Crossgrain, by Jung

Is there something everyone in your industry repeats that you've never quite been able to put down? Have you ever caught it before someone pointed it out? Usually we learn the answer first, and then feel we had known it all along. The problem is how natural that illusion feels. Power and charisma don't arrive because you studied late in life. Intellect compounds. But if you mistake the direction of the compounding, decay compounds too. Lean on other people's interpretations long enough and your own circuitry goes dull. Age into that without noticing, and you end up with more responsibility and someone else's head. It was a dinner. The résumés around the table were impressive. The topic was US Treasuries. They said China was dumping US Treasuries at scale. Ray Dalio's debt-cycle framework was cited. Taleb's tail risk made an appearance. A recent forty-page paper was produced as evidence. And for three hours, the same conclusion kept arriving: Americ...

PhD Statement of Purpose A few application seasons ago, three students came to me separately. Different backgrounds, no knowledge of each other. All three were applying to the same department at Harvard. All three had written a paragraph explaining their fit with the same famous professor there. All three cited the same paper of his as evidence of that fit. It was the paper at the top of his profile page. Nobody copied anybody. They didn't need to. They had all run the same procedure: open the faculty page, take the first result, wrap it in the word "aligns." Three people who had never met produced interchangeable evidence of a unique intellectual connection. That is what a template does. As a coach, I have read Statements of Purpose (Personal Statements) since October 2008. I can usually tell by the second paragraph whether a committee will finish the page. Here is the thing I learned: every professor reading your file is asking one question. Not consciously,...

We know the AI memory story. Do we ask what it is made of? The Story: Artificial intelligence needs accelerator chips. Accelerator chips need High Bandwidth Memory — HBM, the specialized memory stacked beside AI processors. Supply is tight. New factories take years to build. Only three companies on Earth — SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron — can make the good stuff at scale. And HBM consumes roughly three times the manufacturing capacity of ordinary server memory. Therefore the shortage is structural, the suppliers have pricing power, and the premium is deserved. We've heard every sentence above. Here is my question. When SK Hynix gets better at making HBM, who keeps the savings? Does Nvidia's price fall as SK Hynix's cost falls? Does SK Hynix pocket the difference? Was the improvement already assumed in the original price? We don't know. The contract is private, so our uncertainty is not the problem. The confidence built on top of it is. The market talks as though shortage, th...