How Waterloo became Silicon Valley's favorite engineer talent farm
kyliebytes · x · 2026-09-19
Kylie Robison's longread investigates why Bay Area tech keeps saying Waterloo 'creates cracked engineers.' Highlights include the Hacker Fab club building a makeshift chip fab in a closet—a magnetron sputtering machine costing under $500 vs. $500K for a professor's lab rig—without course credit and with professors deliberately kept in the dark, plus a chess game with Geoffrey Hinton along the way.
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