Data for India: “[It] is a public platform to expand the understanding of India through data for everyone. Data For India uses public data from the Indian government and multilateral agencies like the World Bank to produce research-backed data-driven insights and charts on socio-economic issues. Alongside widening access to fundamental information on health, demographic change and the economy in India, Data For India’s mission is also to deepen data literacy by creating shared knowledge around data sources, metrics and methodologies.”
FT on modern-chip manufacturing: “Some of the newest smartphone chips, such as those in the iPhone 15 Pro, are manufactured with what is called a “3 nanometre” process — a name given to a generation of processors with the smallest transistors. Although this no longer references their physical dimensions, it does allude to the shrinking scale of their components. These tiny switches, which control the flow of electrical signals inside every digital device, are the workhorses of microprocessors and the basic building blocks of modern electronics.”
Contrary: “The majority of two or three-dimensional games are real-time interactive simulations. This means they take place in a virtual world whose state must be generated and updated in real time. For games striving for a high degree of realism, like modern first-person shooters, there are many considerations that go into making the world appear true-to-life. The game must have a model of real-world physics, and remain vigilant to ensure that behaviors conform to physical laws. It must also have a model of how light works, tracking the location of different light sources and how they affect objects perceived by the player. Not only must the game encode all this information in a mathematical model of the world, it needs to update these aspects at speeds mimicking reality. For most realistic games, this means the screen must be updated at least 24 times per second to give the illusion of motion. However, most screens have refresh rates at 30 or 60 Hz, meaning they refresh 30 or 60 times per second, so the state updates need to happen even faster than that. In charge of managing all of this is the game engine. Essentially the operating system for the game world, the game engine is responsible for continuously updating and re-rendering the game world over and over again, in a loop, to determine the state of the world at each point in time.”
Ben Thompson: “How many apps or services are there that haven’t been built, not because one person can’t imagine them or create them in their mind, but because they haven’t had the resources or team or coordination capabilities to actually ship them? This gets at the vector through which AI impacts the world above and beyond cost savings in customer support, or whatever other obvious low-hanging fruit there may be: as the ability of large language models to understand and execute complex commands — with deterministic computing as needed — increases, so too does the potential power of the sovereign individual telling AI what to do. The Internet removed the necessity — and inherent defensibility — of complex cost structures for media; AI has the potential to do the same for a far greater host of industries.” [via Arnold Kling]
Niall Ferguson: “In J.R.R. Tolkien’s great epic, The Lord of the Rings, it becomes apparent only gradually that the forces of darkness have united. Sauron, with his baleful all- seeing eye, emerges as the leader of a vast axis of evil: the Black Riders, the corrupted wizard Saruman, the subhuman orcs, the malignant courtier Wormtongue, the giant venomous spider Shelob — they are all in it together, and Mordor is their headquarters. Tolkien knew whereof he wrote. A veteran of World War I, he watched with dismay the approach of a second great conflagration. Sipping pints of bitter and puffing his pipe in “The Shire” — his idealized Middle England — he could only shudder as Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and imperialist Japan came together to form their Axis in 1936-37, and mutter, “I told you so,” when Hitler and Stalin joined forces in 1939…Cold War 2 is escalating faster than the first.”
