2025 letters
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. […]
Startups don’t need dissent; they want workers who can grind until the network effects kick in. VCs don’t like dissent, showing again and again that many have thin skins. That contributes to a culture I think of as Silicon Valley’s soft Leninism. When political winds shift, most people fall in line, most prominently this year as many tech voices embraced the right. […]
Chinese founders talk about AI mostly as a technology to be harnessed rather than a fickle power that might threaten all. Rather than building superintelligence, Chinese companies have been more interested in embedding AI into robots and manufacturing lines. […]
Big Tech might enjoy the monopolistic success smiled upon by Peter Thiel, coming almost to genteel agreements not to tread too hard upon each other’s business lines. Chinese firms have to fight it out in a rough-and-tumble environment, expanding all the time into each other’s core businesses, taking Jeff “your margin is my opportunity” Bezos with seriousness.
If you have to read one, read this one. I loved it. Especially the comparison between the USS and China, but I guess that’s the whole theme behind Dan’s writing. Reading it, I felt the need to read something of this sort about India, and how it is changing.
I felt that also because Zhengdong wrote about his trip to India, and that the US, China and India are changing so much that you could visit them every year.
I visit India every year and I thought maybe I could write a longer thing each year. A similar thing perhaps.