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0 pointsgary_01y ago0 comments

Our universities are decent, I'll give you that. Great for educating folks like Andrej Karpathy so they can go work for American tech companies, or doing research that can be used by American tech companies.

Also, bringing up Blackberry to make Canada seem relevant kind of has the opposite effect.

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walterbell1y ago· 2 in thread

> bringing up Blackberry to make Canada seem relevant

The topic of this subthread is not relevance, it's engineering culture.

Canada produced a device that was used by the U.S. President, plus countless executives who could afford any device of that era. It was such a specimen of engineering excellence that you can pay in 2024 to retrofit an original Blackberry keyboard onto a modern iPhone, i.e. no one has yet surpassed that physical keyboard.

U.S. tech companies continue to recruit from U of Waterloo.

gary_0OP1y ago

This is exactly the complacency that's such a weakness of my country. Canada had one company that made a splash 20 years ago, and that's good enough?

I guess it's fine that engineers will virtually never move from the US to Canada for better pay and more interesting projects, and always the other way around. It's fine that if you ask a Canadian kid to list off apps or tech products that are cool, they won't be able to think of a single Canadian one (most of them won't even have heard of Bombardier). It's fine that our telecoms are some of the worst and most expensive in the world, that this lack of competitiveness and desire for excellence extends to just about every sector of our economy, and Canadians just roll over and take it. It's fine that the brightest students at our universities will leave for other countries with more opportunities and lower cost of living. It's fine, because remember BlackBerry?

walterbell1y ago

It's not about Canada having one (or N) successful companies at any point in time, it's that Canada has a long history of innovation followed by assets going missing. The reason for mentioning Blackberry, Nortel and Instant Pot is "remember NOT TO MAKE THOSE MISTAKES AGAIN".

AI mentioned upthread should be relevant to kids. Besides the foundational early work at U of Toronto, there is at least one Canadian AI startup ($3B+ valuation) with global investors and enterprise customers. They have US offices but HQ remains in Canada. Tenstorrent ($1B valuation) silicon startup recruited chip legend Jim Keller (designer of Ryzen & more). Canadian ATI (GPUs) remains part of AMD.

There's a fantastic woodworking tools vendor that's been around for 40 years, earning kudos for both products and company culture, Lee Valley Tools, which sells to both Canada and US customers.

The multi-millennia history of engineering includes the history of military innovation. If Canada is going to be compared to anyone, Finland is a more natural comparison than the southern neighbor with 10X population and 30X military budget.

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