Sublime

A bitumen mine is not a place you would let your child play, but it is excavated using equipment familiar to any four-year-old conversant in Tonka technology—and with a similar grandiosity of ambition. In order to access the bitumen, the forest above it must first be removed. In industry parlance, this living material is referred to as

In the post–Windows 95 world, Apple was facing an existential crisis. It was quickly losing its raison d’être, but Amelio didn’t get the urgency of the moment. Apple was in such free fall that between 1995 and 1998, revenues nearly halved, from $11.1 billion to $5.9 billion, meaning Apple needed to cut $1.7 billion of costs per year just to tread

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In creating his early clones of Facebook and Twitter, Wang was in fact relying entirely on the Silicon Valley playbook. This first phase of the copycat era—Chinese startups cloning Silicon Valley websites—helped build up baseline engineering and digital entrepreneurship skills that were totally absent in China at the time. But it was a second

The story was told by former Amazon engineer Steve Yegge in a post that he wrote for colleagues at Google, but which ended up being accidentally made public and went viral among Internet developers. It is known as “Stevey’s Platform Rant.”

Silicon (Si) made into thin wafers (the basic substrate of microchips) is the signature material of the electronic age, but billions of people could live prosperously without it; it is not an existential constraint on modern civilization. Producing large, high-purity (99.999999999 percent pure) silicon crystals that are cut into wafers is a