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If you’re building a new kind of billion dollar factory, yeah... spend a million developing a useful simulation before breaking ground on it. But if you’re figuring the perfect chocolate-chip cookie, you’re better off making batches than writing a cookie-baking-physics simulation
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This TIP trend is interesting because I think it’s the start of hardware eating software philosophically. Something big seems to be underway in all of engineering due to colliding trends of late-stage software eating world and early stage climate-tech eating world.
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Call it 4th industrial Revolution or whatever, but a big game is afoot again in tech for the first time in like 30 years. TIP is part of it.
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Not crazy about the term ‘4th industrial revolution’ but getting increasingly intrigued by the class of things it points to, which now includes mRNA vaccines. Kinda groping about for the essence now. The Hunting of the Meme is on.
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Nearly settled on The Fattening as my meme for this whole thing. 3 threads in now, need to go essay soon 🙁
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The biggest deep, lasting change needed is to run more fat. Give up some capital mobility efficiency for resilience. I need to dust off my old material on fat thinking and expand it to TED-talk level grand theory. I’ve been mailing it around more than usual but it’s too modest.
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The motifs of the various industrial revolutions: Zeroth: pendulum clock and telescope First: steam engine Second: light-bulb Third: microchip Fourth: Lithium battery
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Interesting to think of non-consumable materials motifs in each case: Zeroth: optical-quality glass First: steel Second: vacuum! Third: arguably plastic (plays a weirdly critical role in electronics even though sand and copper are more obviously important) Fourth: ?? not lithium
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Can you imagine electronics without plastics? Insulation, packaging, petroleum-based solvents and glues, etc etc. Battery based fat tech-stacks with high levels of software, resilience, etc don’t have an obvious signature material yet. I don’t think it’s lithium.
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Oil as a fuel (as opposed to as a materials feedstock) is a weirdly missing actor in the big history of engineering. It entered the tech stack as a relatively natural and non-disruptive substitute for coal and wood for energy, and plant/animal oils/waxes/tallow for lighting.
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It’s weirdly hard to pinpoint how exactly the oil age changed the course of technology history as a fuel. It was vastly more important politically, financially (as a de facto reserve currency) and economically (allowing vast wealth concentrations) than as a technology.
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IC engines are sort of EC engines (contd) than a new thing. Aerospace engines have more going on with materials than with dealing with oil per se. Centuries from now, oil age will be more notable as a materials revolution. As an energy revolution it’s been more a wide detour.
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Another angle: each of the revolutions triggered a sociological transformation. Zeroth: secular philosophy displaces religion First: rise of literate worker Second: emancipation of women/consumerization Third: specialization/org man/professionalization Fourth: ? autonomization
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Arguably ‘scientific revolution’ is a misnomer for the zeroth revolution because it suggests there was no technology+economic component. In fact, I think the tech (optics and clocks) drove it all.
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