My notes on the thought-provoking book The Collapse of Complex Societies. Recommended to me by Eli Dourado, whose notes you can find here.
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All writing by topic
Precocious Young People Should Do Deep Technical Training
(Skippable Backstory) A few months ago, Tammy Winter published a thread of advice for precocious young people. My addendum to it was the following:
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Thinking through semiconductors — old nodes and AI chips
A project I’m working on forced me to wade into the discourse about semiconductors – especially the economics of older chip manufacturing processes and claims about the importance of bleeding edge processes for AI. I wrote this piece mostly to clarify my own understanding but I thought it might be...
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Inktober 2021
For Inktober I did a drawing not-quite-each day illustrating something that is useful/interesting to know more about. The topics were (Click name to jump to the image): Dyson Sphere How Learning a Field Actually Works Crystal Structures O’Niell Cylinders What Very Online Networking Looks like Molecular Vibrations Project Orion Research...
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Efficiency, Fat Ideas, and False Negatives
Before you even undertake the work to create a thing, there’s some assessment of whether it’s possible and how valuable it will be.1 (For some extremely nebulous definition of value — I’ll talk about that later). Some ideas take a large chunk of resources to assess (‘fat’ ideas).2 In other...
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