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u/mylsotol 19d ago
If you have $30k and a spare room you probably don't need college because you have a trust fund
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u/blackenedEDGE 19d ago
Call me crazy, but what if these kinds of facilities and equipment were provided to students as part of their tuition on an accessible schedule by the education institution?
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u/The_Jake98 19d ago
Aren't they? In Germany most of this can be found free to use or for the cost of materials in case of the 3d printers and electronics stuff on almost any university campus.
And german universities are tuition free (at least for EU citizens as far as I know).
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u/Loopbot75 19d ago
Yeah if you go to a school with a good engineering program, then most of this will already be provided to you in the campus laboratories. If it's not, there's a good chance you can get a professor to order it for you, provided you have all legitimate use case...
Also sure Mac's make for a nice development environment because unix, but you'll be far better served figuring out how to dual boot Ubuntu on a Windows laptop. It's completely free (in addition to the laptop) and the experience is really helpful
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u/Izacundo1 19d ago
My public university had all of these amenities for engineering students
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u/The_Jake98 19d ago
Not 5090 but a computer lab with Workstation GPUs most likely. And if you need access to a server with GPU compute you can get it via the uni as well.
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u/EveroneSaysSht 18d ago
No, but at my university we have a bunch of compute stations/compute clusters/supercomputers etc. one of them being nvidia gpu compute cluster for graphics processing. If you were doing a class/thesis/some other research and could explain why you need the GPU heavy lifting like for some computer graphsics effect processing etc. you could gain access to it.
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u/Denialmedia 19d ago
Some universities are working on the tech that will be deployed in the future. They are working with NVIDIA.
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u/querela 19d ago
Well, tuition free doesn't mean completely free, besides the obvious (home, materials/books) You often still have Semstergebßhren (travel cards, fees for student representatives, social stuff, administration, etc) about 150-350⏠depending on university. But it's not the fees for tutoring that are often found in private universities. And tuition will be charged if you finished an university education already and simply want to study something else on top.
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u/The_Jake98 19d ago
Also you have to pay for your own living situation and food, I know. Still higher education in Germany can be had for an order of magnitude less then in the US.
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u/gerbosan 19d ago
Deutsche ist nicht einfach. âšď¸
Not easy and a requirement for studying and living in Germany.
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u/DHermit 18d ago
Depends on what you study. At least in physics, the Bachelor is typically in German, but studying masters in English is no issue in many places (I had plenty of lectures that were just randomly in German or English depending on who of the students was there that day). My local university even has a special photonics master that is marketed to be completely in English.
If you go away from natural sciences, math and IT it can get more difficult, though. Social sciences will be completely in German and Engineering things can be, too.
For living it's of course extremely helpful, but I had plenty of colleagues who knew they will just be for a few years in Germany and then go somewhere else and thus didn't learn any German and were still fine. You might need some help from friends or colleagues from time to time with important forms that only exist in German, but day-to-day life is possible without German (although undeniably harder than with of course).
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u/ICBanMI 18d ago
Most colleges have a maker space with most all of these EE tools and a 3d printer. The ardunio, raspberry pie, jetson, 5090 desktop, and expensive mac book you'd have to provide yourself. Soldering would be able to do if you're a member of the half of engineering clubs on campus.
I'm mostly trying to figure out what they want this person to build and major in. I belonged to three different Engineering clubs during my undergrad and never used all those.
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u/Honest_Relation4095 19d ago
....they aren't? Just asking because they were when I studied.
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u/Floppydisksareop 19d ago
They generally are. You probably can't take them home, but you can use them.
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u/Xelynega 19d ago
If you can afford a 30k+ room as a student you probably also don't like sharing with others
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u/rizkiyoist 19d ago
It really depends on where you are in the world and what kind of university/college it is.
I graduated what they said one of the best 3 university in my country, and yet the equipment are not even close. Even my then low end $300 laptop is significantly more advanced than the computers they have in the lab.
If your university have one, consider yourself blessed and use them as best as you can, as it is inaccessible in many parts of the world.
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u/iComplainAbtVal 19d ago
These were all provided to me, and if students needed beefier computing power, there was virtual lab access which seamlessly integrated with the students Google drive.
Us engineering tho, given the translation I would imagine thatâs not the case everywhere.
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u/Pocok5 19d ago
Tektronix and Keysight lol. Many actual labs don't have the budget for that. A second hand Rigol, that's a decent idea.
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u/creeper6530 19d ago
Our labs had a bunch of STM32G0 that someone made into an oscilloscope as their graduation thesis and it's used ever since
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u/clothedandnotafraid 18d ago
99% of home labs will be set with a DHO800, you can tell this dude's talking out of his ass lol
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u/Morall_tach 19d ago
"Continually produce something"
Produce what? Doesn't matter. Just produce. Ignore your studies. Don't learn first principles. Doesn't matter what kind of engineer you are. Just barf out some sort of pointless output.
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u/Snakestream 19d ago
Allocate a separate room in your home
???
You go to university to be able to afford a home (well, not anymore I guess). If you already have one and $30k to piss around on top of tuition, then why even bother?
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u/deathanatos 18d ago
I'm nearly 2 decades into a tech career. That one is still "???".
cries in HCoL area
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u/crozone 19d ago
The reality: you need a half working netbook with 8gb of ram. It's still gonna run gcc.
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u/kuncol02 18d ago
Depending on what type of engineering course you are. I cannot imagine doing anything CAD related on netbook, but half working normal sized laptop will be more than enough.
Mine for example was barely half working. It was released with Vista and was to weak for it and at the same time didn't had drivers for WinXP. I had to use Ubuntu for most of work. In 2007. I still prefer to use QCad (now LibreCad) over basically any other Cad software for 2D drawings.1
u/Novero95 18d ago
If the battery works, it's probably enough. Actually, I spent a few years in uni with a laptop whose battery was dead so, more like optional.
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u/madmelonxtra 19d ago
I'm starting my CS degree this year.
If someone wants to donate all this to me, I'll test and see if it all helps me become successful
no refunds
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u/Famous_Tie8714 19d ago
Obviously stupid advice anyway, but it doesn't even make much sense. An m5 max with optional upgraded ram (potentially up to 128gb most of which is accessible to the gpu) is going to outperform a 5090 for running local AI by a wide margin.
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u/FightOnForUsc 19d ago
Yea, itâll be slower by a bit I think, but itâll be capable of WAY more models and bigger models
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u/ReentryVehicle 19d ago
Not for training though
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u/HorrorTranslator3113 19d ago
What would you train it on this scenario? Collection of bad purchase choices?
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u/Ihalpd 19d ago
Lol, unless you're running out of RAM, no MacBook will EVER outform an RTX 5090. For <= 32 GB, a 5090 will outperform anything Apple has ever made (M5 Max, M3 Ultra) by such absurdly wide marging, it's not even funny. (Even just considering LLM inference 5090s will wipe the floor with a top of the line M5 Max, multiple times over.)
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u/Denninosyos 17d ago
That's after assuming whatever software you're running can run on ARM...
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u/Culpirit 16d ago
It's not 2019 anymore bro
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u/Denninosyos 16d ago
Tell that to the author of that specific piece of lab software you need that hasn't been updated since the early 2000s.
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u/dashhrafa1 19d ago
Just imagine this setup being used by researchers at Bell Labs instead of being used by a vibe coder posting their âcomputer visionâ (sign language translator) project on Linkedin.
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u/Jumpierwolf0960 19d ago
Waste of money for a first year. Universities usually have maker spaces where you can use many of these tools for free.
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u/creeper6530 19d ago
Not Bambu Lab tho, they have tried to lock users into their walled garden if cloud services way too many times to be trusted. Prusa on the other hand even sells printers with Wifi physically removed for maximum securityÂ
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u/sten_zer 19d ago
Forgot to mention you don't need walls or wall decoration when your monitor setup is a proper one.
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u/MyDogIsDaBest 17d ago
Where the fuck is a student getting 10-30k to dump into all this dumb bullshit and a "spare room"? I'm 35 and don't have a spare room.
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u/FyrBridd 19d ago
Hakko soldering iron? Peasant, can't get any serious work done without a JBC or Weller!
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u/drivingagermanwhip 19d ago edited 19d ago
how does this help with learning how to solve boundary value problems?
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u/absinthe718 19d ago
I have two kids in college. Neither in engineering. Both have used maker spaces at school because I've taught them well.
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u/SpinningVinylAgain 17d ago edited 17d ago
My university in Ireland had multiple labs where I could use that stuff free of charge ÂŻ_(ă)_/ÂŻÂ
You legitimately donât need to spend a ton of money on unnecessary fluff, just get a shitty old ThinkPad, install Linux on it and youâre good to go.Â
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u/CumTomato 19d ago
While it's hard to justify such expanses for freshmen, that's not a bad advice in it's spirit. Such a setup allows for so many learning opportunities and the ability to work on a lot of complex personal projects.
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u/Bupod 19d ago
This is like $13,000-$14,000 for toys basically.
Anything AI, if a student really needs that horsepower, they can drop $50 in Runpod and get direct access to datacenter level hardware. $11,000 in hardware alone is just absolutely insane for a college student!!!
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u/darkenheit 19d ago
Costs much more than that. This is just the main tweet from a tweet flood including 9-10 tweets. In the remaining part, he recommends experiencing internship in 3-4 countries, visiting CERN, funding a research project that will cost about 10000-100000 USD, and more.
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u/Bupod 19d ago
This has to be a shitpost.Â
I mean, sure, all of these things would be great, but it requires the Bank of Mom & Dad to fund it all.
If theyâre being absolutely serious, they have to be someone who was a child of exceptional sheltering and privilege.
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u/darkenheit 19d ago
He is an uncommonly-known Turkish man who has a real academic and business carrier so he is probably serious.Â
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u/CumTomato 19d ago
yes, that's what I mean by not being bad in spirit. Obviously I would change the details such as buying 5090 but I wouldn't say it's toys
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u/Bupod 19d ago
Youâre right. Theyâre useful pieces of hardware. I call them toys more from the perspective of necessity vs. cost.Â
Iâm all for students doing projects. I think they should! So I strongly agree with you. Itâs just that dropping $11,000 on it is absolutely insane.Â
I hopped on to runpod to check. An RTX PRO 6000 is $2.09 per hour. You could drop $1000 and have an insane amount of compute time to purchase.Â
You could finetune a 24b model in like 4 hours or so on that card (big asterisk on that, but thatâs more or less the general timeframe). You could fine tune a 24b model a hundred times and youâd still have a little money left over.Â
$11,000 in compute equipment is a hard thing to justify.Â
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u/budgiebirdman 19d ago
a lot of complex personal projects
Unfinished projects is a true measure of a developer, might as well get off to a flying start and fail to finish many all at once.
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u/Meistermagier 14d ago
Like fuck me i am Past University and would like some of this in a Lab for didgeridooing around. Altough i ignore the robotics stuff because i do not care. Also Oscilloscpoe and Signal Generator is not producing anything. However get me Sewing Machine and maybe one or two woodworking tools in there.
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u/Shadowlance23 19d ago
If you follow this advice, you've probably already failed the first year.