The Closest Thing We Have to Alien Technology

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Strong rec btown · 2026-05 · on “ASML's Best Selling Product Isn't What You Think It Is”

For those interested in ASML, and how much engineering goes into being able to make EUV lithography work reliably at scale for 3nm nodes (by hitting individual droplets of tin with highly accurate lasers and turning them into plasma!), I highly recommend this recent (Dec 2025) Veritasium video about them: [this video] For more: [LINK] (There's something incredible and downright "alchemical" about the fact that the reason our sand can "think" is because we use light to vaporize tin which then carves intricate glyphs into the sand!)

Recommends jiggawatts · 2026-01 · on “AI Coding Assistants Are Getting Worse”

ASML's secret sauce is not that secret or uncopyable. The Chinese are already working on their clone of the Twinscan tools. Veritasium recently made a good video on the ASML machine design: [this video] The outcome may seem like magic, but the input is "simply" hard work and a big budget: billions of dollars and years of investment into tuning the parameters like droplet size, frequency, etc... The interviews make it clear that the real reason ASML's machines are (currently) unique is that few people had the vision, patience, and money to fund what seemed at the time impossible. The real magic was that ASML managed to hang on by a fingernail and get a successful result before the money ran out. N

Recommends joncrocks · 2026-01 · on “Apple Is Fighting for TSMC Capacity as Nvidia Takes Center Stage”

Do you mean AMSL? There was a great video recently on the company + techniques used for cutting-edge lithography. [this video]

Recommends terlisimo · 2026-04 · on “Making RAM at Home [video]”

The whole process was deep magic to me before I watched that video. It didn't seem less magical after I've watched it. More so, if anything. Asianometry[0] has a number of videos on EUV lithography that cover some of the mind-blowing advances in the years since. Veritasium[1] recently also made a video on the subject. [0] [LINK] [1] [this video]

Recommends random3 · 2026-04 · on “The World's Most Complex Machine”

Veritasium has a nice video about it [this video] Obviously, there are a lot of reasons why. But it boils down to having the vision, the belief and the strength to follow through over many years. It's important to not confound vision with random Kool-Aid. Instead it's grounded in research. That research is itself grounded in a strong vision and belief — it got laughed by the entire physics community at the time: > 'people seemed unwilling to believe bending x-rays, and they tended to that we had actually made an image by regard the whole thing as a big fish story Now contrast this with the current academic reality — "publish or perish" and the reality of venture financing and corporate culture th

Cites lloeki · 2026-02 · on “Nobody knows how the whole system works”

> This is an important distinction because there are things like microprocessors, which no single person knows how to make. But also: no single person could alone build something that has anywhere near the same capability I recently watched this: [this video] The levels of advanced _whatever_ that we've reached is absurdly bonkers. It seems to me that at some point in the last 50 or so years the world went from "given a lot of time I can make a _crude_ but reasonably functional version of whatever XYZ in my garage" to "it requires the structural backbone of a whole civilization to achieve XYZ". Of course it's sort of a delusion. Maybe it's more about the ramp appearing more exponential than ever.

Cites measurablefunc · 2026-02 · on “The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday”

Good point. OP was saying "no one knows" when in fact plenty of people do know but people also often conflate knowing & understanding w/o realizing that's what they're doing. People who have studied programming, electrical engineering, ultraviolet lithography, quantum mechanics, & so on know what is going on inside the computer but that's different from saying they understand billions of transistors b/c no one really understands billions of transistors even though a single transistor is understood well enough to be manufactured in large enough quantities that almost anyone who wants to can have the equivalent of a supercomputer in their pocket for less than $1k: [this video] . Somewhere along the

Cites m4rtink · 2026-02 · on “ASML unveils EUV light source advance that could yield 50% more chips by 2030”

IIRC from the Veritasium video[0] there is actually some hydrogen gas flowing at quite a high speed though the laser chamber to carry away the tin debris so that it does not accumulate on the mirrors. [0] [this video]