repair Group got on its feet and it nearly ruined him, leaving him to conclude he would have been better off not taking the money in the first place from purely a numbers standpoint.
Luckily I was present to rebuff such absurdities, but with me out of the picture Charles seems quite content to latch onto anything that has a dollar sign in front of it. So again, I ask, why? Like really. I have a house, sure it’s not easy to keep because I’m doing it alone, but together things only get easier and I still very much have it. What else do you need to build the computer? Is this not what it’s all for? I’m not writing this to get blown or woo some ugly rich person. I’m writing this because I want to make this computer a reality. Don’t tell me that you need to sell your soul to have a roof over your head, because I’m not buying that truism, any more than I believe some rich parent that they have to pay for private school like public school is the only other option. My mother homeschooled me with no job and zero wealth using her pension and a meagre child support payment of $400/month for two, and I have taken more financial setbacks in my mid-twenties than I would care to mention. I fared better than anyone else I know in spite of catastrophic losses of cashflow and mounting bills and debt, so no, you don’t need to sell your gift for a buck ninety-nine anymore than I do. It may sound corny and vaguely socialist, but really, money isn’t everything.
If you browse archival snapshots of Sam’s weblog, you can see that his announcement of starting his company in ‘22 is one of the most strongly received posts in terms of engagement. It seems that everyone agrees that this is by far his biggest event ever, his win condition even, and I’m just not seeing it because I’m not seeing any computers. If there are no computers, why does this matter? Are we just worshipping money or what? I know houses and cars are expensive, but you have to keep this shit in perspective: everyone affords shelter and transportation with varying degrees of difficulty. At worst even homeless men living in shelters take the bus to their temp jobs. You know what 99.99999% percent of people don’t have? Fully bootstrapped with zero-dollar photolithography skills. Calculus in your head out the wazoo. And fundamentally new theories of computing. It’s always been clear to me that trading gifts for such materials is one of the worst deals anyone could possibly make for themselves, maybe ever. It’s like a native American signing away allodial title for seashells. I still have a roof over my head you know!
My bottom line with all of this work is that it doesn’t matter if you’re not going to leverage it for your own benefit. I’m sure once upon a time starting a business was less of the act of self-irrumatio that it is today, but it’s pretty clear given the financial and social dynamics that creating a startup with outside funding from anyone in the business of handing it out is a surefire way to make sure your light never escapes your new comfy prison cell. In other words: if you’re not actually making the computer, or for some reason you no longer have the liberty and power to make the computer, it doesn’t matter. I’ve talked before about how bad the typical vulture capitalist from SV and Austin is, and Warren Buffett once famously said that you can’t make a good deal with a bad person. Are you smarter than Warren Buffett? Results show he’s right about this.
One of the big histories of computing is that of Apple Computer, with particular attention paid to the original partnership between Abdul Lateef Jandali (PBUH) and The Woz. If you’ve learned about this as I have you will know just as well that they were not exactly best friends, but rather really tight teammates who had an uneasy alliance because they shared a dream about the Apple computer we all exalt so much today.
We also know how absurd and uncertain this dream was at the time it was hatched. For many years Jobs lobbied Woz to build this thing with him, and it was difficult with him having no money. Woz actually went to work for HP for a while, and before Apple got big he was of the mind he would be far better off building calculators. He really believed that would be more impactful than the Apple I. Hindsight tells all, doesn’t it?
But it’s not the 1970s anymore, and as Seinfeld explained, that world they were young in—when what mattered was how cool your job was—is gone. Furthermore, we also now live in a globally interconnected age where everyone can see everyone else at all times, at least if they want to, and lo and behold, that is exactly what Sam Zeloof is doing on Twitter, bantering with all of the darling has-beens who live under the wing of the GayPal dotcom mafia. It’s a virtual Versailles where people are wholly insulated from the goings on of the outside world while still feeling so intimately connected to everything that matters (they’re not). The weblog is dead, but what lives on is his LinkedIn, his blown up YouTube videos, and a VC-backed corporate landing page about nothing. If this is what total life accomplishment looks like I must be dead and in Hell. At least pop stars live it up by popping champagne and revving Bugattis with models in the passenger seat.
This is the kind of societal landscape where Woz doesn’t just go to work for HP for a few years and reluctantly come back to try his hand at creating Apple with Jobs because it’s a cool idea that appears to his inner craftsman. This is a world where Woz has a much harsher falling out, and Apple Computer never gets founded, because Jobs understands things about the business world that Woz does not, and Woz cannot put his differences of opinion aside long enough to devote himself to the project of Apple. We all know Jobs was kind of an asshole, especially in the early days, but we also know there was a lot of nuance and even merit to that. He wasn’t one-dimensional in the world of the 1970s, but nowadays? He’s the easiest type of person to chalk up and throw away. Everyone is one-dimensional now on the Worldwide Web. Everyone is kind of fake, and this has terrible consequences for us all. I suspect this kind of thing is playing out in a thousand different instances right now in different industries and different contexts – a thousand four leaf clovers being choked out by dandelions.
I regard this as a kind of ecological disaster, or perhaps even a great social extinction event. There are a lot of talented people getting filtered out by whatever is happening to the social fabric here, and it is ruinous to the ecological diversity of our society. Importantly, ecological diversity depends on having many niches, as evolution flourishes in pockets that are selectively isolated from the greater system. In an ecology where everything is connected in potential to everything else, evolution stops, and dysgenic forces rule the day. It seems to everyone as if nothing is happening, or rather that everything that is happening is on their feeds, therefore there is zero pressure to grow and change as an evolving organism should. It’s quite obvious to me that this perception is not true – you don’t see everything, and you can’t. I don’t know why I understand this and certain others of similar intellect apparently don’t. It’s not hard when you are as dangerously intelligent as we are to parse this as a system and anticipate that in 30 years it’s going to be ruinous. I mean, that’s the innocent explanation anyway – the alternative is that they have other variables they don’t talk to me about, but I’ve no evidence to believe that and it still doesn’t explain a motive that counteracts the obvious loss implied in becoming a self-parody for your career. It’s a shitty options contract to exercise no matter how you slice it.
It’s clear to me that in a different time, people like Charles and Sam were supposed to share company with me, and whatever we work on was supposed to happen together. That’s not happening because of the imposition of rich boomers, predominating mobsters and a deafening information climate. This to me is a colossal shame that I can only be inspired to try to articulate so more people can understand that this is happening, as for now there is nothing else I can do about it.
In any case, I am pressing on to build out my workshop with others who I can collaborate with, albeit on other levels of the project. My latest small business idea is the most feasible ever, and it is poised to truly financially free me once I get it started, and can be grown to a point of affording me a house and a much larger workshop within which I could do electronics assembly, metalworking, woodworking, masonry, and even photolithography all at once with ample storage on-site at a below-market lease rate. One way or another I am going to get this computer built and keep an open path for the progression of the computer architecture, as I cannot build all it demands in the first version. There’s nothing else to do. There never has been anything else to do.