622: Are Nvidia's Margins Sustainable?, OpenAI Drops Side Quests, Anthropic, China Compute, Starlink + Russia, Meta CFO, Google, AI Water, Project Hail Mary, and Dune 3
"Not a one-time optimization, but a system that keeps finding gains."
The will to win is wasted if it is directed towards trivial affairs.
—James Clear
🛀💭🎞️ I have my tickets to see ‘Project Hail Mary’ on IMAX with some friends next week.
It got me thinking about how many people work for years just so we can have a couple of hours of quality entertainment.
Andy Weir no doubt spent countless hours on the book. Then: adapt it for the screen, storyboard each scene, figure out how visual effects would be done, do the casting, build sets, make costumes, props. Then months of shooting with large crews. Then months of editing, post-production, VFX, writing and recording original music.
And somehow all those pieces have to land together into a coherent whole. 🧩
All that so I can pay $15 and sit for a couple of hours with (hopefully) a grin on my face.
📚📺 ✍️ If I could write like anyone, I would write like David Milch.
You already know that Deadwood is my favorite TV show. I even did a whole podcast about it with David Senra (📚🎙️🤠).
For the past few months, my wife and I have been watching NYPD Blue, a nice time capsule of 1990s New York City, and the show that made Milch famous (and rich, though he lost most of it gambling on horses 🏇💸). And it’s reminding me all over again just how much I get from Milch’s writing voice that I don’t get elsewhere. The mix of poetry, vulgarity, tenderness, brutality, and moral ambiguity.
I wrote some thoughts about the show in Edition #610, and more about a talk that Milch gave and his memoirs in Edition #564.
I don’t know where I’m going with this, except to encourage you to check out (or revisit) Milch’s stuff. If you’re wired anything like me, you’ll be glad you did.
