Sublime

“What’s Moore’s Law?” the senator asked. “You have to understand, Senator,” Reid interjected, “that in Washington, you assume that every year things cost more and do less. In Silicon Valley, everyone expects our products to cost less every year but do more.”

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

Paul Romer, an economist at New York University who specializes in the theory of economic growth, says real sustainable economic growth does not stem from new resources but from existing resources that are rearranged to make them more valuable.

Conventional beliefs only ever come to appear arbitrary and wrong in retrospect; whenever one collapses, we call the old belief a bubble. But the distortions caused by bubbles don’t disappear when they pop. The internet craze of the ’90s was the biggest bubble since the crash of 1929, and the lessons learned afterward define and distort almost all

software development actually suffers from diseconomies of scale: the more engineers, the slower it goes.

The rise and spread of technologies has also taken the form of world-changing waves. A single overriding trend has stood the test of time since the discovery of fire and stone tools, the first technologies harnessed by our species. Almost every foundational technology ever invented, from pickaxes to plows, pottery to photography, phones to planes,