Post

Sam Rose
@samwho.dev

Since reading Chris Miller’s “Chip War” last year I can’t stop thinking about this. The phone I’m writing this on is alien technology. Chips made by etching patterns so small they can’t even be seen by visible light, using lasers created by heating tin to the surface temperature of the sun.

Roger Senserrich@4freedoms.es

My GPU has 45 billion transistors in it. Like, we have this magic rock that we carved 45,000,000,000 miniature switches on it to create images of worlds that do not exist on a screen. We really, really not appreciate enough how insanely magical technology is.

5 reposts31 likes

Sam Rose
@samwho.dev

The laser is guided by mirrors so flat that if they were blown up to the size of Germany, the maximum excursion would be ~1 millimetre. Lasers so complicated only 1 company in the world is capable of making them, and doing so requires parts from more than 800 other companies.

Sam Rose
@samwho.dev

I’ve started to believe that technology’s biggest bottleneck in 2025 is human creativity. And that’s not even to say we aren’t creative! We absolutely are, but the sheer scale of the tiny little chips in our pockets is mind boggling.

Sam Rose
@samwho.dev

I'll say that the book does spend a long time talking about the geopolitics surrounding microchip advancement, and a lot of time talking about the military. I personally found the early years of chip development a little bit dry to read about, it was the later, more recent chapters that blew me away

Salish Sea
@seasofsalish.bsky.social

I had no idea. We just bought our daughter an Apple M4 Max yesterday. She needs it for her tech design program. That’s all I have to add. Also tech is amazing. I wish we could use it for good. These past few months haven’t given me much hope for tech to be a force for good.

Sam Rose
@samwho.dev

There is a massive amount of good that has tech to thank, it’s not quite as doom and gloom as it looks on the face of it.