WSJ: “What’s driving this trend in chip design is a simple reality: The pressure to continue making chips faster and our devices more capable is unrelenting, and the chip industry’s ability to keep pace by shrinking transistors to eke out more performance is running into technical barriers. As a result, semiconductor engineers are increasing performance by jamming chips closer together. What’s emerging are mini-metropolises of silicon at the heart of our electronic world. In some cases these etched crystal conurbations are growing so big they are attaining physical dimensions rarely seen before in chips. Presently, most chips are around the size of a dime or a quarter, but some chips are now growing to nearly the size of a playing card, or in one case, a dinner plate.”
FT: “Like many people, I struggle at times to focus on reading for pleasure in our shimmering, omnipresent digital world. It’s a paradox of modern life: while our laptops and smartphones are saturated with text, we often find we have neither the time nor the attention to read for fun….In recent weeks I have set out to retrain my Twitter-addled brain in order to regain the habit of deep reading. I have made a conscious decision to consume less — less news, less online drama, less junk reading — and to create a device-free space in each day. And slowly, I have found my ability to concentrate and be fully immersed in a book has returned. I’ve also noticed that it’s easier to follow complex arguments, and to retain a strong visual sense of fictional worlds in contrast to the watery impressions of a book formed by skim-reading.”
Ninan: “There are only two five-year periods when India recorded rapid growth. The first was in the fiscal years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, when the global economy was on steroids and India benefited from rapid export growth. The second was 2014-19, when there was a growth bonus in the form of falling and low oil prices. Both periods were followed by sharp slowdowns, caused in the first case by a financial crisis and this time by the pandemic. India’s growth in the last three financial years has averaged just 1.9 per cent.”
