Chip war, Prudence, Goodhart's law - Edition 10
Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology
by Chris Miller
I started the year with this book and it turned out to be a scintillating book packed with tons of stories. The book is about the origin of the transistor and chronicles the life of the advancement of chip technology.
I was expecting the book to be dull with the history of how it all worked out and transformed human life. On the contrary, I found this book too hard to put down. This book answers many questions. I'm listing some of them in no particular order.
* How come Japan came to dominate the electronics industry all over the world?
* Why Europe in spite of being a close ally of the USA didn't play any significant role in the advancement of the chip technology.
* What kind of role Intel played in the chip economy?
* What kind of role US federal government played in advancing chips? The short answer is huge.
* In the early days of the chips economy who was the biggest user of chip technology and where it was used? The short answer is the USA for war.
* Why TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited) is probably the most important company in the whole world.
* Why the most important company is based out of Taiwan and not in the USA, Russia, or Japan?
* In the early years of the Internet why the cluster of technology companies were based out of San Francisco.
* How Japan was beating the USA in the chips technology.
* How Intel missed the whole mobile revolution.
* Russia, the long adversary of the USA, tried to steal chip technology but couldn't produce anything of significance in spite of large-scale espionage. Japan decided not to steal technology and use the technology. In the process, Japan's economy grew manyfold. What exactly Japanese government and what lessons it has for other companies to grow?
* Now we know that AI is going to be the dominant technology of the next 50 years what lessons governments all around can learn to get ahead of the game?
* How to write a book on a boring topic and still hold the interest of the audience.
I thought I knew so much about the technology space. Reading the book made me realize so much I don't know. I think this book is a must-read for anyone who wants to know anything about the single most important technology that has changed human life in the most significant way.
This book is an enthralling read. Don't miss it.
The Perils of Prudence
Race for the South Pole will continue to be one of my favorite books. The book describes in great detail how meticulous planning by Amundsen helped his team not only conquer the South Pole but in the process his team members gained weight. On the other hand Scott’s team had more resources but they died of hunger.
The author postulates that the key to victory for Amundsen was “speed”. The less time he spends on the treacherous conditions the better it is. The author applies the same analogy to startups. The startups need to have “speed” so that they can get out of the “danger zone”. The author took a year to write this article and it’s well worth a read.
Goodhart's Law Isn't as Useful as You Might Think
Setting up incentives is a tricky thing for businesses and government alike. Long time ago I was working for Bearing Point and a new manager started rewarding QA folks on the weekly meetings based on the number of defects a QA person has created. Soon afterwards we started getting a sea of defects. Most of them would be very minor things like “a period is missing”, “confirmation message is shown” and things like that. Previously QA folks would create one issue to have multiple defects of similar type but now they started creating multiple issues for each defect to increase the number of defects.
The author heavily borrows from his experience at Amazon to outline how to measure things properly or when not to measure.
Tyler Cowen on AI and China
Tyler Cowen is one of the most celebrate economist of our time. Marginal Revolution is a very popular blog and he is the person running it. This podcast is less about China and more about general economics. I like the questions that were asked to Tyler by the host and I paused the podtcast to think what would my answer be before listening to what Tyler had to say.
How To Handle Failure
Things don’t always go as per the plan. We need to have a plan to handle the times when the plan will go belly up. I enjoy the writing style of Jared a lot. I hope you like it too.