On the flip side, he was using up millions and millions of company dollars on his singleminded pursuit with no obvious results to show for it. Had things gone even a little differently, things would've gone very differently indeed. Hard to imagine most companies tolerating an employee flat ignoring instruction to change to another task when their old task was proving fruitless.
Hindsight is clear enough here, but in context it was pretty nuts what the guy was doing.
Makes you wonder how many great inventors of revolutionary tech were shoved off their path by dumb luck.
Probably far fewer than never had the opportunity to realize they could be great in the first place.
If greatness is one in a billion we have 8 (boy would the richest like us to believe that!). If it’s one in 100 million (I’m bad at math. I think it’s like) 80. Or if it’s one in a million, that’s 350 in the US alone. I’m inclined to lean toward the later, after all, if there aren’t a lot of greats waiting to be called up, how the fuck did we beat the odds by such a large margin??
It’s an extreme example that perfectly illustrates how profit is extracted from employees by the employers. He didn’t have any leverage to get a larger share of the profit from his labor, as is the case with most employees. You could call it toxic behavior, and it is, but it’s the expected behavior, the behavior incentivised by the system.
Sensible employers would go, holy shit, this guy delivered a moonshot and wants to keep going. Maybe let’s give him a teensy fraction of the money he made us, to encourage more of that from him and others.
That too is capitalism. That would be plain self-interested greed, and also reward the guy who did all the work. It was stupid business to spend millions of dollars to not employ that guy.
The real issue is that when someone in power is a complete idiot asshole, there’s fuck-all people can do to fix that. That systemic issue is honestly more of a problem than the money itself or the power itself.
Again: this was a bad decision, even from the perspective of raw greed. Paying the guy enough to keep him at the company is also capitalism. So it’s not useful or relevant to just say ‘that’s capitalism’ when a business makes a fucking stupid decision that loses them money.
It also shows how capitalism hinder innovation. It doesn’t create it. The potentially innovative path took money without any guarantee of creating profit. It’s bad business to be innovative. Capitalism prioritizing profit never chooses the best path, even if it gets a good ending eventually despite itself.
I’m not sure how you come to this conclusion. For every example of a capitalist avoiding risky investments, there are 100 capitalists betting on the next innovation.
Venture capital. Heard the term? AI, Metaverse, crypto, web 2.0, .com… The tech space alone is full of capital making (stupidly risky) bets. They also make good bets too, like PC, search engines, online shopping (oh, look how the tech giants came to be).
I get it, capitalism bad. But this is just a nonsensical argument.
The ratio might not be 1:100. It might not even be tilted towards the risk takers. Also some if not most of the examples you mentioned are based research done in universities and defence agencies. That research is typically a much riskier endeavor. That’s why the private sector doesn’t even attempt it and only shows up to productize or build upon that research once the risk for not turning profit is minimized.
Sure, it happens sometimes. However, the goal is never innovation for the sake if innovation. It’s innovations to create profit. The idea is you invest into one of these ideas that then creates a monopoly that can practice anti-completive behaviors to create more profit.
For example of something better, look at research universities. They are normally outside of capitalism and create innovation primarily for the goal of advancing knowledge of a subject or to solve some issue. It’s rarely purely for profit to sit on the thing after it’s created and ensure no one else can use it.
This is something that’s often poorly understood. There’s no profit in a perfectly competitive market. That is, according to orthodox economic theory, the most efficient market conditions are the ones where no participants make profit. From that you can derive what you said - that innovation is sought for moving a business away from perfect competition by gaining competitive advantage, which is anticompetitive! 😆
I was working for a place that was the market leader in a certain niche of simulation software. Their simulation was about 10x more efficient than their competitors. However, that version of the software is strictly off limits for the public, and made a version which they sold with a sleep statement so that it was only 1.1x faster than the next best solution. That way they could remain market leaders any time the competitors released a better version. Even though many systems rely on growing simulations to simulate bigger scenarios that could help save lives.
Specifically free (libre) licences, as permissive licences allow corporations to improve/adapt the software without contributing back to the community.
I only work on software with GPL compatible licences now.
Yeah, I guess the original statement was too broad, but any FOSS using a GPL license effectively is. I guess not anti-capitalist though, but un-capitalist. It doesn’t try to remove capitalism, it tries to be seperate from it.
Capitalists are motivated to innovate if there’s undistorted competition. If they don’t they will lose new markets. For exemple Microsoft and IBM failed to build the start of general public web search and Google won. More recently, Google failed the race to release the first general public LLM, OpenAI backed by Microsoft did.
There are probably as many examples of this as there are of companies ruining innovation for stupid reasons.
Though, what better system that a regulated “free” market do we have successfully tested? A bunch of political leaders deciding alone of what the companies should do? How does that prevent irrational decision that stops innovation? How do you prevent them from just doing whatever benefits them as seen in many authoritarian regimes that were supposedly socialist?
It’s a capitalist company that funded him to go to Florida and bought him the machine to do his work.
Where do you think he would get the 3 million the company gave him? It’s the company that spent that money to bet on innovation and they got a return on investment
Capitalism never chooses the best path, but neither does any other system. We haven’t invented a perfect system, and it’s probably impossible. Sounds like a strange critique since we’ll never reach perfection
Yeah where he went to a university not a capitalist company to learn. Then persisted in his research despite the capitalist company wanting to shut him down for not being profitable, then that company specifically and consciously screwed him over and didn’t reward him for it. Then tries to screw him over once again when he got a different job because of it.
The CEO of the time who actively went against the conventional wisdom of capitalism to fund a person he had know for decades and personally knew how capable he was.
Then as soon as that CEO left the personal connection was gone and typical capitalist mentality took over and tried to shut it down
Just like almost every big discovery this happened in spite of capitalism, not because of it.
That could happen in socialism, where a government grant runs out and research is no longer funded because the person in charge of funding science changes.
Socialism isn’t “when the government does stuff” it’s better thought of as when companies become democratised, so while it could still happen you have more chance to appeal to average people rather then purely answering to the CEO chasing profit margins.
Capitalism never chooses the best path, but neither does any other system. We haven’t invented a perfect system, and it’s probably impossible. Sounds like a strange critique since we’ll never reach perfection
Just because nothing is perfect doesn’t mean we can’t call out stuff for not being it. Sounds like a strange critique since we’re supposed to improve on things.
You’re right that nothing is perfect. How does that make critique invalid though?
Capitalism prioritizes profit. That’s it. We can imagine systems that prioritize any number of things; public welfare, innovation, creativity, equality, etc. Nothing will be perfect, but I’d say any goal is better than the selfish goal of profit seeking. Do you disagree?
Where do you think he would get the 3 million the company gave him?
As the story describes, it was the founder who was acting emotionally that funded him. It was no different than a noble patronage of someone like DaVinci in medieval times. When the capitalist son in law took over, he was cut off. It was only Japanese culture from Japan’s pre-capitalist era that saved his job.
The founder was acting in the company’s interest, that’s why you fund research.
He was actually not cut off either, he wasn’t fired when he continued his research despite being told not to. He still received a salary and was able to use the equipment purchased with company funds
There is a ton of entertaining and informative content that doesn’t show up in multiple separate feeds for me. Because it doesn’t get pushed by the algorithms.
I don’t get the dislikes, it is a great question. But as someone above, I think the cost was to dicover a way to make blue LED at all and make it scalable, then it’s just like any other product.
Thanks - and yeah I absolutely pre-suppose that much. I was just hoping for a more specific answer. There could be just as interesting of a story about how it went from prototype —> ubiquity. I personally don’t just wave that process off and say “meh economies of scale.” Production scaling is often quite innovative too. And many lab innovations die on the vine because they can’t cross this chasm. So the fact that this one could, after being such a holy grail for so long, is something I would love to understand more.
Haven’t watch the video yet, but I remember how impressed my step dad was with the blue LED when we got our PlayStation 2. I was like, yeah great whatever let’s play games, at the time.
Just a PSA for those who don’t know… no shade against Odysee… I’ve just encountered folks here who don’t know this:
Veritassium and many others on YouTube make their living by the advertising shown on YT. If you’re a premium member, even more money goes to the creator when you watch their content. It’s this very money that allows independent creators to create more / better content!
If they weren’t comfortable with not getting YT ad revenue, they wouldn’t be uploading their content to alternative sites.
Relying on YT as the gatekeeper to your entire livelihood also has a cost. It’s not trivial to calculate but I imagine it’s greater than the loss of AdSense money. There’s a reason many people who rely on video content creation to survive hedge through the likes of Nebula, Floatplane or, indeed, Odyssey.
I actively avoid buying anything with a blue LED because they are so obnoxious. So bright. Why do I want to read by the light of my HDD? Does this video explain why they have to be like that?
Maybe if you have a separate wing of the mansion to do computing stuff it is not annoying. But if like a lot of people you have electronics in your living space, these lights are extremely disruptive.
It seems that can’t really be dimmed… I had to give up on a couple of blue backlit alarm clocks because there is no way that the time can be visible without illuminating the whole area around them.
For whatever reason, red is the best one. I would prefer another color aesthetically. For whatever reason, red is the only color that does what it has to do and nothing more.
This is actually a biological phenomenon that most humans experience! Our eyes are more attuned to greens and blues rather than reds, so green and blue light appear brighter as the cones in our eyes are more sensitive to those colors. Similarly, our cones are less sensitive to red so it appears darker.
There’s also a physics component to this as well since red light has about half the energy (twice the wavelength) as blue light. However, since there’s a difference in energy, the engineer must take that into account when designing multicolor LED applications so as to keep a level light intensity when changing or blending colors.
Luckily my device screens can all be turned off, closed, put face down and otherwise turned off when not in use. Unlike indicator lights on the routers, APs, HDDs, PCs, mice, powerbars, extension cords, radios, headphones, USB cables, ACs, microwaves etc etc etc. Either totally unnecessary to have a light in the first place, or a subtle light could do the job just as well.
Excellent counter example to anyone claiming that we need patent and copyright to innovate.
This man made nothing on his invention and was not motivated by money but fame.
There are endless of examples of how those who do things for money hold back the creativity that leads to innovation. This is one of them. It almost didn’t happen because his pursuit was not seen as profitable.
And if he had been granted a patent for his invention, he would have been fairly compensated for his work by being able to license production to companies that had the means to make them at scale. OP seems to think this scenario is an example of how patents should be abolished, but it’s a perfect example of why we have them in the first place. And that reason is so that rich people don’t fuck over comparatively poor inventors.
Your cognitive dissonance is why we cannot improve this system. Patents cannot both be responsible for his lack of profit from his invention and how he would have been fairly compensated.
Patents do exists and we was not fairly compensated, therefore patent do not solve their intended problem.
We live in this reality. Not whatever rose colored version you think could exist if we just get the correct tweaks in place.
At some point we need to stop trying to adapt the concepts people came up with hundreds of years ago. Created in a world that no longer resembles our own.
Consider how contentious the issue was that they redefined to included it in the constitution. The consider what other contentious issues were also included in that same document, i.e. the three fifths compromise.
Sure, but the company fronted the millions of dollars required to develop the technology. The investment needs to come from somewhere.
That doesn’t have to be a private company, though. We need public funding that retains the patent rights, if not just to make the invention free from licensing costs to manufacture.
The insane thing about our current system is that we do have public funding, but private companies wind up with the patent anyway
The company didn’t invent it. A person did. The company almost stopped it from being invented. They didn’t spend millions inventing this. A person spent tens of thousands of hours inventing it.
That the funding is only available from a company is a result of the patent system. It does not spur development, it perverts it. Any ideas to the contrary are propaganda.
People have been inventing shit longer than corporations have existed. People have been inventing things without any guarantee on return on investment for most of human history.
Capitalism is bullshit and the capitalization of ideas harms humanity.
Correct. With or with patents and with or without copyright, it eventually would have been invented.
Edit: Curious if you watched the full video. It clearly indicates that all corporate efforts were heading in an opposite direction and that the path this inventor took was considered to be not profitable and not worth the investment by everyone else working on this. The company he worked for wanted to shut down his research and focus on following the herd. No one else was close to his level of progress and capitalist interests almost scuttled this invention.
Yes, I watched the video. Inventing stuff is obviously very expensive and I doubt anyone could have done it without being financed in some way.
Why are you so sure that the eventually hypothetical inventor wouldn’t have patented it? Inventing is expensive and one would presumably want to make the millions spent on the project back and isn’t your time worth anything?
I am happy that the invention wasn’t delayed considering how much it has changed the world.
I mean, the video even showed that there WERE notable people other than him travelling down the same path, his first few leaps were copied off them, he just figured out the last few himself
Yeah it’s pretty bad and nobody talks about it. Nobody researches the effects of patents on our global civilization. I suspect the practical role of patents is to actually retard innovation - something gets improved or invented or most of the time just engineered to work better and monopolization or just paperwork makes it too expensive for wide spread adoption. This in turn helps prevents disruptive technology from making large scale investments obsolete - instead of having to adopt and improve your factories you can continue as before because any innovation will be slow and also priced to be around as expensive as existing solutions. Or the patent can just be bought. And even if an inventor has noble intentions, starting manufacturing yourself is a totally different skill set so like most startups often fails and then the patent gets sold off. Innovation becomes a commodity.
This is my logical conclusion but it’s speculative. I suspect researching negative effects of patents is a somewhat “taboo” topic for scientists to research.
In regards to climate change this becomes… genocidal. We have hundreds of thousands of industrial processes that rely on fossil fuels or certain levels of energy. With all the before mentioned effects this basically made a timely response to climate change impossible. Every little improvement to existing processes is patented and maximized for profit. Basically we never had a chance.
Before there were blue LED, the indicator light for full beam was a blue tinted incandescent bulb. My parents had a Volkswagen Passat from the 1980s (?) where the usually blue indicator light for full beam was a green LED, since blue ones were not invented back then.
My favorite thing about widely-available blue LEDs was the effect on TV scifi.
Watch the Star Trek shows made in the 1980s and 1990s and the tricorders, alien gadgets, and other props were always twinkling with red, yellow, and green LEDs to look futuristic. A generation later and every single hand prop on 2000s Doctor Who, Torchwood, etc. glowed and twinkled blue because the LEDs had just become cheap enough for prop makers, but weren’t yet widespread in day-to-day life so the viewers were seeing something strange and unusual.
Now every color of LED imaginable is just common and whatever, but for a good stretch of time glowy blue became the standard “scifi” color just because that particular tech happened to turn up at that particular time.
They’re still rgb plus maybe yw using colour mixing, so depending on the quality, tuning, physics and our perceptionof light, not all colours are as nice or bright.
Oh I was making a joke cause it sucks at purple. Which is red and blue combined generally. But that’s not really how the RGB color cycle works as far as I understand in some extremely cursory Wikipedia reading lol
IIRC, it has something to do with the fact that purple sort of doesn't actually exist. As I understand, purple is basically your brain going "idk wtf it is but it's not green"
More specifically, it's because purple fires your red and blue cones, but not the green one. Normally, as green is between red and blue, anything that would trigger those two also would trigger green. So when it doesn't, that's when your brain goes "well I guess it's not green???"
I’m not sure that LEDs were the thing that kicked off the trend. They made it easier to implement, but even in the 80s and 90s, you had things like Tron that might have kicked off the futuristic look with neon lines/tubes.
This was an yet another glorious episode from veritasium.
I hope we get well past UVC LEDs. (i.e., shorter wavelengths) UV LEDs are already available. Unfortunately, this progress will stop before X-ray light. With +1 KeV energy, you pretty much must blast off the electrons from the atoms to emit X-rays, which an x-ray tube already does. Or by peeling off a piece of scotch tape.
I imagine that lithography for integrated circuits would be an application, assuming you could make an appropriate photo-resist. The shorter the wavelength, the smaller the possible feature size. Current lithography relies on constructive and destructive interference between wavelengths to create super small features.
As far as “light” it’s already capped out, then. Going shorter there’s only x-ray and then Gamma ray. Gamma ray lithography sounds bad-ass and dangerous.
Light = energy, shorter wavelengths= higher energy. Blue light has a shorter wavelength than red light. UV has even more energy. X-Rays have a lot more energy. For reference in the visible spectrum were talking about maybe 1-4 eV (this may be wrong, I’m too drunk to look it up rn).
If we want to produce light, the aim is to find an energy gap that has the exact energy gap that corresponds to the wavelength we’re interested in. Typically this corresponds to an electronic transition, i.e. an electron “jumps” into a higher orbital, on its way down it will emit the energy difference as light.
2.1 X-Rays rn are produced by accelerating electrons onto a metal plate with high voltage. The impact of the electron “rips” out an electron in the close vicinity of the nucleus. Another electron will take the place of that electron, the energy gap associated with that process is large, which is why it produces X-Rays.
If we want to produce LEDs that emit in the far UV range we have to find large energy gaps in materials which is difficult. We still have to have a way to get the electron across the energy gap using electricity.
X-Ray LEDs are probably not realistic, as the energy of x-rays is so large that we have to rip out electrons from the close vicinity of the nucleus… which is already what we’re doing with X-ray tubes.
Maybe not in a flashlight, but the scientific industry would be very pleased with them. Sterilize water and all surfaces in a second? Flash with 200nm light.
Handheld battery powered X-ray devices exist and are widely available. I used to work with those. In Germany you need a permit to operate them. www.thermofisher.com/order/catalog/product/…/XL2
What’s wrong with the current UV tubes? Sure, the smaller ones take about 5-10 W to get the job done, so maybe an LED version would be more efficient. If you’re using UV to keep a massive pool clean, then you’re obviously going to be need more of those bulbs, and they can add up to hundreds of watts quite easily. Is that really a big problem though? Having a pool isn’t cheap, so electricity spent on UV probably isn’t going to be your main concern. Making it cheaper is always welcome, but are UV tubes really that big of a problem?
I mean they aren’t instant and have to be within a fairly short distance of the thing you want to sterilize in order to work because they are absorbed by the air. Something like a pool would be practically impossible as water also absorbs UV and a pool is too big to penetrate all the way through just from the sides or bottom. It only works for drinking water because you pass said water through a tube that must be fairly narrow.
Oh yeah and an X-ray could sterilize all the way through an object, not just the surface. Very useful for making things like microwave meals.
More efficient compact X-ray generators would be pretty huge for science work. We run the diffractometer in my lab at 2 kW and it still takes hours to get a good quality scan
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