pjmorris

"A loss of X dollars is always the responsibility of an executive whose financial responsibility exceeds X dollars." - Weinberg’s 'First Principle of Financial Management' and 'Second Rule of Failure Prevention’ - 'First-Order Measurement', Quality Software Management, Volume 2, Gerald Weinberg

I just read 'The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry', a selection of his essays and speeches. I'm quoting a relevant chunk of his 2011 speech 'The Future of Agriculture':

What must we do? First, we must not work or think on a heroic scale. In our age of global industrialism, heroes too lightly risk the lives of people, places, and things they do not see. We must work on a scale proper to our limited abilities. We must not break things we cannot fix. There is no justification, ever, for permanent ecological damage. If this imposes the verdict of guilt upon us all, so be it. Second, we must abandon the homeopathic delusion that the damages done by industrialization can be corrected by more industrialization. Third, we must quit solving our problems by ‘moving on.’ We must try to stay put, and to learn where we are geographically, historically, and ecologically. Fourth, we must learn, if we can, the sources and costs of our own economic lives. Fifth, we must give up the notion that we are too good to do our own work and clean up our own messes. It is not acceptable for this work to be done for us by wage slavery or by enslaving nature. Sixth, by way of correction, we must make local, locally adapted economies, based on local nature, local sunlight, local intelligence, and local work. Seventh, we must understand that these measures are radical. They go to the root of our problem. They cannot be performed for us by any expert, political leader, or corporation. This is an agenda that may be undertaken by ordinary citizens at any time, on their own initiative. In fact, it describes an effort already undertaken all over the world by many people. It defines also the expectation that citizens who by their gifts are exceptional will not shirk the most humble services.

"The overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used" - Amdahl's Law

My Bialetti Moka pot doesn't attempt to acquire an IP address.

It is one thing to make a law, it is another to enforce a law.

There is likely something more recent or more specific, but I read and enjoyed 'This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age', Burrows when it came out in the 90's.

CEO of Citadel Capital. He's one of the people featured in 'The Quants How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It', Scott Patterson.

> Could you recommend titles about discovery of radio-activity and after ? I'm fascinated by this subjec

I'm less than an amateur here, my recommendation would've been the first ~300 pages of Rhodes. Maybe re-reading that part for events and ideas rather than names would help, but hopefully someone more skilled can answer.

I agree so strongly that I moved it from my 'to buy' list to bought.

Also of note is Wellerstein's more recent 'The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age – The Anti-Nuclear President, the Bomb Decision, and Cold War History', which I read earlier this year and thought it was excellent.

A clipping from its closing pages:

> “What is the measure of a civilized man?” The proper answer, Lilienthal suggested, was to consider the sense that a “civilized man” was one who believed they had a responsibility to others. The invention of nuclear weapons had clearly magnified the problem: “One sees that the mark of a civilized man must be some quality that will help the world from destroying itself. He is most civilized who has those qualities and talents of leadership, by example and precept and character and ideas, that will help civilization to survive.”

To extend the reading list, I was completely floored by 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb', Richard Rhodes, but that was 20 years ago. I need to re-read it, and add 'Dark Sun' and 'American Prometheus' to round out that part of my picture of the military-industrial complex.

'Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States', Alex Wellerstein.

> "Over the course of this book, we have looked at some eighty years of this history. We have seen how the idea of nuclear secrecy was initially born out of a very specific fear—that the world’s worst nation could achieve nation-destroying power—that, over the course of many transformations, morphed into something more generalized. More than totalitarian regimes were the target of this secrecy: allied nations, private industry, democratic institutions, and “the public” more broadly became understood as targets as well, for reasons both justifiable and not. The secrecy problem moved wherever the problem of the bomb went, which was far indeed. The desirability of control over nuclear knowledge became totalizing because the threat of loss of control was tied to the almost unimaginable power of the bomb itself. These two forces—the desire for control, the fear of its loss—became locked in a vicious cycle, each driving the other."

Last year I read 'Amusing Ourselves' and 'Technopoly'. A very interesting thinker.

Last year, I got an email from a college friend who reminded me that I'd told him to buy MSFT shares in 1986. Neither he nor I did, so I file this in my 'Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda' file, alongside similar stories about Cisco in 1991, Netflix in 2001, and Bitcoin in 2011.

AI is special because it is much speedier and doesn't have second thoughts. Both of those are disadvantages in this case.

At a guess based on context, is Mahan 'The Influence of Sea Power upon History: 1660–1783', Alfred Thayer Mahan?

True. 'The Secret History of Silicon Valley', Steve Blank, is essential viewing, IMO.