Links
4 stars
The World’s Most Important Machine | Veritasium [YouTube]
55-minute video
The $200M Machine that Prints Microchips: The EUV Photolithography System | Branch Education [YouTube]
39-minute video
These two videos are long but incredible; they complement each other nicely. The modern world depends on ASML’s EUV machines, and the engineering is astounding. And yet I didn’t have a particularly informed view of how they work...
This is a video about the most complicated commercial product humanity’s ever built. It costs a whopping $400 million, and it is so bizarre that I want to introduce it to you with a thought experiment. Imagine you are shrunk down to the size of an ant, and you are given a laser that’s strong enough to melt through metal like butter. Next, a tiny droplet of molten tin, roughly the size of a white blood cell, is shot out in front of you around 250 kilometers per hour. And your task is to hit this not once, not twice, but three times in a row in 20 microseconds with your little laser. Well, that is exactly what this machine does. It hits one tiny tin droplet three times in a row, heating each one up to over 220,000 Kelvin. That’s roughly 40 times hotter than the surface of the Sun. And it doesn’t just hit one droplet, it hits 50,000 droplets every single second.
[...]
The same machine also contains mirrors that might just be the smoothest objects in the universe. If you scale one up to the size of the Earth, then the largest bump would be no thicker than a playing card. On top of that, it is able to overlay one layer of a chip perfectly on top of another and never be off by more than five atoms. And this is all happening while parts of the machine whip around at accelerations of over 20 Gs. For 30 years, almost everyone thought that actually building this machine was impossible, and yet it exists. There is only one company in the world that can make it.
Inside microchips are nanometer-sized transistors and wires, but how are these nanoscopic structures built? Well, in this video, we’ll explore the EUV Photolithography System built by ASML. This 150-million-dollar machine is essentially a microchip photocopier; it takes the design of a microchip and copies it across hundreds of microchips on a silicon wafer. This EUV Photolithography System is one of the most complex machines ever made, and it encompasses an entire world of science and engineering within it. Specifically in this video, we’ll dive deep into the EUV Lithography tool and explore how 13nm EUV light is produced, how the EUV light is focused onto a photomask, how the photomask, or mask, moves around, what the patterns on the mask look like, the projection optics, and how the wafer moves around and the wafer stage.
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This video has consumed our entire team for the past 8 months, and we hope you enjoy the final result! Additionally, we would like to extend a special thank you to ASML for collaborating with us on this video and sharing a wealth of knowledge and insight.
3 stars
The Dilbert Afterlife | Astral Codex Ten
27-minute read
Scott A. on Scott A. on Scott A. | Shtetl-Optimized
4-minute read
Classic Scott Alexander:
Adams’ comics were about the nerd experience. About being cleverer than everyone else, not just in the sense of being high IQ, but in the sense of being the only sane man in a crazy world where everyone else spends their days listening to overpaid consultants drone on about mission statements instead of doing anything useful. There’s an arc in Dilbert where the boss disappears for a few weeks and the engineers get to manage their own time. Productivity shoots up. Morale soars. They invent warp drives and time machines. Then the boss returns, and they’re back to being chronically behind schedule and over budget. This is the nerd outlook in a nutshell: if I ran the circus, there’d be some changes around here.
Yet the other half of the nerd experience is: for some reason this never works. Dilbert and his brilliant co-workers are stuck watching from their cubicles while their idiot boss racks in bonuses and accolades. If humor, like religion, is an opiate of the masses, then Adams is masterfully unsubtle about what type of wound his art is trying to numb.
This is the basic engine of Dilbert: everyone is rewarded in exact inverse proportion to their virtue. Dilbert and Alice are brilliant and hard-working, so they get crumbs. Wally is brilliant but lazy, so he at least enjoys a fool’s paradise of endless coffee and donuts while his co-workers clean up his messes. The P.H.B. is neither smart nor industrious, so he is forever on top, reaping the rewards of everyone else’s toil. Dogbert, an inveterate scammer with a passing resemblance to various trickster deities, makes out best of all.
The repressed object at the bottom of the nerd subconscious, the thing too scary to view except through humor, is that you’re smarter than everyone else, but for some reason it isn’t working. Somehow all that stuff about small talk and sportsball and drinking makes them stronger than you. No equation can tell you why. Your best-laid plans turn to dust at a single glint of Chad’s perfectly-white teeth.
Scott Alexander has put up one of his greatest posts ever, a 10,000-word eulogy to Dilbert creator Scott Adams, of which I would’ve been happy to read 40,000 words more. In it, Alexander trains a microscope on Adams’ tragic flaws as a thinker and human being, but he adds: “In case it’s not obvious, I loved Scott Adams. Partly this is because we’re too similar for me to hate him without hating myself.”
The Spectacular Burnout of a Solar Panel Salesman | WIRED
14-minute read
“I know I’m not going to fail, because I don’t have an option,” he said into his phone’s camera as he paced around the room while wearing a white T-shirt festooned with palm trees. “Because literally if I fail, I’m fucked, I’m going to be homeless. And that’s not going to happen. I will knock until I die.”
[...]
On his sixth day in Tampa, shit finally worked: An appointment Colvin had set up resulted in a closed deal. Since he’d been promised a 50-50 commission split with the closer, Colvin calculated he was due to make at least $3,500. “It’s like I cannot fathom—I’ve never seen so much money at once in my life,” he said in that night’s celebratory video. “I can’t believe it’s real.” Looking at the records he’d been keeping, he estimated that he’d been through about 850 face-to-face rejections before this one success.
Colvin kept a close eye on his bank account in the days that followed, checking to see whether the first of his two payments had arrived. Then, more than a week later, it finally did: The amount was $180.
[...]
“It seems like every time things couldn’t possibly get worse, they got worse,” he said. “But this is the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life, which is crazy because this is also the most unstable I’ve been in my entire life. Yet I believe the true reason I feel so much fulfillment is that I’m doing what I know I’m destined to do.”
Original link | Archive.is link
Microsoft Is the House That Excel Built | Bloomberg
12-minute read
Microsoft’s spreadsheet software is expensive, derivative and depressing. It might also be the most killer app of all time.
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Before the Apple II, of course, paper spreadsheets had been in use for generations by bookkeepers, who, one can only assume, also had mixed feelings about them. The basic idea is even older. A clay tablet, found in Iraq and dated by archaeologists to around 1800 B.C., shows 15 rows and 4 columns of numbers, calculations that seemed to have been etched by some anonymous Babylonian forerunner to today’s moderately disgruntled marketing consultant.
[...]
Among the most popular posts of all time on the Excel subreddit is one that explains how to embed a feature-length movie into a sheet as a way to get around employee-tracking software. The code allowed the creator to claim he’d spent hours working on a spreadsheet while also rewatching Wall-E, illustrating Excel’s breadth but also showing that even the most enthusiastic users would often rather be doing something else.
Original link | Archive.is link
The snail farm don: is this the most brazen tax avoidance scheme of all time? | The Guardian
11-minute read
It is a drizzly October afternoon and I am sitting in a rural Lancashire pub drinking pints of Moretti with London’s leading snail farmer and a convicted member of the Naples mafia. We’re discussing the best way to stop a mollusc orgy.
The farmer, a 79-year-old former shoe salesman called Terry Ball who has made and lost multiple fortunes, has been cheerfully telling me in great detail for several hours about how he was inspired by former Conservative minister Michael Gove to use snails to cheat local councils out of tens of millions of pounds in taxes.
His method is simple. First, he sets up shell companies that breed snails in empty office blocks. Then he claims that the office block is legally, against all indications to the contrary, a farm, and therefore exempt from paying taxes. “They’re sexy things,” chuckles Ball in a broad Blackburn accent, describing the speed with which two snails can incestuously multiply into dozens of specimens if they’re left alone in a box for a few weeks. Snails love group sex and cannibalism, he warns.
As the conversation drifts away from snail breeding he describes personal connections to a very prominent member of the House of Commons, his years hiding Italian mafia killers while they were on the run, and the potential market for snail salami. Almost everything he tells me seems improbable, yet everything I could later verify checks out. I’ve got little reason to doubt the rest.
2 stars
People With Parents With Money | Intelligencer
16-minute read
The rejections were swift and often vague. DMs went unanswered or, worse, “liked.” We broadened our search again and again, drafting dozens of uncomfortable emails and texts to friends, co-workers, family friends, family of friends, former bosses, exes, people we met once and vaguely kept up with on Instagram. We dropped uninvited into Facebook groups (and, in some cases, were just as quickly ushered out of them). When we brought it up at drinks and holiday parties, conversations ended with a gauzy look of confusion or a sudden beeline to the bathroom. “I’ll ask around!” they would often say, followed by a prompt “Sounds fascinating, though!” Spending your parents’ money, we realized, may be the very last taboo in polite society.
These 14 people range from those whose grandparents ran multimillion-dollar media empires to those whose teacher-parents made decent stock returns. In awkward conversations that occasionally became therapy sessions, they answered our questions candidly: How much, how often, for what? Several admitted they weren’t even sure how to label their own class status in a city of extreme wealth. Nearly all of them remarked that they hadn’t ever talked about this with anyone else — ever.
Original link | Archive.is link
Overmatched: Why the U.S. Military Must Reinvent Itself | New York Times
6-minute read
The report is a comprehensive review of U.S. military power prepared by the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment and delivered most recently to top White House officials in the last year. It catalogs China’s ability to destroy American fighter planes, large ships and satellites, and identifies the U.S. military’s supply chain choke points. Its details have not been previously reported.
The picture it paints is consistent and disturbing. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, said last November that in the Pentagon’s war games against China, “we lose every time.” When a senior Biden national security official received the Overmatch brief in 2021, he turned pale as he realized that “every trick we had up our sleeve, the Chinese had redundancy after redundancy,” according to one official who was present.
The assessment shows something more worrying than the potential outcome of a war over Taiwan. It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically advanced ones. And it traces a decades-long decline in America’s ability to win a long war with a major power.
War games can be wrong; analysts sometimes overstate adversaries’ abilities. Yet this larger point should not be ignored. Nearly four decades after victory in the Cold War, the U.S. military is ill prepared for today’s global threats and revolutionary technologies.
Original link | Archive.is link
Is It a Bubble? | Oaktree Capital
24-minute read
AI has the potential to be one of the greatest transformational technologies of all time.
As I wrote just above, AI is currently the subject of great enthusiasm. If that enthusiasm doesn’t produce a bubble conforming to the historical pattern, that will be a first.
Bubbles created in this process usually end in losses for those who fuel them.
[...]
The use of debt in this process – which the high level of uncertainty usually precluded in past technological revolutions – has the potential to magnify all of the above this time.
Since no one can say definitively whether this is a bubble, I’d advise that no one should go all-in without acknowledging that they face the risk of ruin if things go badly. But by the same token, no one should stay all-out and risk missing out on one of the great technological steps forward. A moderate position, applied with selectivity and prudence, seems like the best approach.
Reading Lolita in the Barracks | Asterisk Magazine
16-minute read
In the summer of 2012, under the watchful eye of a drill sergeant, I found myself learning to throw a hand grenade — decidedly not how I preferred to spend the summer after my freshman year of college.
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As everyone who knows me would agree, I am not exactly combat material. There are two kinds of men: those who feel a certain thrill upon hearing words like “AK-47” or “Hellfire missile,” and those who find the first kind embarrassing. This is not to say I’m a wimpy milksop. I have cycled across a country (Japan) and run several marathons, which of course means I am superbly equipped to outrun anyone when it’s time to flee.
It was the same eventful summer “Gangnam Style” galloped toward its first billion views, giving my country a spike of cultural relevance that has somehow yet to recede; Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps pulverized records at the London Olympics. Facebook had just IPO’d, and Tesla had released its Model S. Looking back, it was a prelapsarian time all around, set against the gentle drama called the American presidential election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.
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The Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953, never ended with a peace treaty, only a ceasefire. This meant, as we were insistently told growing up, the country is technically still at war.
“I Swear to Chairman Mao!” On Becoming a Red Guard | Literary Hub
5-minute read
The school I loved had changed into a terrifying place ever since Mao stood on Tiananmen Gate and told the young people to “be violent,” and to “smash all things old.” The Confucian temple was wrecked, and a crowd gathered to pull down the giant stone slabs. Boys urinated in the bronze incense burners, which they had toppled. They went around campus waving iron bars and hammers to knock off the heads of the small statues. Gardens were trampled and battered. I heard that our elderly gardener—with whom I had chatted, as I had been fascinated by what he was doing—had been accused of being a “class enemy,” beaten up, and died.
Book Review: The Land Trap by Mike Bird | Progress and Poverty
18-minute read
The Land Trap is when land slowly sucks up all your economy’s productivity, inflating a dangerous real estate bubble that eventually pops, leaving disaster in its wake. It progresses in five stages.
Is This the End of Reading? | The Chronicle of Higher Education
14-minute read
If you design a class based on the assumption that students will do the readings, you’ll get nowhere. If you make it easier, and go over what they should have read in class, students will participate. But then what are you doing, other than entertaining?
She has long followed the mantra “meet your students where they are.” But she says if she meets them any further down, she’ll feel like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.
Original link | Archive.is link
The Pelvic Floor Is a Problem | WIRED
15-minute read
The pelvis and its many ligaments and muscles and tendons are something like the puppet master of the rest of the body: Tension or dysfunction within the pelvis can manifest in symptoms as wide-ranging as dull lower back pain, shoulder tightness, shooting thigh pain, butt pins and needles, and more. This is to say nothing of issues that occur in the pelvis’s many organs—IBS, constipation, painful urination. Inability to relax the pelvic floor can cause problems, too, just as overly loose or unengageable pelvic floor muscles can.
Original link | Archive.is link
Why Solarpunk is already happening in Africa | Climate Drift
8-minute read
What’s happening across Sub-Saharan Africa right now is the most ambitious infrastructure project in human history, except it’s not being built by governments or utilities or World Bank consortiums. It’s being built by startups selling solar panels to farmers on payment plans. And it’s working.
Over 30 million solar products sold in 2024. 400,000 new solar installations every month across Africa. 50% market share captured by companies that didn’t exist 15 years ago.
If Asians are Lactose Intolerant, why all the Milk Tea? | Chinese Cooking Demystified
11-minute read
A puzzle: over 90% of East Asians are genetically lactose intolerant. So then why is there dairy everywhere?
We Might Not Be So Strange | Nautilus
8-minute read
The odds of all of these things lining up to allow intelligent life to evolve on the same kind of timescale as the life of our planet—neither much sooner nor much later—seemed vanishingly small in the late 20th century to theoretical physicist Brandon Carter.
[...]
Mills and colleagues took these last four steps, as well as complex cognition, as the best “hard steps” candidates—and considered how unlikely each of them really are. Their conclusion: Perhaps none of them are. “We are raising the possibility that hard steps do not exist at all,” Mills says.
How Venezuela’s New Leader Went From Revolutionary to Trump’s Orbit | New York Times
6-minute read
Delcy Rodríguez, a guerrilla’s daughter, started out as a provocateur. She pivoted to revive a ravaged economy, making her vital to U.S. plans to run Venezuela.
Original link | Archive.is link
1 star
Confessions of the influenced | The Verge
15-minute read
For audiences, it means we have spent the better part of a decade living within a 24/7 digital infomercial, with social media — sponsored content and organic posts alike — resembling not much more than a buying guide, a catalog of unabashed and conspicuous consumption. Some audience members find themselves in deep debt or describe their behavior as a full-blown shopping addiction; others have developed careful strategies in an effort to limit their consumption. We have never been so aware of all the things there are to purchase, and the frictionlessness of shopping apps disguised as social media has created an army of voracious buyers. What has this abundance done to us?
Original link | Archive.is link
The strange Wild West tale of the first cow-buffalo hybrid | Popular Science
4-minute read
The “cattalo” was a homely creature—stocky and shaggy, with a slight buffalo’s hump and a cow’s docile face. Charles “Buffalo” Jones invented the cow-buffalo hybrid in 1888. His intention? To create the hardiest free-range livestock the Great Plains had ever seen. But Jones could’ve never predicted what happened next.
Scientists Discover Cloud-9, a Starless ‘Galaxy That Wasn’t’ | New York Times
3-minute read
Astronomers announced the discovery of a starless cloud of hydrogen gas, a pristine relic of the cosmos that is almost as old as time itself.
Original link | Archive.is link
Mass death paved the way for the Age of Fishes | Popular Science
3-minute read
About 445 million years ago, our planet completely changed. Massive glaciers formed over the supercontinent Gondwana, sucking up sea water like an icy sponge. Now called the Late Ordovician mass extinction (LOME), Earth’s first major mass extinction wiped out about 85 percent of all marine species as the ocean chemistry radically changed and Earth’s climate turned bitter cold.
However, with great biological havoc also comes opportunity. During all of this upheaval, one group evolved to dominate all others—jawed vertebrates. This ultimately put life on a forward path that can be traced up to today, according to a study published today in the journal Science Advances.
PARIS - 3D TIMELAPSE - 300 BCE to 2025 | YouTube
3-minute video
3D Evolution of Paris from 300 BCE to 2025.
This animation was based on the work of Michel Huard
This is a visual simplification of the evolution of Paris through the years, it may not be 100% accurate
No AI was used to create this Animation
There’s a new face in Hollywood, generated by AI | CBS
4-minute read
Fast forward nearly 25 years, and it appears that real life has caught up with the movies, with the introduction of an AI-generated actress named Tilly Norwood.
Photos Capture the Breathtaking Scale of China’s Wind and Solar Buildout | Yale E360
1-minute read
Last year China installed more than half of all wind and solar added globally. In May alone, it added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of roughly 100 every second.
7,000-year-old underwater wall raises questions about ancient engineering — and lost-city legends | Big Think
4-minute read
Nine meters (30 feet) beneath the waves, they found it: a vast, man-made stone wall, averaging 20 meters (66 feet) wide and two meters (6.6 feet) tall.
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That’s centuries older than Stonehenge, and millennia older than the pyramids of Giza.