Dare mighty things!

All writing by topic

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... [Read More]

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... [Read More]

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... [Read More]