Will AI Displace Software Engineers?
AI, Jevons Paradox, and the Future of Software Engineering The year is 1994. A groundbreaking technology is proliferating—one that would expose all of human knowledge to everyone, anywhere in the world. Industries relying on information scarcity trembled. Newspapers, encyclopedias, travel agents, and countless others faced an existential threat. That technology was the Internet, and while it did eliminate many jobs, it created exponentially more. Entire categories of work—social media managers, SEO specialists, app developers—emerged that would have been impossible to predict....
Catastrophic Failure in Complex Systems
Software systems exhibit a peculiar property: the more sophisticated they become, the more they tend toward catastrophic rather than graceful failure. This pattern isn’t unique to software - it’s characteristic of all complex systems, from neural networks to financial markets. But software’s rapid evolution and ubiquity makes it a particularly interesting case study. A complex system isn’t merely complicated. Rather, it possesses specific properties that make its behavior fundamentally unpredictable:...
Nvidia - Barbarians at the Moat
Nvidia is one of the largest companies in the world, frequently taking the top spot. It’s revenue is growing at an astonishing rate, with margins better than a lot of pure software businesses - something usually unheard of for hardware companies. All of this is on the back of a massive AI hype cycle. During a gold rush, you should sell picks and shovels. Nvidia is selling bulldozers. In this post, I will dive into the components of Nvidia’s competitive moat, its strengths and weaknesses, and the competitors trying to cross it....
Book Review - Moonwalking With Einstein
Joshua Foer’s “Moonwalking with Einstein” is one of the rare books that I found worth rereading. In it, Foer, a young journalist, enters the bizarre world of memory competitions after being assigned to cover the world championship. He describes in vivid detail the unusual characters he encounters, mnemonic techniques he learns, and books he reads to help prepare him for the U.S. Memory Championship. The “memory athletes” he interviews are able to memorize a deck of cards in thirty-two seconds, recall over eighty thousand digits of pi, and recite the entire works of Shakespeare....
Willpower and the Brain
Regardless of your views on David Goggins, it’s undeniable that he possesses an extraordinary level of persistence and willpower. Not only did he complete the grueling BUDS training for the Navy Seals three times, but he also finished US Army Ranger School and Air Force Tactical Air Controller training. He set a world record by completing 4,030 pull-ups in just 17 hours. Beyond that, he has finished over 60 ultra-marathons, triathlons, and ultra-triathlons....