Viewing profile — patfla

Don't disagree. I regard Tan as a (powerful) local optimization where the counter argument to broader optimizations is that they're riskier. The latter are though more fundamental.…

Unfortunately, an economy is now wholly peopled by shareholders, and the most important shareholders are usually the owners and corporate officers. Software dev who's worked in bot…

If you look at its history, Broadcom is a financial acquisition company that operates in technology. I think Tan's position is: these are (mostly) mature technologies and should be…

Fred Brooks wrote in The Mythical Man-Month that it's harder (more time-consuming) to produce the software that corresponds to a given hardware. In 1975.

It'd be interesting to bring this up to date.

I wonder how much of this is about getting closer access to relatively inexpensive US energy in general and petrochemicals in particular?

I thought that ASML got its EUV light source, basically, by buying Cymer in San Diego. Read some of [0], and then searched it, but didn't find a single instance of 'Cymer.'

Watched about 20 minutes of Gringo before I got tired of it and turned it off. Sounds like a textbook case of what can happen if you take a very bright person and then give them a …

Maybe I should have read past the first sentence. The joke's on me.

I stopped reading at the first sentence: "It’s a well-established fact that a guitarist’s acumen can be accurately gauged by the size of their pedal board- the more stompboxes, the…

Traditionally, you had _decreasing_ returns to scale. What's new with digital technologies is _increasing_ returns to scale. Very counter-intuitive for traditional economists - or …

Big Tech got so big because digital technology is different from preceding industries in that increasing (not decreasing) returns to scale prevail. In particular, in software where…

The article says ARHGAP11B promotes the growth of upper-layer neurons. Jeff Hawkins has this intriguing idea that the transition is all about the runaway growth of, in particular, …

I've never spent a lot of time on FB and with the interface change, I avoid FB even more than I did before. Interfaces with fewer, larger elements always strike me as a dumbing dow…

It seems that's the same bay as for Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, which with a population of 180,000 is Kamchatska's largest city. So this is very close to what amounts to a large popu…

The dollar's status as the world's reserve currency allows the US to consume at a rate that wouldn't otherwise be possible. All the trade surplus countries want that to continue. L…

Of the parts of the world, other than the US, that I'm most familiar with, Japan and Western Europe, they control drug prices - and keep them low. I've had a theory for a while tha…

Some serious diseases (this was true with the Pandemic of 1918) cause their worst effects, including death, through overreactions of the immune system. Evolution is clever but it's…

How does this get past the FTC? Oh right, it's been a dead letter since the Reagan administration. Monopoly 'R Us. Never mind the FTC - the rest of the semiconductor industry has t…

Sit at home and wait for covid19 to pass.

I read this intriguing thing once to the effect that: if space and time were discrete, say, at the Planck scale, that the infinities that bedevil modern physics would, magically, d…

> turned the table back to the US "back" is incorrect - not a native English speaker. Who says Chinese disinformation doesn't need to reach as far as ycombinator news? I agree with…

Actually if one looks it up (I have many times), as the Chinese industry was developing (meaning a while ago now), a large part of the key cell technology that China used came from…