Chaos is the theme of the week

Chaos is the theme this week.  Each day’s news feels like it comes from the spin of a roulette wheel — I did not have “annex Gaza” in the pool.

So, why should this newsletter be any different?  Here is a grab bag of interesting things from all over the economy and tech industry.  

Raves

Construction Physics explains the electrical interconnect queue, which is actually a great look at pending electrical generation projects.  And there is a stunning amount of generation in the queue, almost twice the installed base.   Renewables are the dominant category — this is very optimistic news!   As the article points out, not all these projects will be built; historically, there has been a high abandonment rate.   But still, very hopeful.  The other interesting thing here is just how long it takes to get a project built and interconnected — it certainly seems like there is an opportunity to improve the permitting and planning process.  

SemiAnalysis summarizes the recent International Electron Device Manufacturing conference, where many semiconductor products are showcased: TSMC N2 node, with all kinds of interesting materials innovations; compute-in-memory to address memory bandwidth issues — orders of magnitude more memory bandwidth, at the cost of architectural complexity; all sorts of innovations around stacking and layering.  There is a lot of Moore’s Law runway ahead of us.

Strong as steel, light as foam.  Machine learning and nano-3D printing produce breakthrough high-performance, nano-architected materials.  Pervasive cheap AI is going to change everything — the design of every structural material, every drug, every chip, pretty much everything is going to be altered by AI.

Markitdown seems hugely helpful.  I have folders full of a mishmash of PDFs, Excel docs, Word docs, images, and other cruft.  A lot of existing extractors suck or are expensive, this seems like a great great tool.

What a nice way of presenting your resume — and creating such a resume would force you to think and reflect about your career and what happened along the way. 

Why write a newsletter or blog?  Because writing is a central part of thinking.   I cannot really understand a topic until I can write about it, and writing forces me to organize my thoughts, and sometimes surprises me with the conclusions I come to.  

Writing on a regular cadence is highly valuable — “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

Apple Invites is a nice, focused little app.   

A Brandi Carlile and Elton John album?  Count me in!  Elton has done fascinating work to keep his music current and alive; I loved his song with Dua Lipa.

A Few Rants

It is an ugly time in the country — and ugly actions by our leaders encourage ugly actions by everyone.   I’ve admired Microsoft under Satya’s leadership, but this layoff seems very ugly — Microsoft is doing fantastically well and can certainly afford to treat people more humanely.  A new norm of lousy treatment is becoming OK.  Which is sad, what has happened to “a shining city upon a hill?”   Leaders should set the standard for behaviour, not regress to the mean or worse.

This week, I was reminded of a famous quote from Jerry Tarkanian, the legendary basketball coach at UNLV.  At the time, the NCAA was trying to fight widespread “cheating” in the game, and there was a lot of evidence that Kentucky had violated many rules.  But Kentucky is one of the sport’s bluebloods, and no one wanted to damage that program.  Jerry famously observed “The NCAA is so mad at Kentucky they're going to give Cleveland State another year of probation.”  We are so upset about our economic competition with China that we are slapping tariffs on Canada.