Everything Is BOM: Bill of Materials Encyclopedia | Hacker News Reader

Everything Is BOM: Bill of Materials Encyclopedia

bomwiki.com

58 pointssebg21 comments

Missing entry for 'asml machine' :)

Actually a lot of this is garbage AI hallucinated info, eg. https://bomwiki.com/item/drone-docking-station/ authoritatively combines USB devices with fanciful drone installations.

Similarly page for "Drum machine" says that "Sidechain compression" is a "Sequencing modes" on the drum machine, and is used (on the drum machine according to the text) to sidechain compress a bass line in a DAW, but the relationship would be the other way, not to mention it's not a "sequencing mode" at all.

Seems bit rushed in the parts I already know, so guessing that applies to all of it. The idea is quite neat though, maybe makes more sense as a humanly edited and curated wiki instead of "automatic publish of 10K articles no one reviewed".

These are specifically not Bills of Material, but general (LLM-generated, it seems) lists of the kinds of parts involved in things. No specific part numbers are indexed, and things like "Bare PCB" are not usefully-broken-down; FR4 is quite different than what you'd use for a high-frequency RF board, so saying bare PCBs are "$1 to $200" is not at all helpful.

I like the idea implied by the name, but this is more like a "Vaguely How Stuff Works dot com" than that.

Well that soured quickly. A wiki is only as good as the human experts who volunteer to contribute towards it. I’m not sure there are any in this one?

but but agents bro

who needs volunteers when I have tokens?

Seems kinda silly to name such a huge project after a meme that will be stale in a few years, but then, this was likely all generated by AI, so it doesn't matter.

EDIT: Expanding on this a bit, because I want this comment to be more productive and less old-man-yells-at-cloud.

When I saw the link I got curious. It reminds me of the old skdb[0] project and of Open Source Ecology[1]. The idea is cool: a DAG of civilization from David Gingery[2] basic tools to jet planes and turbofans and rocket engines! Imagine that!

If it was real, it would be world-changing. The creator would be a personal hero of mine. But it's not real. It's a vague suggestion of the real thing.

Who is the creator? No-one knows. These vibeslop websites never have an About page, or contact info. No-one is putting their reputation on the line, regarding the quality or accuracy of the content.

[0]: https://diyhpl.us/skdb/

[1]: https://www.opensourceecology.org/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Gingery

> never have an About page, or contact info. No-one is putting their reputation on the line, regarding the quality or accuracy of the content.

It's a useful litmus test current to quickly evaluate new websites/services/projects, if there is no names/profiles attached to it that you can find some history about, it's well likely to be hastily put together with not much concern for quality. People who care about quality usually end up proud of the thing they make public.

Tangentially, this is why (despite being an extremist for privacy) I've somewhat soured on Internet anonymity. Very few people are using their anon status to further discourse, i.e. like Publius. Mostly it's just people who want to sever the reputational thread between their output and their person.

I think it's fine to be pseudonymous, like Gwern, because while your government identity is protected, the pseudonym is a persistent store of reputation across time.

What meme?

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/everything-is-computer

It's not like it's in the url, they could easily change the page title

I was able to find the about page after some digging... https://bomwiki.com/about/

Really cool! I wonder what their data source is

It's a wiki

Presumably they should have said “sources” but that’s not a helpful answer

Seems like a LOT of AI generation.

I wonder where this wiki format would be useful vs asking an AI directly.

The few pages I've looked at seem to be mostly (if not completely) AI hallucinated, with semi relevant photos from WikiMedia linked. Despite the name there is no way to edit the articles or even log in.

Also the "BOMs" are provided for such generic objects as "Excavator", which makes no sense. Different excavators will be made of different parts. If you want to get the general idea you can ask an LLM yourself instead of going to that website.

This is cool! Shameless plug, I started bomquote.com 15+ years ago with the thesis "everything is a BOM". We provide design firms & hardware teams design-to-MFG services including line item quotes for their entire BOM. Hard to believe I haven't come across this site by now.

Very cool idea! I'm no longer in firmware but my previous employers could have used this at the time - it was all speadsheets and phonecalls at the time

What is the point of this? Apparently a minivan can be built using 170 parts.

At that level of abstraction, this is useless.

That is the question. Someone spent a non-trivial amount money to produce this pile of LLM-generated nonsense that will now pollute online searches for years to come... and I can't think of any reason to do it unless they're either profoundly confused, or plan to slap some ads on top.

I particularly like that almost everything contains "1 x wire bundle", including a city bus and a potato planter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com