The Fab of Fabs ...

Illustration: Basile Fournier

The most important tech in the world resides in Taiwan under the auspices of TSMC, the fab of fabs building the most sophisticated chips in the world for virtually all of the heavy-duty players in the digital universe including Apple, Nvidia and the US military, among significant others. The success of the company lies in the fact it tailors chips keyed to the specific needs of companies like Apple while keeping their design specifications sacrosanct to the company in question as building trust, along with supreme competency in doing business are the primary reasons why TSMC rules in building the most valuable technology on earth.

Savary strongly believed that international trade would be the antidote to war. Humans can’t conduct polyglot commerce across borders without cultivating an understanding of foreign laws, customs, and cultures. Savary also believed the Earth’s resources and the fellowship created by commerce were God-given. “It’s not God’s will that all human necessities be found in the same place,” Savary wrote. “Divine Providence has dispersed its gifts so that humans will trade together and find that their mutual need to help each other establishes ties of friendship among them.”

TSMC’s success is built on its singular comprehension of this dispersion of providential gifts. The firm is merrily known as “pure play,” meaning all it does is produce bespoke chips for customer companies. 

A true contrarian in a good way. 

Like a dutiful valet who exists only to make his aristocrat look good, TSMC supplies the brains of various products but never claims credit. The fabs operate offstage and under an invisibility cloak, silently interceding between the flashy product designers and the even flashier makers and marketers. TSMC seems to relish the mystery, but anyone in the business understands that, were TSMC chips to vanish from this earth, every new iPad, iPhone, and Mac would be instantly bricked. TSMC’s simultaneous invisibility and indispensability to the human race is something that Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, likes to joke about. “Basically, there is air—and TSMC,” he said at Stanford in 2014.

A Pyrrhic victory at best.

"They call Taiwan the porcupine, right? It’s like, just try to attack. You may just blow the whole island up, but it will be useless to you,” Keith Krach, a former US State Department undersecretary, told me a few weeks before I left for Taiwan. TSMC’s chairman and former CEO, Mark Liu, has put it more concretely: “Nobody can control TSMC by force. If you take by military force, or invasion, you will render TSMC inoperative.” If a totalitarian regime forcibly occupied TSMC, in other words, its kaiser would never get its partner democracies on the phone. The relevant material suppliers, chip designers, software engineers, 5G networks, augmented-reality services, artificial-intelligence operators, and product manufacturers would block their calls. The fabs themselves would be bricked.

Like money, silicon chips are both densely material and the engine of nearly all modern abstraction, from laws to concepts to cognition itself. Illustration: Basile Fournier

The fab of fabs indeed.

Fleeting Winter

 

Winter's becoming but just a memory in CT thanks to global warming so, in order to commemorate the passing of a season yours truly loves is this short clip showing it actually snowed, something one can see along with a bit of ice if one takes the time to look for it. Enjoy.

No national divorce ...

Agreed.

The decline of the trades ...

Illustration: Natalie Peeples/Axios

The shortage of tradespeople, you know, plumbers, mechanics, electricians, etc, etc., aka the folks that keep America running while the meritocracy, the rich and the entitled pontificate and make love to their cell phones in the act of doing mostly nothing for the large part of the day, has become a crisis because we don't make anything anymore, thanks to Ronnie offshoring the manufacturing prowess of the nation to China in order to gin profits for stockholders.

To whit.

America needs technical workers — and supply isn't measuring up to demand.

The big picture: Older workers in the skilled trades are retiring and not enough young people are training up to take their jobs as construction workers, plumbers, electricians and beyond.

By the numbers: The construction industry faces a gap of a half million workers, according to Construction Dive.

• And that gap is expected to widen as federal money flows into new infrastructure projects around the country — calling for even more labor.
• 
  
• The application rate for technical jobs like plumber and electrician dropped by 49% between 2020 and 2022, NPR reports.

What's happening: As America de-industrialized in the second half of the 20th century, education was reimagined to emphasize seeking four-year degrees, says Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

As a result, "we have a K through 12 system that does create better education and more high school graduates, but doesn’t do any job training," he says. And four-year college is held up as the ultimate goal for every student.

Some 30 million jobs in the U.S. that pay an average of $55,000 per year don't require a bachelor's degree, according to a Georgetown analysis.

And while college graduates do earn more on average than trade school graduates, a four-year degree doesn't guarantee a high-paying job. Student debt is rising, and only two-thirds of those with degrees say the debt was worth it, per a YouGov poll.

Given where the economy is going, the notion of college grads making more money than tradespeople is becoming rather dubious, right?

Fleeting Winter/rev XX

The Meander

Edge Line

One of a kind

Field of dreams

Grayscale ...

Shadow Moon

A Random Walk in New Canaan

A day and night tour of New Canaan including a stop at the updated library and a
stroll through the town at nite to check out the sights on a warm winter day. Enjoy.

The wiring's different ...

Ron DeSantis (Photo via AFP)

Being an Aspie, I know one when I see one and Ron is one, further along the spectrum than yours truly, I suspect, after reading about how inept this very smart guy is in dealing with reality.

The repugs have a problem as the wiring's different in us. Not better or worse but different and this guy, IMHO, cannot change his behavior in public at this point in time while running for POTUS as it took me years to learn how to deal with people and reality in proper fashion.

To whit ...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis hasn't officially entered the Republican presidential primary yet, but some of his supporters are taking steps to work around his lacking social skills.

Multiple sources told The Daily Beast the Florida governor struggles with basic social skills, and his allies are working in early primary states to structure events to prevent unexpected interactions between the public and a candidate who is off-putting at best and rude at worst.

“He would sit in meetings and eat in front of people, always like a starving animal who has never eaten before,” a former DeSantis staffer told The Daily Beast, “getting sh*t everywhere.”

Kinda explains his politics doesn't it?

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Reuters/Pixabay

The coolest guy in the world, right?

It's a facade :)

All films are fake, which is not a bad thing as virtually all art, like film, is fake, in one way or another as art is but a fabrication created by us rubes in an existence we will never fully understand. :)

Why western sets? Well, they're the archetypical example of the fake as facades, as seen in the pix above, are needed to build out the "reality" of a western town in the most efficient way possible.

In writing this blurb, the notion of AI comes to mind as its take is like the western set, all facade and no depth in its attempt to describe the vagaries of existence to us without the depth of experience we all share as humans residing on a planet called Earth.

11 degrees, yet another fake by yours truly. :)

Betrayed yet again ...

A must-see film to show how W lied to us just as Johnson lied to us regarding Nam.

Iraq Veterans, 20 Years Later: George W. Bush ‘Owes Me a Beer, at the Least’

The prevailing question for the young men in the first film was, “Why am I here?” This sequel finds them two decades later wondering, “What was it all for?” And none of them can point to any positive takeaways.

Job loss & the moral hazard ...

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash

Moving along, it seems AI's going to do a number on jobs as
it's cheaper to have a bot do the deed than us rubes.

Considering that AI is literally designed to model human capabilities and thus automate human tasks, it's a fair question — and one that a group of professors from New York University (NYU), Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) may have just helped to shed a little bit of light on in a new paper, aptly titled "How Will Language Modelers like ChatGPT Affect Occupations and Industries?"

"We find that the top occupations exposed to language modeling include telemarketers and a variety of post-secondary teachers such as English language and literature, foreign language and literature, and history teachers," write the researchers. "We find the top industries exposed to advances in language modeling are legal services and securities, commodities, and investments."

So, to recap: our teachers and our financial services, according to these researchers, might just be the first to succumb to language-modeling AI like ChatGPT, which we should probably note is bad at both providing factual information, which probably isn't good for the "teaching" part, and also is very bad at math, which similarly doesn't behoove success in the realm of finance. Cool cool cool.

The moral hazard ... 

Let's just say, as a hypothetical, that someone does build Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — human-level AI that, if realized, would undoubtedly change everything.

The world economy would likely turn upside down overnight, while radical changes to social structures, political systems, and even international power dynamics would follow closely behind. What it means to be human would suddenly feel much less concrete, and meanwhile, those who build the system would rapidly accumulate financial and political power.

If just one piece of technology could do all of that, you might have some thoughts about which individual or group might be the ideal — as in, least world-ending — candidate to bring such a machine into existence.

Functioning as a non-profit would make sense; money would certainly be needed to create this and any other piece of world-changing machinery, sure, but presented with the need to generate consistent revenue, both objectivity and safety can go out the window quite quickly. You'd also probably want the tech to be open-source, and you probably wouldn't want any legacy Big Tech companies to own a controlling stake.

OpenAI is for-profit, closed-source, and very much in bed with legacy tech mammoth Microsoft, which has billions vested into the buzzy AI leader. But unlike other AI competitors, who may have started out as for-profit to begin with, OpenAI has very different roots.

Dividing Line/rev II

Indeed, as Vice writer Chloe Xiang brilliantly put it, the current iteration of OpenAI is everything that the company once "promised not to be" — a pretty damn sleazy detail, especially considering that these are the folks who might just be the ones to bring AGI, if it's ever actually possible, into existence.

When the outfit launched back in 2015 — the brainchild of SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk, alleged vampire-lite Peter Thiel, and Y Combinator co-creator Jessica Livingston, among other major industry players — it was open-source (hence the name) as well as firmly anti-profit, arguing that a revenue-dependant model would compromise the integrity of the tech.

"OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return," reads OpenAI's introductory statement, published back in 2015. "Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact."

That statement almost reads a bit alien, considering where the firm is today. Corporate and fiscally motivated, moving with the familiar — and familiarly flawed — "move fast and break things" Silicon Valley approach, it's ventured so far from its original goal that even co-founder Elon Musk has become a vocal opponent of the company.

1 point perspective/rev II

The Moral Hazard/rev II

But three days at OpenAI’s office—and nearly three dozen interviews with past and current employees, collaborators, friends, and other experts in the field—suggest a different picture. There is a misalignment between what the company publicly espouses and how it operates behind closed doors. Over time, it has allowed a fierce competitiveness and mounting pressure for ever more funding to erode its founding ideals of transparency, openness, and collaboration. Many who work or worked for the company insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak or feared retaliation. Their accounts suggest that OpenAI, for all its noble aspirations, is obsessed with maintaining secrecy, protecting its image, and retaining the loyalty of its employees. - MIT Technology Review