Sethupathi Balakrishnan
@bsethupathi
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design, technology and everything in between! spent summer at LSE / arranging rectangles @Cadence twn / prev @Qualcomm mostly rants / observations
Joined June 2010
Kindness > Honesty > Clarity > Correctness > Efficiency. - Jeff Erickson (Prof. of CS, UIUC).
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this guy is a giga chad. speed ran what i learnt in 2 years in 2 weeks. i am precisely doing this in my office. i'd recommend this guy to come work with cadence/qcom/google (cpu team) anytime.
Here's me playing with my design in the EDA tool.> I can zoom in and look at the individual cells and transistors.> I can selectively hide different metal layers to get a sense of how everything is connected.> I can view energy density, component density, etc. on my design
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@aviralbhat Privileged Parents -- Privileged education -- Higher Risk Appetite -- More choices. Not everyone has it @aviralbhat. Either way, it was a nice read.
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@MajmudarAdam np. i am pretty sure you'll have a ton of things going on. if at all you're interested in pursuing this at a corporate setting, lmk, i'll ask my hr to contact you.
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@dylan522p dude, the single member team from china. he is an ultra giga chad. he quite literally decimated / destroyed ispd. in hindi we say, maa chod diya.
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@striver_79 While I hope that the situation improves, I must say that I'm indebted to Pepcoding YT Channel for teaching me Advanced Data Structures and Algorithms.
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@protosphinx Slightly disagree here!!. The Americans still have all the items that are of supreme importance in the Semicon Industry. 1/ EDA Software.2/ IPs.3/ Advanced R&D. They outsourced Mfg. long ago. Now, they want it back because of US-Twn-China issue.
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@onlymadhoo True! Experienced this myself!! It took about 2-3 months to get all the documents in order!! . My VISA however, got approved in 2 days!! . P.S -- I live in Taiwan. Hence, the process here is very fast.
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@Akshat_World Power of DeFi is truly amazing. I sent money from Taiwan to India using Block chain. I was charged a very negligible fee for the transfer. I felt so happy!!.
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@GigaBasedTrad apple park is not that bad tbh. how else would you want a corporate office to look like?.
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same with history, computer science, math and finance.
I have more interest in physics, maths and data science today than when I was actually studying it. Tells you how soulless our education delivery is.
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@thekaipullai Contrary to this, I still regret the fact that I was taught nothing about finance during schooling.
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We had a great interactive session with @chetan_bhagat yesterday!! On how to really prepare for life changing entrance examinations. It's was very insightful and thoughtful. Thank You @chetan_bhagat !!.
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@Dev15719948 @dylan522p the winner of this ISPD routing contest was from peking uni. in china. only one member and one advisor. that’s the team and they seemed to win by a huge margin. in terms of parallelization, run time, code quality etc. more info on the contest here —
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visited tsmc r&d center today. thanks almighty for this opportunity. it feels surreal!!.
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this guy keeps delivering. (his political leanings aside). he is exactly doing what i'd do if i were wealthy. ray of hope.
A few years ago, during the pandemic, a Zoho customer and fan, Mr Abdul Gafoor, who owns Mr Light Global, a major own-brand distributor of electrical and electronics products in the Middle East (and now in India), came to see me in Tenkasi with a box full of hand held tools from
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poland has great programmers. they have great math olympiads. samsung, google have their polish offices where a lot of heavy lifting is done. (search, ai products etc.). this also applies to google zurich.
Poland absolutely crushing it as far as software teams are concerned, outperforming the global average by 50%. 🚀🇵🇱
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coming to tw has been life changing (quite literally). my job allowed me to play and i feel i played a little too much. eu, jp, hk, dxb, dli and the uk within 3 years of work. happy!! i know there’s more to do, but glad so far. not that bad after all.
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there are so many concepts in math that i am encountering for the first time!! . man, these are being taught in jee classes. sad that i didn't sit through them, glad that i am at least learning about them now.
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man, i love twitter. proving my point again. my addiction to this platform is absolutely justified.
Uploaded the blender file of this bad boy onto my dropbox (link in replies). I hope it is of some use for the fam. Be fruitful and multiply!
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@PriapusIQ I'm guilty of doing this. My legs usually are very sore after a long flight journey.
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One of the tech innovations that I detest!! It's the QR code in restaurants for the menu!! It completely destroys the experience!! I would still prefer to look at the physical menu!!.
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@protosphinx There's a reason why TSMC is #1. It's very much due to the "military" style of operations. The Taiwanese here in TSMC work very very hard [which is often a bit too much for any foreigner let alone the Americans].
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@parsh_kothari This idea is too optimistic without giving enough thought to ground reality. Setting up a Fab costs almost $20B. We are simply not good with precision engineering.
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same thing happened to me in tw. lost my phone on a cab. got it back in 2 hours. these are the reasons why i always want be in a high trust society.
Dropped a wallet with a lot of cash on a railway station in japan. Got it back in less than 10 minutes thanks to the police and lost/found dept. We were very very impressed. I really didn't expect to find it and I'm pretty sure in most other countries it'd be gone forever.
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I feel @coursera is criminally underrated. There are so many "high quality" courses that are available for free. I benefitted immensely from it!!.
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Slow growth is good growth!! Earlier these start-up valuations were scary. Now, they are feeling the heat as the VC's have become extremely cautious w/ their funding. They're infact exiting. PayTM mall .Invact metaversity .Klarna . All are in trouble!!.
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@protosphinx Even I remember flying Paramount! Man, the flight was beyond classy!! It had some finesse!!.
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Doing *exactly* this!! I've been doing for about 3-4 months now!!.
If you’re alone in a new city, and can afford to splurge a little bit, start hosting themed parties. Invite people over for board games, movie nights, book readings and so on. Slowly your social circle will grow, you’ll start getting invited, and you don’t feel lonely anymore.
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To the people who are aspiring to get into IC Design, let me tell you the sweet spot to be in. Try to get jobs in companies that are S/W oriented but want to venture into IC Design. Eg. Google.Microsoft.Meta.Amazon.
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@SarahHinkfuss Did this and still no progress! Hence, I gave up. It seems that the only way to make the VC/PE folks to take me seriously to earn that coveted Ivy League MBA!!.
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Experienced the same attitude with US/Taiwan interviewers!! They treat you as equals!!.
Just had a technical round with a US startup (principal engineer), and the interviewer was extremely polite, cracked a few jokes which helped with my nervousness, and helped me when I was stuck. We meed more interviewers like these in India.
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context — these kids have built some truly phenomenal and mind boggling projects. go rule the world kids!! it’s all yours.
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@VinayKrKatiyar Hi. I'm Sethupathi. I'm an Engineer. I know a thing or two about IC Design, Algorithms, Productivity and Finance.
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small wins builds momentum, .momentum builds confidence, .confidence leads to more action (yes, there will be failures), .action brings results,.results get your happiness hormones triggered.and that's how you avoid being unhappy/frustrated.
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@RichaaaaSingh taste is also a problem (for me at least). i'd prefer sth else (like ladoo, kaju katli etc.).
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I came to Taiwan for the Tech and stayed for the people!!.
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saw recent interview by @MohnishPabrai X @ShaanVP. i resonated on a few things that he told and i am seeing it happening in my corporate career. i'm a part of r&d team and there's quite literally no enthu from other team members on how the business is functioning.
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on the ai noise -- . while everyone is excited about ai and how it's boosting productivity etc., i'd like to address the elephant in the room. fact --. this ai hype is not translating to more semicon. job creation. the job market in the US/India is hyper competitive.
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@MajmudarAdam has shown what all are possible with tools like gpt, claude, gemini at your disposal. thx. for that. also, this again proves my thesis of "being at the right place at the right time".
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ok, a teeny tiny update. i'll be attending @LSESummerSchool this summer on computational methods in financial mathematics. i'll be in london for a while. i'm looking forward to what London School of Economics has to offer.
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I am bullish on ETH because -- .1. It is used in smart contracts. 2. NFT transactions happen through ETH. 3. I have myself transferred money to India from Taiwan using Block chain N/W (Escrow). The transaction fee was almost negligible. #investing.
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taking more risks (this is a huge privilege) and mostly a function of being at the right place at the right time. and we all know taking asymmetric risks leads to asymmetric returns. you can take more risks if you have a minimum guaranteed life.
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I respectfully disagree what is being said here -- . In @cadence/@synopsys/@Theteamatx/@DeepMind, most of the items mentioned here are used. 1/ DP - Yes.2/ Tries - Yes.3/ Segment Trees - Yes.4/ Two Pointers - Probably Yes.5/ Tree traversals - Yes. Graphs, Geometry, FFT - Yes!.
In my entire career as a software engineer, these are the number of times I used:. 1. Dynamic Programming : 0.2. Tries: 0.3. Segment Trees : 0.4. Two Pointer Method : 0.5. Tree Traversal : 1. But we prepare for them in every interview. What a waste of engineering talent.
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ok. i can clearly see china slowly leap frogging into eda. they’ll soon completely crack it and make better versions of cadence/synopsys tools.
@dylan522p dude, the single member team from china. he is an ultra giga chad. he quite literally decimated / destroyed ispd. in hindi we say, maa chod diya.
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If you're poor, you're first priority should be to get out of debt/poverty etc. Everything else can wait. Marriage, Girlfriend, Family.
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People listen to you ONLY when you win. So, go WIN first!!.
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i wasted so much time to remove --> ' (single quote character) from a file using sed. apparently we should use - .sed -i "s/'//g" file.tcl. i used .sed -i 's/\'//g' file.tcl. lesson learnt. again the guy behind me helped. wth.
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🇹🇼 ftw! fyi, i am working in @Cadence 🇹🇼 and tsmc is 50 m away from my office where the latest N2,N3 semiconductor chips are produced. 🙂.
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i’ll say it. i didn’t quite enjoy airchat. yeah, @naval is hyping it up. it got my attention for about 2 days. now, back to twitter. and i don’t want to hear voice notes. thx.
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I'm hearing that @YouTube is playing 3 Ad's these days!! Glad that I took YT Premium 2 years back!! I don't know if I became very productive, but I at least did not waste time on Ad's.
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EDA (SDE's) don't WANT to do Physical Design and Physical Design Engineers are not capable of developing EDA Algorithms. The future belongs to those who do both. They are irreplaceable!!.
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@AseemTiwari8 @MohnishPabrai @ShaanVP no, it's not about just that. i think it is about the attitude.
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Fucking delusional! HSR works beautifully in Taiwan/Japan/EU. In fact TSMC was possible because of the HSR.
Rail made sense a while ago. May be an obsolete concept today. Too inconvenient, too expensive compared to modern public transit ideas. It’s a shame other systems are not considered.
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The bar played some really nice music!! Metal/Rap/R&B etc. Apparently, this bar is where a lot of foreigners in Hsinchu for their weekend getaways.
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You can get literally anything by spending enough time. For eg. If you want a good job, spend time acquiring relevant skills. If you want to crack an exam, spend time with mock papers. If you want a good physique, spend time working out in the gym.
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i have "seen" this playout in large corporate organizations. also, that explains the attitude these women have. one can say, it's their time, let them have it, but but --.you have no idea how many doors were shut for me.
Pretty privilege is very real. If you don’t think so, you’re only lying to yourself. People simply notice you more - it translates into more connections, more opportunities, more “luck”.
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The world is more connected than I could imagine!! Sometimes it's scary good!!.
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mera situation kaafi unique hai. yahan ki taiwanese ladkiyon ko indian pasand nahi hai aur indian ladkiyon ko main taiwan me hun, ye pasand nahi hai. 😢. maybe that’s how it is.
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note to self -- . write detailed reports and documents.
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oh man, tw really screws over the undergrad kids. they’re not paid well. at times i feel, life is not too bad and i am indeed a little bit lucky.
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Thank You @divya_sharmaMD Ma'am. (For supporting me).
Your circle is supposed to be proud, not jealous.
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you are only as good as your peers in office. if you’re in either end of the curve, natural selection will do it’s job. quality is often propagated top down than bottom up. luck plays a major role in your career. stay humble.
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