Category: Very Berkeley

Sedate Sunday: Startups in the Age of Climate Change

As we sit by and watch the ever-increasing impact of climate change on our world, it stands to reason that startups must also be seeing an increase in interest, investment, and technology innovation to fight this. Yes, this would be reasonable.

The startup scene is never reasonable.

It’s not the 1980’s, kids. We don’t invest in technology or startups with the public good in mind anymore. Big global investments are entirely focused on making money fast — preferably by stealing it from you and me in fees and in turn selling our personal information to others who also want a piece of you and me. It’s rather disgusting, actually.

Want to change this? It’s pretty easy. 1) Require opt-in on personal information. 2) Disallow monopolies to bundle / require opt-in as a requirement for using their software. 3) Eliminate Section 230. Oh, and we might actually eliminate the tax carry loophole used by venture, forcing them to actually do some work.

None of these suggestions are going to happen, folks.

We all are watching what happened in Maui. Fire swept by 60mph winds consumed the entire town of Lahaina in a few hours, taking many in the town completely unaware. Cell service and power were down — obviously, there was inadequate or non-existent backup capability, and old-styles poles were knocked over like dominos — rendering notification impossible. No one thought to use the sirens. The counting of the dead has just begun, and already it has surpassed the death toll from the 2018 Camp Fire in California.

I suppose everyone is now asking “Why didn’t we see this coming?” Well, actually we did and we do. We just can’t get anyone to put money into startups to deal with this threat.

The 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Fires started with a hot wind and dry lightning. I know. I felt the pressure change and awoke. I walked to the screen door and almost fell over from the sudden blast of hot wind from a direction of the mountain wind shadow. William was by my side as we stepped out on our covered porch. William cautioned me to not step beyond the shelter of the porch. We watched the dry lightning start to hit different locations of the surrounding mountains as the wind gusted. And the fires began.

Unlike Maui, CalFire has much more extensive resources for fighting fires. Yet many communities burned to the ground. CalFire was hampered by the rills and gullies inaccessible to conventional firefighting equipment throughout the Santa Cruz mountains. Like Maui, we have been in the midst of long-term drought, so dead fuel was ubiquitous. The winds were strong, but not as strong as Maui.

While power was immediately knocked out for many locations (PG&E also relies on old-fashioned power poles in many mountainous regions), cellular and microwave links were maintained due to adequate battery backup. However, many locations in the mountains are “dead zones” with respect to cellular linkage. For those folks, they relied on house-to-house contact by local authorities and neighbors. Unlike the poor people of Lahaina, the mountain people had more time and more resources to get out, so loss of life was minimized. Loss of property, however, was considerable.

Also unlike the Maui fires, the strikes resulted in fires under the canopies of trees, so air flights dropping retardant and water from the local reservoirs failed to reach the actual fire points. This meant, simply, that small fires could not be staunched before they became big fires. This was a significant opportunity loss.

William and I were among the thousands under mandatory evacuation in the days after the lightning strikes. As we sat in a hotel near Stanford Hospital (William had cancer surgery scheduled that week), William looked up at me and said “You know, I’m tired of this. We could use existing technology to locate the fires. We could use drones to get under the canopy. We can carry retardant to drop on small fires before they become big fires.” And then, he began to put together a business plan to do exactly that.

It wasn’t easy for a man with terminal cancer to begin this process. But William and I were struck by the complete indifference by Silicon Valley companies and venture to the reality of climate change. Oh sure, they put money into charities to help folks after-the-fact. But that’s too-little, too late.

William is a legend in Silicon Valley. He’s the Father of Open Source Berkeley Unix. His work and its progeny are the engines of commerce. Yet he could not get sufficient interest beyond some meetings and happy talk. Apparently, wealthy folks can just relocate to safer locales. It is not a burning concern to these folks.

But with global climate change, is anywhere really safer?

There is actually some movement now on his vision to make a safer world 1-1/2 years after his death. So in this, I am hopeful.

To assist in spotting small fires before they become big fires, UC San Diego is working with CalFire to develop AI mechanisms to essentially sort through various feeds looking for anomalies that may indicate a fire starting.

This is the first item William outlined 3-1/2 years ago as we sat in our hotel room waiting out the fires.

As to drone development, at the time William was putting together his funding proposal and doing the research, drones were predominantly consumer-oriented, with the capability of handling a camera. They were user-operated over short distance. And they were completely unusable for carrying heavy loads like fire retardant.

But war is often the engine of change. And the war in Ukraine launched by Russia has resulted in a literal blitzkrieg of drone innovation and reduced cost of payload. This price to payload ratio is the key to affordable drone fire-fighting capability. After all, a cheap $2,000US drone targeting a small under-canopy fire is now much more cost-effective than a helicopter dropping fluids from above which may or may not work. As stated in the article, “A drone gives a lot of bang for the buck, as utterly new weapons often do.”

NATO has also announced a new $1B fund for defense and security startups. Expect to see startups focused on cyber-security, drone technology, and non-interceptible command and control hardware and software to take the lead here.

Translating weapons of war to consumer products is often challenging. However, drones have gone from consumer toys to weapons of war capable of carrying heavy payloads. So it is much more feasible to move them back to peaceful purposes like fire fighting.

It is as important to keep the peace as it is to make war. And climate change is not simply a war we can win or lose and walk away. We can only adapt. Or die.

Fun Friday: I Welcome our AI Overlords, Don’t You?

As the layoffs of the old continue here in Silicon Valley, the investment community and Big Tech ™ rush headlong into the wonderful world of AI. Every company and every startup now sees that brass ring ready to anoint the Overlords of AI ™ (pending I assume).

Elon Musk, annoyed with his not-good-enough OpenAI involvement, is simultaneously railing against the perils of AI and announcing a new AI company called xAI — which will apparently tell us how the real world works with an exploration of “the true nature of the universe”. Heh.

I guess the Earth and the Solar System aren’t enough anymore. Nor is the Milky way galaxy with everything within the Perseus and Scutum-Centaurus arms. Nope, now we’ve got to include the Hubble picture of all galaxies to get the maximum pitch potential. I guess the TAM is huge enough for even the most greedy investor. I think…

Meanwhile, ChatGPT application growth has finally started to slow down, as people rush to the new Threads app launched as a competitor to Twitter. Yes, folks, the dumbest site in all the Milky Way has been duped by Meta (the Facebook fellows) as an add-on to their Instagram app.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a site in need of boosting must be in want of a cloned competitor. In other words, the quickest path to development is usually to rip and piggyback open source code onto something else and cross your fingers as you go live. It may not be ready, but it will be running, kinda.

Meanwhile, OpenAI is being investigated by the FTC for its propensity to unleash “hallucinating” AIs on the world, leading to rampant lies and misleading statements. They’re also annoyed that the AIs were trained on copyrighted works, but honestly I think that’s an afterthought as no one cared when source code attribution was deleted and content aggregators like Google News allowed one to find the article that didn’t require payment before. Why now? Maybe it just makes the filing more “human”.

The term hallucinating is a fascinating one for a piece of software, n’est-ce pas? It allows the company to elide responsibility for their software producing rotten results by implying the software is just some kind of person with a disability who should be treated with kindness and not legal threats. It also distances the company from this AI “person”, as person’s are only responsible for themselves and no one else.

This is, in sum, a very weird attempt to extend the ragged edges of Section 230 of the communications act to AIs where the AI software developer has no influence nor liability for what the AI actually says.

If you recall, the act states that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

The legal shield was passed to allow individuals to comment and post items on websites like Facebook and Twitter — and even blogs like mine if I so desire — with no liability to the provider of the service for the words said. People say dumb things, goes the thought, so why punish the website operator? This little sentence made the Internet providers rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

By acting like the AI itself is just providing information, and the developers and propagators of the information are just providers of an interactive computer service, they distance themselves from the liability of these acts.

So of course, everyone in Silicon Valley and beyond wants to extend it to AIs. Investors. Big Tech. Even Elon Musk.

That’s where the money is.

Sedate Sunday: NIF Fusion Breakthrough, UC Strike Settled, Nuclear Investments Thrive

As a sum up to an eventful week, LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) announced that they had achieved fusion ignition. “LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE).” The facility is impressive, using 192 lasers coordinated to burst on a tiny deuterium-tritium capsule.

The media was less impressed: “We are still a very long way from having nuclear fusion power the electric grid, experts caution. The US project, while groundbreaking, only produced enough energy to boil about 2.5 gallons of water, Tony Roulstone, a fusion expert from the engineering department at the University of Cambridge, told CNN.” 

Given all the years and planning and building and incredible cost, the NIF wasn’t just a cool way to try to bootstrap fusion ignition as a clean energy source. As physicist Bob Rosner, University of Chicago and former director of the Argonne National Laboratory, stated in an interview with John Mecklin at the Bulletin of the the Atomic Scientists, “The folks who succeeded so splendidly in attaining ignition and self-sustained fusion on December 5 were not part of DoE’s fusion energy program (which sits in the DoE Office of Science Office of Fusion Energy Sciences); they’re working instead for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which manages our nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.”

What’s all this got to do with nuclear weapons? Well, in the late 1980s there was a lot of pressure to ban underground nuclear testing, and it succeeded. So now, how do you certify that your nuke work as advertised? “NNSA decided to build new experimental facilities (one of which was the National Ignition Facility), efforts were made to construct new simulation codes to help certify the weapons, and investments were made in new generations of advanced computers that these codes required and could run on. And NIF was meant to, in part, validate the design code approaches used for the weapons.  Before NIF was even completed, they chose a target experiment that—in combination with simulation codes advances—could demonstrate that we knew what we were doing.”

When William and I ran Symmetric Computer Systems in the 1980s, we sold Symmetric 375 computers to LLNL precisely for this reason. As William had a unique security clearance due to his earlier work at NASA, he was asked to examine the simulations and correct any issues with the Fortran compiler supplied with the computers – which was done. Later, when they switched to Sun Microsystem computers, they continued to call us about “Fortran compiler issues” in our systems which didn’t exist. When we told them we found no errors, they admitted it wasn’t our 375 computers that were the problem. Instead, they tried to get us to fix Sun’s Fortran compiler because the Sun people “wouldn’t return our calls”. We told them, nicely, to either buy more 375 computers or take a flying leap. They chose the leap. I suspect the compiler errors delayed their simulation work for about 5 years. Such is the cost of cheapness.

In other news, the long strike of UC workers is over. Graduate students, postdocs and academic researchers are the backbone of the university, but as the cost of living has skyrocketed, pay has stagnated. I’m pleased to see UC is finally dealing with this issue fairly.

Given the NIF breakthrough, perhaps it’s only fair to review the $3.4B in nuclear investments this year. According to Crunchbase, one major player, Bill-Gates backed TerraPower, raised $750M in it’s most recent round. TerraPower uses molten salt reactor technology. Dr. Shu, Professor Emeritus at Berkeley, did a talk back in 2016 at Microsoft on his patented two-fluid molten salt breeder reactor (2F-MSBR) using thorium which I found quite interesting (yes, William and I were there). Dr. Shu felt that this was the only way to combat climate change and save the planet in his lifetime.

As to fusion, even though the NIF has had billions of investment over decades and has only now achieved scientific energy breakeven, there is still a lot of money involved in seeing it through: “The biggest single fusion investment came in December, when Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems raised a huge round of more than $1.8 billion led by Tiger Global and also included investments from Bill Gates, Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures and about two dozen others. Just before that, in early November, Everett, Washington-based Helion Energy closed a $500 million Series E led by Sam Altman—with an opportunity for an additional $1.7 billion tied to reaching performance milestones.”

Expect even more money thrown into conventional and fusion energy investments after NIF’s announcement. 

Fun Friday – If a Sequoia Falls in an Angry Forest of Limiteds, Does it Care? Martian Craters and the Lives of Eels!

Firstly and most importantly, there is a fascinating article about the eels returning to the Sargasso Sea to reproduce in Smithsonian Magazine that I highly recommend reading. Eels have played a part in literature, myth and cuisine for eons, but little is yet known about their life cycle. I wonder how they feel, after living so many years in brackish shoreline and fresh waters, making the long journey back to the salty sea to spawn and die? Do they miss it? Do they want to leave? What do they dream?

From the deep seas to the starry skies, one can learn a bit about crater counting to determine (roughly) geologic events. This technique, first devised for lunar geology, can with caveats be applied to Mars. So what are you waiting for? Count those craters!

Finally, out in Silicon Valley venture land, the crypto fallout continues, with one of the most powerful and ruthless venture firms on Sand Hill Road diving into the foxhole. According to Bloomberg, “Sequoia Capital wrote down the full value of its $214 million investment in FTX only weeks after hailing the founder of the embattled cryptocurrency exchange as a “legend” with a “savior complex.”” Ouch!

This especially must bite all the other investors who in June 2021 let Sequoia lead them down the merry path of a $1B investment round. How times, and valuations, change.

Since then, while man-child Mr. Bankrupt, er, Bankman-Fried, who obstensibly ran FTX and is incidentally the spawn of law professors from Stanford — an investment fund that also runs a university — has been running around begging understanding of his plight, Sequoia decided to handle this disgrace by sacrificing one of their lesser lights to the Gods of Mammon — even though poor Divya Gupta wasn’t even at Sequoia when they led that fateful round in 2021. Heck, he hardly had the chance to get his feet moist, as it were, before things collapsed. Ah well, at least they don’t make them walk the plank anymore (I think). 

Partner Alfred Lin, Mr. FTX is Swell, had the pleasant duty of apologizing to their Limited for this debacle, whining that they really really really did their diligence (snort) and that they were misled (hahahaha). 

Sure, it’s absolutely commonplace for a little venture firm like Sequoia to not have the resources to conduct proper due diligence of an investment opportunity and its founder, ignore the paperwork, and glad-hand other venture firms using the “Trust me, we’re the smart money” mantra to get everyone else to dive in – NOT. 

But they are saying now that they have learned their lesson: “Moving forward, Sequoia partners said they would be more cautious about making substantial investments in companies whose founders they did not have a longstanding relationship with for investments made out of its global growth and expansion funds.”

I guess Stanford is no longer welcome at the Christmas party.

Happy Holidays!

Fun Friday: Twitter and the Age of Anti-Innovation


“One lesson that has to be remembered in my line of business is that when an operation is over it is OVER.The temptation to stay just one more day or to cash just one more cheque can be almost overwhelming, ah, how well I know. I also know that it is also the best way to get better acquainted with the police. Turn your back and walk away – And live to graft another day.” The Stainless Steel Rat, Harry Harrison

Well, I wasn’t going to talk about Musk, but I’m a bit jealous. First he subpoenaed Stanford University about twitter’s 1995 origins  — a university he claims he spent all of two days at in the materials science engineering PhD program at that time. Then he up and forgot he was going for an interesting Silicon Valley history lesson and decided to buy the company anyway. Sigh.

Perhaps he gave up because he skipped out on paying Stanford their exorbitant tuition and fees by not enrolling, and he’s worried they still have the bill. Actually, this is very possible — my own father attended Stanford and left with a $100 owed them. A generation later, when his son got admitted, Stanford still remembered. Academic debt is eternal. But the boring story is Musk got a better deal and frankly, I don’t remember twitter as an “item” at all. Go figure.

This was a heady five years for me and William: after writing the two year 386BSD series “Porting Unix to the 386″ in Dr. Dobbs Journal and the source code of 386BSD 0.0, 0.1, and 1.0/2.0 , and the DDJ 386BSD Release 1.0 CDROM with all the writings and annotations in 1994, by 1995 we were putting the finishing touches on the first volume of Source Code Secrets while inventing role-based security, polymorphic protocols and new approaches in high speed networking (these articles actually led to a rethink in high speed networking that birthed InterProphet in 1997), and tinkering with CDROM filesystems on a lark. So forgive me for missing the import of this crucial event.

Musk has an axe to grind. Actually, he has several axes to grind. Anyone who knows the history of SpaceX has seen his axe. I assume he was going to bury it right in Stanford’s backside by grabbing any info they have about Twitter and its hapless former CEO Parag Agrawal, but I suppose he’s now quite happy being Chief Twit (not my first choice for a moniker — I think Big Tweeter would be better) and chopping up anything that moves. My guess is he’s now looking for some confirmation of those darn bots popping up everywhere, like heffalumps and woozles. Are they real? Or just a fever dream? Who knows?

But 1995 does stand out in retrospect. It can be considered officially the year anti-innovation became the watchword in investment even as amazing technologies like open source came to the fore. The opportunities for grift on the Internet (don’t forget that “no one knows you’re a whatever” meme) was so compelling and sexy that *any* attempt to disrupt this was taken as a threat. 

Limit the words. Limit the thought. The nastier, the better. No discourse. No remorse. Virality uber alles. (Haven’t we learned by now that virality leads to pandemics?) 

Like crack, the unfiltered quips of just about anybody and their bot was addictive — especially to journalists. Gotta admit, it’s a lot harder to track down and interview people in depth, or attend press conferences, or sort through press releases, or travel to obscure places, or actually cross-check your sources first — especially if you’re not getting paid well for it. Twitter made all that stuff superfluous. What mattered was being the first. “Covfefe”, yeah baby! Deep stuff. Quit twitter? Forget it. They’re permanently addicted, and Musk knows it.

While twitter has an outsized influence on journalists who write about twitter, who else uses twitter, really? Politicians? Extremists? The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City? The most lucrative demographic from a marketing ad sales standpoint is young people, not these people. But most of the kids have migrated to other more trendy sites, like tiktok or instagram. Twitter usage declined 10% among teens over the last seven years according to Pew Research. Heck, even Facebook is doing better than them, and from my perspective it’s been getting grayer along with my cohort.

The problem with a cynical viral play is that things like “making money” or “building a product” are unimportant. We’ve seen that time and again, but twitter was the worst of the worst for lacking even a modicum of humor and humility. Even when they had a chance to build something sustainable for a younger target audience, their tendency to kill anything that smacked of building a real business was stomped on. Virality and viciousness don’t require innovative talent and product. 

One example of their anti-innovation attitude was their acquisition of Vine, a trivial and frankly unthreatening six second video loop site. It was clear by the early 2000s that video was an interesting opportunity. Heck, I was pitching ExecProducer’s Massive Video Production strategy and online automated video production mid-2000s on Sand Hill Road. ExecProducer and CoolClip had much more sophisticated video server production than Vine, with a very different focus. So Vine should have been a no brainer to move twitter into a younger demographic, right? Uh, nope. After four miserable years, it was shut down. In the end, twitter acquired a potential rival — and killed it.

I wish the anti-innovation euphoria popular in the Silicon Valley investment scene would become tiresome. But it’s just too easy to make and lose money. Currently, venture capital investment is sitting on $500B of dry powder according to Pitchbook. Think of those numbers, folks. $500 BILLION DOLLARS, just sitting in accounts, waiting for the next six months flip unicorn. It boggles the mind.

Real innovation is risky. It takes time. We can’t flip a startup in six months doing real code, real hardware, real systems. It takes time to convince customers to try our stuff. It takes time to shake out the bugs. But it’s also a heck of a lot of fun and necessary.

Because sometimes the grift really does end. And you don’t want to be there when it does.

Fun Friday: Telescopes and Memories

I’ve been planning to write something for a while, but frankly, there hasn’t been anything really fun to write about.

Everyone is complaining about gas prices and inflation. Global trade is still bottlenecked and tangled in knots. There’s still a pandemic, folks, although you wouldn’t know it from the way people are dancing like it’s the last night before the End of the World.

On the business front, venture is busily grabbing any money they can to hoard while telling their portfolio companies to “tighten the belt”, mainly around the necks of their employees. Companies are eagerly complying by rescinding job offers and instituting layoffs. Folks are nervous as they crowd airports, hoping their flight isn’t one of the hundreds cancelled that day due to lack of flight staff. And the war in Ukraine waged by Russia in a fit of insanity continues to kill innocents and destabilize the entire EU.

Speaking of dead innocents, the US Supreme Court, destined to go down in history as depraved pandering sacks of shit, decided that guns everywhere makes for a stronger America. Their overturning of Roe v Wade, expected after the leaked draft admiring the people who burned innocent people as witches crawled out of the sewers, has been released and to no one’s surprise reduced women to that of beasts. Yes, it is not a Fun Friday for many people. Maybe it’s a Gun Friday. I’m sorry.

Roe v Wade was decided in 1973. I was twelve. It impacted my life and health for the better. Today it is officially overturned in a ruthless precedent-be-damned legal coup. I am sixty, past childbearing age. It cannot impact me directly. Yet I have daughters and young people I care about. I don’t want to see them hurt. Their happiness and livelihood and health matters to me. They should have the same rights to choice and freedom that I had. They may not know how much it matters yet. But they will. I am sure of that.

I spent the morning cleaning one of William’s prototype telescope designs for display in the office. It’s an unusually compact and minimalist design. As I cleaned the mirror and cover plate, I found a cricket living in the focuser. I watched it hop off the picnic table and out of sight, grabbed the telescope, and took it to the office.

It now sits amongst the many creative works William and I did together. Our reliquary. 375 computers. InterProphet low-latency networking boards. 386BSD articles and books and CDROM. An unpopulated six layer 375 motherboard.

In other parts of the office, an EtherSAN prototype unit box, a 386BSD CDROM with the heftiest liner notes ever made, 386 computers of various vintages used for 386BSD, and bins 386BSD and 375 disk drives, boards, and cables. Some complete and some mid-project, designs waiting for a hand to finish the work.

It is a reminder that things are never finished — they are only left in a state of usability for a time. Once that time passes, one either has to toss it away or begin again. I choose both. To toss some things away and to begin again on other things.

Young people also have a choice. They can fight for their freedoms — and they can toss them away. I hope they choose wisely.

Fun Friday: Low-Tech Delays for Cars, An Icon Retires, and Mars Sings

Silicon Valley continues to belt-tighten amidst the turmoil of inflation, the continuing and never-ending pandemic impacting global trade, and the “Hundred Days War” in Ukraine brought to the rest of the world by Russia’s kakistocracy. Venture firms continue to prioritize late stage companies with their largess, hoping to get ahead of the perceived end of civilization (just look for companies closing their Series E and F rounds). And the summer travel scene, much hoped to bring back the hospitality industry after two years of lockdowns and mandates, suffers from cancelled flights and worker shortages.

But all is not lost. On the bright side, IC cars may die out, not due to direct competition with EVs, but instead from a lack of a low-tech component — wire harnesses. According to Reuters, IC wire harnesses are not usually machine made, unlike component harnesses made in the computer industry (and also used in Li-ion battery harnesses like that in EVs like tesla). Instead, countries like Ukraine hand-crafted these necessary components for a plethera of IC cars from a variety of small sources, a low-cost approach that major auto companies saw no reason to change — until now. The EV platform is looking more and more cost-effective and sensible to auto manufacturers, all thanks to the little wire harness.

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Meta/FaceBook, and women-in-business Lean-In icon, has chosen to “lean out” of her role in favor of wedding planning and philanthropy. Privately, according to the Wall Street Journal (which I will not link to as it is subscriber-only folks), Sandberg was upset with company investigations into her private meddling with tabloid The Daily Mail over its reporting of her then-boyfriend, perennial jerk and still amazingly CEO of Activision / Blizzard Bobby Kotick, as well as improper corporate expenditures for her upcoming wedding to another billionaire after she dumped Bobby.

It’s gratifying, actually, to see this woman presented as a flawless advocate of corporate womanhood 1) demonstrate such poor taste in men, especially to a tabloid notorious for its duplicity and ruthlessness — here’s hoping number 2 works out better — and 2) not even bother to use her own private staff to put together her wedding and pull out her own personal platinum card when as COO she would have scrutinized everyone else’s expenses and use of facilities / resources.

Lest anyone worry about poor burned-out Sheryl, do not concern yourself. She has made plenty of money from her sojourn at FaceBook and will not have to return her dress to David’s Bridal for a more economical one.

Finally, listen to the Song of Mars — a haunting low moan which enriches the mind and the soul, complements of Maurice, Chide, et al published in Nature. As you read the paper, listen to the dreamlike song of another world. You will be enlightened.

Happy Friday.

Fun Friday: Funding in Transition and Mammalian Distributed Memory Storage

As inflation continues to take its toll on everyone’s investments as well as steak dinner (psst – get the rotisserie chicken at Costco instead), Silicon Valley is clearly in a state of transition. Startups have been told to tighten their belts financially. Layoffs in big tech companies have begun. “Growth” ventures are failing to get follow-on funding, primarily in the consumer space and media (in Substack’s case, they’re also proving the old adage that no one pays attention to writers).

But for every easy money gambit that’s falling out of the sky, there is hope for the dreamer and rogue. Venture firms are still collecting money hand-over-fist from desperate Limiteds eager to get some return with the stock market slowing. Folks with money want to make more money. There are lots of them.

Of course, this doesn’t directly help the small entrepreneur. Big Venture (TM) doesn’t fund the small fry inventing neat technologies anymore — they have too many Series D unicorn mouths to feed. Big tech companies are no longer a safe bet — they may fire you and escort you unceremoniously out the door without any warning. In hard times, loyalty is not its own reward.

But there are a lot of individual investors out there who can drop $1M on a neat tech idea. All the startups William and I founded started with a dream, some code, and a handshake during lousy economic times. They were funded precisely because making easy money on scams and gambits have evaporated.

So if you’ve got a good hard tech project, now may be the best time to go for it. The cash is still plentiful. Just play it cool. It worked for us. It can work for you.

Researchers tracked neural activity across a whole mouse brain to determine what areas were involved in storing a specific memory. Many brain regions found likely to be involved in encoding a memory (top) were also found to be involved in recall upon reactivation (bottom). Credits: Image courtesy of the Tonegawa Lab/Picower Institute.
Neural activity across a whole mouse brain to determine what areas were involved in storing a specific memory. Many brain regions found likely to be involved in encoding a memory (top) were also found to be involved in recall upon reactivation (bottom). 
Credits:Image courtesy of the Tonegawa Lab/Picower Institute. Read the article!

And speaking of distributed memory, a new study from MIT describes the mammalian brain as storing memory, not densely in a few regions, but instead loosely across many regions of the brain. This makes sense in a way. It’s a lot easier to completely lose a memory if it’s in one or a few locations than spread throughout the brain. Also, storing memories in larger “chunks” would result in a lot of wasted storage space since a memory is of varying size. Indirect references to each memory element, even if a few are lost, are more efficient than directly physically mapping a memory.

It does explain the dreamlike aspect of memories, doesn’t it? And also perhaps memories which are completely wrong but feel entirely real and true. Likely we lose a lot of these references that fill in some of the blanks over time. Associated elements, like smell, can track back along a pathway to a memory to give the gist of it, but it may be only a shadow of what was actually recorded.

But is the brain’s memory sparsely allocated as well? It may well be given this highly distributed storage across many parts of the brain. Sparse allocation is common in operating systems because it is usually faster and overall more efficient. But it can use more total memory than that of a densely allocated memory mechanism if most of the elements contain non-repeatable data. Are most of our memories just collages of a few meaningful pieces and a lot of filler? Perhaps dreams look odd precisely because they are just stray strands of sparse referents to redundant memories garbage collected by the brain and reallocated for use.

To dream. Perchance to sleep. Now that is the question.

Not-So-Fun Friday: William Jolitz in Memoriam

I’ve avoided writing about many things over the last few years of William’s long illness. Writing his obituary was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. He lived an amazing life full of discovery, wonder and terror. Selecting just a few vignettes to illustrate his character and strength of will was difficult. I miss him terribly.

For the last six months of his life and the first three months of his death, I avoided the Los Gatos office we shared over the years. There are so many projects we planned that are now left undone. Some I can finish. Others I must deconstruct. Some are lost forever, except in my memory.

But now here I am in the little office I shared with William, surrounded by the relics of technologies and products and startups past. The passion is never extinguished, but only delayed a little.

Much in the world has changed but still stays exactly the same. Things William and I and others no one else remembers get rediscovered again and again. Things that shouldn’t be get dug up and instantiated with a “This time for sure” enthusiasm that belies sense. All for fame, or fortune, or just because it’s fun. It’s the Silicon Valley way.

And because memory is in the end all we have.

Fun Friday: AMD-Intel Battle Commences, Big Honking Space Guns, and our Good Friend, the Comb Jelly

The Changing Face of Intel (Economist, 2021)

Another slow Friday. Texas has frozen over. California is becoming ever-drier. The Polar Vortex has crept downwards over the decade to now reach Mexico. Summer will be burning. And the pandemic continues.

Everywhere climate change has come for us all. We are not ready for it. Not. At. All.

Pat Gelsinger has taken the reins at Intel, as the Economist notes (paid subscription). I do enjoy a piece that remembers Andy Grove, the iconoclastic Intel CEO who passed away in 2016 and made Intel a leader in microprocessors. 

I remember hearing rollicking stories of the semiconductor industry from Dick Williams, then retired Director of Research from Ford Aerospace / Loral, when we shared an office in the late 1990’s at InterProphet (he was on the Advisory Board).

Back in those days, he would recount, creating semiconductor processes was so difficult that people would talk about it from different firms over drinks after work, so everyone knew everyone. He also hired Bob Noyce into his first job.

Andy Grove and Bob Noyce were among the Traitorous Eight who founded Fairchild Semiconductor. When that got stuffy, Noyce left with Gordon Moore (of the famed “Moore’s Law”) to found Intel, and of course immediately pulled in Grove and dived into DRAM — and did well, until the DRAM Wars drove them out. That’s when the X86 series was born. 

By the time the 80386 was established in the late 1980’s, we were outlining a new open source Unix future with 386BSD and A Modest Proposal in 1989. When we were updating 386BSD in 1990, we were given access to their prototype 80486 processor at their headquarters here in Silicon Valley — just so 386BSD would run correctly.

I actually have a fondness for the early Intel. They were supportive of 386BSD and courteous, unlike AMD’s bland officiousness. Later on, when Intel abandoned 386BSD and went exclusively to Linux for what they thought were legal concerns, I was disappointed but not surprised. There was a lot of “fake news” back then about 386BSD and us, and there was no Snopes to counter it. 

Only years later was I told by one of my retired Intel executive contacts that they made a mistake in that decision, as none of the catastrophic claims ever came to pass. But it was water under the bridge at that point, and I had gone on to found InterProphet, a TCP low-latency fabless semiconductor company with William. It was just another of the many opportunities in Silicon Valley killed by malign neglect.

Now Pat Gelsinger, architect and technologist, is back at Intel, and he has quite a mess to clean up. Bad business decisions, delays in chip production, and an unimaginative product roadmap might still have not hampered Intel’s profitability. But unlike the Sanders era of AMD, the current CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, is a brilliant technologist and business leader who has led AMD to leadership in the industry.

So now a battle of equals commences. AMD and Intel. It should be interesting, to say the least.

But while we’re waiting, there’s always Big Honking Space Guns from Russia and the ever-amazing comb jelly to bemuse and bewitch you, as they have me. 

Have a Fun Friday, everyone!