Ideas Aren’t Getting Harder to Find
Fifty years ago, productivity growth in advanced economies began to slow down. Productivity growth — the component of GDP growth that is not due to increases in labor and capital — is the primary driver of rising incomes. When it slows, so does economic growth as a whole. This makes it an urgent trend to […]
Quill OS – an open-source, fully-functional standalone OS for Kobo eReaders
Quill OS – Homepage Quill OS is an open-source, fully-functional standalone OS for Rakuten Kobo’s eReaders. Here are some of Quill OS’ features: Fully integrated KoBox X11 subsystem ePUB, PDF, picture and plain text display support Versatile configuration options for reading muPDF rendering engine for ePUBs and PDFs Wi-Fi support and web browser Encrypted storage […]
The Bob Dylan Concert for Just One Person
Flagging Down the Double E’s is an email newsletter exploring Bob Dylan performances throughout history. Some installments are free, some are for paid subscribers only. Sign up here: Screengrab from Experiment Ensam Eleven years ago today, a Finnish online gaming company posted a 14-minute video that blew the minds of Bob Dylan fans across the […]
The World Happiness Report is beset with methodological problems
A case study in elite misinformation. Want to support this Substack and make me extra happy on this World Happiness Day? Become a paying subscriber and receive 25% off your annual subscription! Helsinki in winter. A picture of joy. (Photo by Alessandro Rampazzo/Anadolu via Getty Images) Today is World Happiness Day. So, like every year […]
Native vs. emulation: World of Warcraft game performance on Snapdragon X Elite
2025-12-15 Share At the beginning of the year, I tested the Snapdragon X Elite unreleased dev-kit, and I couldn’t really compare x86 versus native gaming performance for the same game. I only managed to get World of Warcraft Classic x86 to run, and when compared to the native version, the FPS drop was 40-60% in […]
Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
Motivation and Framing I love space. I live and breathe it. I’m lucky enough to brush the heavens with my own metal and code, and I want nothing more than a booming orbital space economy that creates the flywheel that makes space just another location we all work and visit. I love AI and I […]
Ford kills the All-Electric F-150
Ford is once again shifting its electric vehicle manufacturing plans, a response to a year that’s been tough for the powertrain technology that’s still making waves overseas but has seen domestic government support cut and customer enthusiasm weaken. Instead of planning to make enough electric vehicles to account for 40 percent of global sales by […]
Fix HDMI-CEC weirdness with a Raspberry Pi and a $7 cable
For years I treated HDMI-CEC like a house spirit: sometimes helpful, mostly temperamental, never fully understood. My living-room stack is straightforward: Samsung TV on ARC (NOT eARC – story for another day), Denon AVR-X1700H hidden in a closet, Apple TV plus a bunch of consoles connected to the receiver, and a Raspberry Pi 4 already […]
A kernel bug froze my machine: Debugging an async-profiler deadlock
QuestDB is the open-source time-series database for demanding workloads—from trading floors to mission control. It delivers ultra-low latency, high ingestion throughput, and a multi-tier storage engine. Native support for Parquet and SQL keeps your data portable, AI-ready—no vendor lock-in. I’ve been a Linux user since the late 90s, starting with Slackware on an underpowered AMD […]
1/4 of US-Trained Scientists Eventually Leave. Is the US Giving Away Its Edge?
Abstract:Using newly-assembled data from 1980 through 2024, we show that 25% of scientifically-active, US-trained STEM PhD graduates leave the US within 15 years of graduating. Leave rates are lower in the life sciences and higher in AI and quantum science but overall have been stable for decades. Contrary to common perceptions, US technology benefits from […]