My current goal is to get a job as a developer and work towards combining my career with my revolutionary activity. But I’d like to build skills that are as applicable as possible to digital revolutionary struggle. Any thoughts?
Can confirm, also some parallel path for training and spreading knowledge in the industry is desperately needed. Like for continuing education on applied electrical engineering. So much knowledge, practice and the like is siloed off and proprietary in each individual tech company. Lots of the smaller government contractors are staffed with engineers who are shockingly incompetent as a result, it's like the blind leading the blind, repeating rules of thumb from 1989 hardware electronics.
Definitely. Something as simple as the basics for "how to get a custom pcb made" world be good to have somewhere independently controlled and with up to date information for people interested in turning their arduinos into something mass produced
The number one thing I've seen there is that in a lot of companies it's common for the team doing the schematic and the layout to be totally different. like to the degree where the design engineers will often act as if they're above working with the proles (layout techs). This is especially common in older east coast companies with roots in MIC work.
It's something that's definitely been segmented since they were doing this shit with wire wrapping and literal drawings done by drafters. It's mostly division of labor, like how anyone can be trained to use solidworks. I elaborated here
I typed up a whole rant about that in particular but I hit something wrong and lost it and also my edible is kicking in, so I'll get back to you.
My chocolate is kicking in, and I'm a high level pot mage. .... lemme try to channel that lost idea.
The production pipeline from schematic to device is horribly fractured in corporate practice. This practice is unsuitable for a distributed group of revolutionaries. In order to arrive at usable devices for direct action one must vertically educate individuals on the entire design chain and pipeline, allowing them to then specialize and develop the skills of others as work flows through the design pipeline. In order to accomplish this a process of deontolgization and re-delegation must take place over the whole of the design, production, and supply chains.
We are talking about a very large re-organization of knowledge. A technological revolution of sorts.
How'd i do?
Pretty much, it really feels like there's just so much knowledge that's just left inaccessible inside corporate structures. I've worked with a bunch of interns by now and pretty much all of them were learning from first principles. So their knowledge about how PCB design process works was only going to be informed by the corporate internship they happened to be able to get. It's not a great indicator for overall scientific progress if things are this disconnected from reality.
Re: hardware design specifically I'd say doing layout reflects a proficiency with a CAD tool, much like doing 3D modeling, it doesn't really require any specific electrical engineering knowledge but that definitely helps. Tools like xDxD/expedition are actually set up so the person doing the schematic can plug in all the design rules per net like impedance, max and min trace widths and the person doing the layout can have everything set up and not require someone breathing down their neck. For stuff like turning an arduino project into a custom PCB you probably don't need much or any electrical engineer involvement, as long as long as you're not doing anything exotic or novel the process is pretty simple.
It's still important work, but in the context of companies doing stuff like consumer product development, industrial equipment development, or SBIR mills/MIC contractors, it's something that is increasingly farmed out. It's definitely something that engineers can and should be familiar with, especially the entire process for ordering and assembling PCBs. The entire PCB fab/assembly process is something that I only really see being done for industry and get-rich-quick kind of crowdfunded projects. Probably more just that the knowledge isn't out there and there's a monetary and tool barrier to entry. (https://kicad-pcb.org/ Highly recommend this open source project)
Open source hardware projects in general are kind of anemic. I'd like to see more sorts of open hardware development around shortwave radio, you can even get chips that do encryption off the shelf!
Yeah, there's a lot of support for doing atmel/Arduino projects and nothing for even beginning to approach anything deeper.
Often times knowledge of firmware is also relevant (mostly in C). For example hooking up a memory to a microchip, which protocol do you choose, how big does it need to be, how fast can it read/write all depend on the specific application. That sort part selection requires knowing how you plan on using it in the firmware as well as how fast you intend on using it.
There will then be the nuts and bolts of what supporting hardware is needed, but every manufacturer will include implemention details for their chips. Reviewing the latest data sheets is a decent way to keep up on modern techniques too.
Just post bad takes and get people mad enough they start posting long rants with a good bibliography.
The revolution will require contributions of all types and magnitudes. Everyone has something to contribute. From each according to their ability and so on and so on. :zizek-ok:
There are many fields in technology which will prove useful in building a new world. Radio/Wireless communications, networking/routing, software development, systems administration, digital publishing, guerilla marketing and agitprop, black hat and white hat security diciplines, cryptography, automation, manufacturing, reverse engineering, DIY repare, recycling and re purposing old and abandoned equipment and that is probably only scratching the surface.
Just like no specific ideological sect is going to make the revolution happen on their own, no particular technological discipline is going to unlock the door for us. It is our responsibility to contribute what we can. To be a part of a trend which moves things in the direction of the future we would like to see.
With that in mind, focus on something which interests you. If it interests you enough, you can take the grill pill and excel at it. If you can excel at it, you can take that talent and focus it on improving people's lives.
If you want to fuck the corporations, start chipping away at the semiconductor oligopoly by giving a voice and exposure to alternative processor architectures. You'd be quite literally seizing the means of computation, and the means of computation are the means of production in the digital struggle.
@thisguyfucks appears to be a good start if you are looking into learning good fundamentals - he's expressed will to share
I'm a veteran software dev and recently quit my job to study security engineering full time and to try to get an entry level job doing that.
The problem with software jobs is generally always that you're doing shit work (relatively speaking I guess it isn't, but I'm sick of it) to make rich people richer. Or in many cases, you're on a death march of a shit project that's stupid and pointless and doomed to fail and you're wasting some rich guy's money, but in either case you're attempting to enrichen the rich. Software is fucking expensive and only the rich can afford it.
The biggest things in my opinion to further social good in software:
-
Build tools that allow uncensored and anonymous communication . This is a huge rabbit hole but it spans a lot - let people browse the internet privately, send messages private, consume information privately. Right now virtually all web traffic is monitored and stored. Between your ISP, the servers you're hitting (Amazon's), maybe even the VPN you use that claims to not log anything (one was recently caught doing this) - there is very little privacy. There are some tools that allow all of this in bits and pieces but none are mainstream.
-
In conjuction with the first point, create software platforms that prevent coordinated inauthentic behavior. Bots. As technology improves it becomes more and more impossible to tell bots apart from real posting. It's going to get worse and worse and people with billions of dollars will be clicks away from massively influencing general opinion in the same way it's currently being done by buying media and news outlets.
-
Work in furthering AI. AI is going to be the lynchpin of moving past scarcity and having the human race continue to exist past biological bodies.
The first two points are difficult to make any money doing. There's no money in federated, private, anonymous services. And there's a super high ceiling for the skills needed to work on these platforms and problems. Those skills can get you related work but probably not for anything socially "good".
I think AI is the best route. There is money to be made (again, enriching the rich) but the expertise allows you to contribute to the community as a whole, too. But AI is the sort of field where it's pretty necessary to have a PhD or similar and that's not for me.
I chose security for selfish reasons. It's technical and my background helps and I find it the most interesting option of my employment avenues.
Another option: get a do nothing job that pays a lot and wastes someone's money. They're out there. I've had jobs where I did virtually nothing and no one cared. It didn't pay great personally, but the high paying ones are out there. I've read stories from people who work at Google making $300k+ a year and they admit they do virtually no work because they aren't interested or motivated to do it. If you can manage the balancing act of working hard enough to get hired and then knowing how to bullshit and not actually do any work, you can do your small part in draining money from shitty orgs like Google
-
