The dark at the end of the tunnel
A metaphor for 2025?
Quote of the Day
”If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it.”
- Richard Feynman
And was it Wittgenstein who said somewhere that “If a thing can be said, it can be said simply”? Or maybe I imagined it.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Haydn | Missa in angustiis “Nelson Mass” in D minor | Credo: Et incarnatus est
I love Haydn, but this work was new to me. No longer, thanks to John Seeley. I found the title puzzling, so went to Wikipedia:
Though Haydn’s reputation was at its peak in 1798, when he wrote this mass, his world was in turmoil. Napoleon had won four major battles with Austria in less than a year. The previous year, in early 1797, his armies had crossed the Alps and threatened Vienna itself. In May 1798, Napoleon invaded Egypt to destroy Britain’s trade routes to the East.
The summer of 1798 was therefore a terrifying time for Austria, and when Haydn finished this mass, his own title, in the catalogue of his works, was Missa in angustiis (Mass for troubled times). What Haydn did not know when he wrote the mass, but what he and his audience heard (perhaps on September 15, the day of the very first performance), was that on 1 August, Napoleon had been dealt a stunning defeat in the Battle of the Nile by British forces led by Admiral Horatio Nelson. Because of this coincidence, the mass gradually acquired the nickname Lord Nelson Mass. The title became indelible when, in 1800, Lord Nelson himself visited the Palais Esterházy, accompanied by his British mistress, Lady Hamilton, and may have heard the mass conducted by Haydn whom he would meet shortly afterwards
Long Read of the Day
I have a cunning plan …
Charlie Stross in top form.
If you hanker after dystopian sci-fi extrapolations of a Trump Administration then this is it, courtesy of a master of the genre.
Because we are obviously living in the silliest, darkest time line — or maybe the darkest, silliest time line — Donald Trump’s pick to lead American healthcare next year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is an anti-vaxxer crank. And this week the New York Times broke the news that Kennedy’s Lawyer Has Asked the F.D.A. to Revoke Approval of the Polio Vaccine. They add, “Aaron Siri, who specializes in vaccine lawsuits, has been at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s side reviewing candidates for top jobs at the Department of Health and Human Services.”
Read on.
My commonplace booklet
Andy Grove was Right
If, like me, you have been watching the tech industry for decades then one of the most startling stories is of the slow-motion implosion of Intel, which was once a truly dominant force — as dominant in its time as Google or Nvidia are now.
John Gruber has a great piece about this on his Daring Fireball blog.
There’s no argument about it. Intel completely missed mobile. iPhones never used Intel chips and Apple Silicon chips are all fabbed by TSMC. Apple’s chips are the best in the industry, also without argument, and the only mobile chips that can be seen as reasonable competition are from Qualcomm (and maybe Samsung). Intel has never been a player in that game, and it’s a game Intel needed not only to be a player in, but to dominate.
It’s not just that smartphones are now a bigger industry than the PC industry ever was, and that Intel has missed out on becoming a dominant supplier to phone makers. That’s bad, but it’s not the worst of it. It’s that those ARM-based mobile chips — Apple Silicon and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon lineup — got so good that they’re now taking over large swaths of the high end of the PC market. Partly from an obsessive focus on performance-per-watt efficiency, partly from the inherent advantages of ARM’s architecture, partly from engineering talent and strategy, and partly from the profound benefits of economies of scale as the mobile market exploded.
Gruber points out that of all companies, Intel should have seen the danger that this would happen. It had failed to take “phone chips” seriously, but within a decade, those ostensibly negligible chips became the best CPUs not only for expensive PC desktops and laptops, but also their their energy efficiency advantages made them popular for data centres too (where once Intel had been the go-to supplier).
The irony is that appreciating the potential of the personal computer is what made Intel a corporate giant way back at the beginning of that revolution. Then, PCs were derided as toys by the big computer companies — the DECs and IBMs — of the 1970s and early 1980s. IBM, for example, only belatedly realised that it had to get on the PC bandwagon, and in order get on board it went to Intel for the 8086 processors to power its PC. Which meant that Intel (along with Microsoft, the owner of the PC operating system MS-DOS) ruled the entire computing industry for 25 years.
The biggest irony of all though — as Gruber points out — is that Andy Grove, the Intel CEO who drove the company’s rise to world domination, was famous for a particular aphorism. “Business success,” he famously observed, “contains the seeds of its own destruction. Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”
Yep.
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
- Ilya Sutskever on ten years working at the frontier of AI research. Fabulous 20+ minute keynote address to last week’s NeurIPS conference in Vancouver by one of the great figures in the field. Interesting (and tantalising) punch-line comes at the very end of his talk — before the questions. I love his straightforward, unpretentious style.
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