Technology & Platforms

A 'Law' That Was Actually a Self-Fulfilling Industry Roadmap

Moore's Law wasn't a discovered law of physics. It was an observed trend that the entire industry then organized itself around achieving.

AI Is a Cost Curve, Not a Product

The interesting story in AI isn't any single model — it's how fast the cost of intelligence is falling.

Amara's Law: Too Much in Two Years, Too Little in Twenty

The same technology gets overestimated early and underestimated late. Both errors come from drawing a straight line through something that is slow first and rapid afterwards.

Compute Is Becoming a Commodity — Slowly, and Expensively

GPU datacenters look like a technology story. They're really a capital-intensity story with technology as the excuse.

How Big Tech Actually Wins

Scale alone doesn't explain platform dominance — control over the interface between supply and demand does.

Infrastructure Is Invisible Until It Isn't

Nobody thinks about the cloud layer beneath a product — until an outage reminds everyone exactly how much depends on it.

Metcalfe's Law: Why Second Place Is So Much Worse Than Second

Ten times the users gives roughly a hundred times the possible connections. The exact formula overstates things — the underlying point about compounding leads does not.

Microservices Weren't Wrong — They Were a Phase

Every architecture pendulum swing gets described as a discovery. Most of them are a rediscovery of a trade-off nobody wrote down.

Modularity and Integration: Fit Against Flexibility

Control every part and tune the fit, or accept a standard interface and gain interchangeability. Which one wins turns on a single question — and the answer changes as a market matures.

Semiconductors: Everything Depends on a Handful of Buildings

Chip design is spread across hundreds of firms. Making the advanced ones happens in very few places — and that single asymmetry explains the shortages, the politics, and the fragility.

The Architecture Decision Inside Every LLM

Transformers won not because they were the cleverest idea, but because they were the most parallelizable one.

The Hardware Business Nobody Wants to Admit They're In

Every device company eventually discovers it's actually a services company wearing a hardware costume.

The Network Perimeter Was Always a Fiction

Zero-trust isn't a new security philosophy so much as an admission that the old one never actually worked.

When a Law Ends, the Industry Doesn't Stop — It Specializes

Moore's Law slowing down didn't end progress in chips. It ended the era where general-purpose silicon was good enough for everything.

Why Most Consumer Apps Die Quietly

The consumer app graveyard isn't full of bad products — it's full of good products with no reason for anyone to open them twice.