Long Weekend Links

• One way to think about computation before computers is through the work of Herbert Simon, the only person to win both the Turing Award and the Nobel Prize in economics. He explained that firms, like computers, are information processing systems. Firms have hierarchy, limited cognitive power, and bounded rationality. Firms also have learning curves, where unit costs fall predictably with cumulative production. In a way, humans organized themselves to be better information processors long before computers. We might extrapolate the trend before Moore’s Law to 400 years ago, with the invention of the joint stock corporation. [Zhengdong Wang]
• A feature shared by all living organisms whose behavior is complex enough to place them near human in intelligence is a hundred billion neuron nervous system. Imaging vision requires a billion neurons, while a million is associated with fast and interesting, but stereotyped, behavior as in a bee. A thousand is adequate for slow moving animals with minimal sensory input, such as slugs and worms. A hundred runs most sessile animals. The portions of nervous systems for which tentative wiring diagrams have been obtained, including much of the brain of the large neuroned sea slug, Aplysia. the flight controller of the locust and the early stages of some vertebrate visual systemsTreveal that the neurons are configured into efficient, clever, assemblies. This should not be too surprising, as unnecessary redundancy means unnecessary metabolic load, a distinct selective disadvantage. [Hans Moravec]
• If you’re trapped by a problem, in your research, or in business, or on a military campaign, and you can’t figure out any way to free yourself, try turning the tables on yourself and prove that it’s impossible for you to win. Note that this is not the same as avoiding impossible problems in stage 1 (the site survey), we are assuming here that we’ve chosen a solvable problem, but we’re going to pretend it’s impossible anyway. Why? Because we might learn something from how and where our impossibility proof eventually fails. There will be some crux. Some moment it can’t connect and all turns to ash. Study that moment, it may be the key to your original problem. The adversarial equivalent of this is putting yourself in the enemy general’s shoes. What is the move you can make that there’s no way for him to plan for or respond to? That’s your move. Example: It’s your move in a chess game and you’re in a horrible position. You can feel the net tightening around you, and you don’t know how to escape. So you turn the situation around, and think about how your opponent can force a checkmate. All of the paths to checkmate hinge on attacking one particular square. You return to your side of the board and see that there’s a method of defending that square which blocks every checkmate and lets you escape the trap. [Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf]
• I believe that Chinese technological success is now the rule rather than the exception. There are two fields in which China is substantially behind the west: semiconductors and aviation. The chip sector is gingerly attempting to expand under the weight of US restrictions; meanwhile, China’s answer to Airbus and Boeing is on a very long runway. I grant that these are two critical technologies, but China has attained technological leadership almost everywhere else. And I believe its technological momentum will continue rolling onwards to engulf more of their western competitors over the next decade. The electric vehicle industry is the sharp tip of the spear of China’s global success. Chinese EVs have greater functionalities than western models while selling at lower price points. A rule of thumb is that it takes five years from an American, German, or Japanese automaker to dream up a new car design and launch that model on the roads; in China, it’s closer to 18 months. The Chinese market is full of demanding customers as well as fast-iterating automotive suppliers. It also has a more productive workforce. According to Tesla’s corporate disclosures, a worker at a Gigafactory in China produces an average of 47 vehicles a year; a worker at a Gigafactory in California produces an average of 20. China’s automotive success is biting into Germany more than anywhere else. I keep a scrapbook filled with mournful remarks that German executives offer to newspapers. “Most of what German Mittelstand firms do these days, Chinese companies can do just as well,” said a consultant to the Financial Times. “In my sector they look at the price-point of the market leader and sell for roughly half of that,” the boss of a medical devicemaker told the Economist. It’s never hard to find parades of gloomy Germans. Now more than ever it looks like their core competences are threatened by Chinese firms. [Dan Wang]
• Also, when you look at these cars and there’s no one driving, I actually think it’s a little bit deceiving because there are very elaborate teleoperation centers of people kind of in a loop with these cars. I don’t have the full extent of it, but there’s more human-in-the-loop than you might expect. There are people somewhere out there beaming in from the sky. I don’t know if they’re fully in the loop with the driving. Some of the time they are, but they’re certainly involved and there are people. In some sense, we haven’t actually removed the person, we’ve moved them to somewhere where you can’t see them. [Andrej Karpathy]
• The mineral deposit at the quarry is layers of limestone that originated from a combination of depositional and erosional processes associated with sea-level fluctuation during the late Pleistocene era. The geology is composed of three major sedimentary formations as discussed in Section 6.3. The total thickness of the combination of the Miami Limestone layers varies from 70 to 85 feet. The current quarry excavation extends over an area of approximately 3,045 acres and will expand over the life of the mine (LOM) to 4,655 acres. The quarry currently averages an annual production of approximately 10 million tons of limestone to feed both the aggregate plant and the cement plant. [Titan America SA]
• The transaction includes modern and high-quality assets such as an integrated cement plant, operating one of the most efficient cement kilns in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, with a clinker production capacity of 990,000 short tons per year. Thanks to its attractive location, the plant is well-positioned to serve a 6.2 million short ton per year addressable market across Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and Ohio, with strong exposure to large-scale infrastructure and technology investments and extensive transportation modernization programs. The acquisition is expected to accelerate top-line growth, enhance geographic diversification and improve operating margins through the realization of integration synergies, including substantial operational and commercial benefits from integration with the existing assets—Essex Cement in New Jersey and Roanoke Cement in Virginia—as well as Titan America’s fly ash processing and marketing facilities operated with Separation Technologies, a Titan subsidiary across Pennsylvania and Ohio. [Titan America SA]
• Amrize has entered into an agreement to acquire PB Materials Holdings, Inc., the leading aggregates business with a complementary ready-mix concrete network in the high growth West Texas region. Part of Amrize’s profitable growth strategy, this acquisition will strengthen the company’s aggregates business, adding over 50 years of aggregates reserves in West Texas to serve long term demand. PB Materials will add 26 operational sites into Amrize’s network, extending its operations throughout Texas and the Southern region as infrastructure, energy projects, data centers and commercial investments drive construction growth. [AMRZ]
• The Texas-Arizona-California corridor becomes the undisputed tech mecca, triggering a land grab unlike anything since the railroad era. Water rights, housing developments, commercial real estate, data centers, AI infrastructure - everything gets bid up to absurd levels by everyone from sovereign funds to family offices to retail FOMO. The border states that were flyover country a decade ago become more expensive than coastal tier-one cities. Arizona water rights trade like Bitcoin in 2021. Someone will get very rich. Most will arrive too late and overpay. [Mojo]
• If breakevens reduce by only 30 percent over the next five years, approximately 60,000 locations currently classified as Tier 2 ($40 to $50 per barrel of oil equivalent [BOE] breakeven) could achieve the same breakevens as today’s Tier 1—less than $40/BOE, in the absence of inflationary pressures. This could increase the overall Tier 1 count by 150 percent. A range of innovations, such as horseshoe wells and other next-generation designs, frac efficiency gains such as trimulfrac, and other novel breakthroughs yet to be developed, could all contribute to this movement, alongside the cost efficiencies coming from expanded scale. [McKinsey & Company]
• Tech giants are sick of waiting around for electricity. But locking in future power means taking on more upfront risk. The race to build up more AI data centers has created a strain on the existing power grid while also bottlenecking the ambitious plans of the world’s largest tech companies. AI systems consume far more energy than more typical servers and other computing gear, but new energy generation facilities don’t exactly go up overnight. As a result, companies better known for driving advertising clicks and social network likes are now diving into the power business. In a landmark deal, Google-parent Alphabet last month agreed to buy renewable energy developer Intersect Power for $4.75 billion, plus the assumption of debt. [WSJ]
• I’m writing this because we’ve obviously been differentiating into castes in the USA - much like all good things (height, attractiveness, reaction time, life satisfaction, etc) end up being positively correlated with “g,” there is a cluster of people who are the exception to the “80% of Americans are overweight or obese” rule because they exercise and watch what they eat, AND have good careers and are educated and are more conscientious and have better time preference and own real estate, and so on. [Performative Bafflement]