Philip Lessner

𝐒𝐦𝐨𝐥𝐭𝐞𝐤 𝐉𝐨𝐛 – We are looking for a 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐳𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐑𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐄𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐫. You will do electrical characterization and reliability assessment of our ALD-based dielectric stacks and CNF-MIM capacitors. smoltek.com/smoltek-semi/a…

I’m glad I’m retired and can use Apple Mail/Gmail now.

Every time we've made it easier to write software, we've ended up writing exponentially more of it. When high-level languages replaced assembly, programmers didn't write less code - they wrote orders of magnitude more, tackling problems that would have been economically impossible before. When frameworks abstracted away the plumbing, we didn't reduce our output - we built more ambitious applications. When cloud platforms eliminated infrastructure management, we didn't scale back - we spun up services for use cases that never would have justified a server room. @levie recently articulated why this pattern is about to repeat itself at a scale we haven't seen before, using Jevons Paradox as the frame. The argument resonates because it's playing out in real-time in our developer tools. The initial question everyone asks is "will this replace developers?" but just watch what actually happens. Teams that adopt these tools don't always shrink their engineering headcount - they expand their product surface area. The three-person startup that could only maintain one product now maintains four. The enterprise team that could only experiment with two approaches now tries seven. The constraint being removed isn't competence but it's the activation energy required to start something new. Think about that internal tool you've been putting off because "it would take someone two weeks and we can't spare anyone"? Now it takes three hours. That refactoring you've been deferring because the risk/reward math didn't work? The math just changed. This matters because software engineers are uniquely positioned to understand what's coming. We've seen this movie before, just in smaller domains. Every abstraction layer - from assembly to C to Python to frameworks to low-code - followed the same pattern. Each one was supposed to mean we'd need fewer developers. Each one instead enabled us to build more software. Here's the part that deserves more attention imo: the barrier being lowered isn't just about writing code faster. It's about the types of problems that become economically viable to solve with software. Think about all the internal tools that don't exist at your company. Not because no one thought of them, but because the ROI calculation never cleared the bar. The custom dashboard that would make one team 10% more efficient but would take a week to build. The data pipeline that would unlock insights but requires specialized knowledge. The integration that would smooth a workflow but touches three different systems. These aren't failing the cost-benefit analysis because the benefit is low - they're failing because the cost is high. Lower that cost by "10x", and suddenly you have an explosion of viable projects. This is exactly what's happening with AI-assisted development, and it's going to be more dramatic than previous transitions because we're making previously "impossible" work possible. The second-order effects get really interesting when you consider that every new tool creates demand for more tools. When we made it easier to build web applications, we didn't just get more web applications - we got an entire ecosystem of monitoring tools, deployment platforms, debugging tools, and testing frameworks. Each of these spawned their own ecosystems. The compounding effect is nonlinear. Now apply this logic to every domain where we're lowering the barrier to entry. Every new capability unlocked creates demand for supporting capabilities. Every workflow that becomes tractable creates demand for adjacent workflows. The surface area of what's economically viable expands in all directions. For engineers specifically, this changes the calculus of what we choose to work on. Right now, we're trained to be incredibly selective about what we build because our time is the scarce resource. But when the cost of building drops dramatically, the limiting factor becomes imagination, "taste" and judgment, not implementation capacity. The skill shifts from "what can I build given my constraints?" to "what should we build given that constraints have in some ways been evaporated?" The meta-point here is that we keep making the same prediction error. Every time we make something more efficient, we predict it will mean less of that thing. But efficiency improvements don't reduce demand - they reveal latent demand that was previously uneconomic to address. Coal. Computing. Cloud infrastructure. And now, knowledge work. The pattern is so consistent that the burden of proof should shift. Instead of asking "will AI agents reduce the need for human knowledge workers?" we should be asking "what orders of magnitude increase in knowledge work output are we about to see?" For software engineers it's the same transition we've navigated successfully several times already. The developers who thrived weren't the ones who resisted higher-level abstractions; they were the ones who used those abstractions to build more ambitious systems. The same logic applies now, just at a larger scale. The real question is whether we're prepared for a world where the bottleneck shifts from "can we build this?" to "should we build this?" That's a fundamentally different problem space, and it requires fundamentally different skills. We're about to find out what happens when the cost of knowledge work drops by an order of magnitude. History suggests we (perhaps) won't do less work - we'll discover we've been massively under-investing in knowledge work because it was too expensive to do all the things that were actually worth doing. The paradox isn't that efficiency creates abundance. The paradox is that we keep being surprised by it.

@MsMelChen And, the current Iranian regime will do anything to undermine peace. Intelligence says that Hamas initiated their terror attack because Israel and Saudi Arabia were getting too close to signing a peace treaty.

It wasn’t long ago when Egypt, Syria and Jordan had anti-Zionist “Death to Israel” postures toward Israel, in the same manner that Iran does now. They fought over territory bitterly. But they have all but given up their genocidal ambitions and have become good neighbors to Israel. They trade and collaborate openly with Israel, especially on matters of national security and defense. This could be Iran soon. We are this close. Make no mistake, it isn’t because these nations love the Jews. It’s because the state of Israel, through decisive military action in the Six Day War, demonstrated its prowess as it won both the war and the respect of its neighbors. Iran continues to maintain its genocidal rhetoric and goes as far as to pursue the weapons to make that a possibility. In the region it continues to use proxies and networks to inflict terror and destabilize other Arab nations. But these proxies have never been weaker. This is an opportunity to finally get rid of the head of the snake. Look how it all turned out with Egypt, Jordan and Syria.

#Tantalum #capacitors are one of the five principal dielectric types and represent a market over $1.2B. These capacitors have an interesting history and this blog post covers the invention of the solid Ta cap in the 1950's👇 philiplessner.com/blog/4 More to come...

Everyone is concerned about the increasing power consumption of AI applications. YAGEO Group has the components that can help reduce that power consumption and enable a more sustainable future. Read about our offerings and their roles in 👇 linkedin.com/pulse/yageo-gr…

@GadSaad Of course, the better way is that each side of the river produces something of value to trade with the other side. Unfortunately, that doesn't happen in practice as often as we'd like.

I've said this before but it's worth repeating: World history is defined by the following simple rule. There are two groups on either side of a river. Each covets various resources from the other group. The only thing that stops a perpetual conflict between the two groups is the realization by each group that the other will respond in equal measure (or worse) if attacked. Now imagine that the West has decided to throw away this defining dynamic that shapes this fundamental historical reality. Defending what is ours is rooted in our genes; it is a central feature of our human nature. But the West has said that we are so progressive, so empathetic, so enligteneed that we are not bound by pediastrian biology. Hence, we will not defend our culture; we will not defend our heritage; we will not defend our religion; we will not defend our women; we will not defend our children; we will not defend our values. According to our Western leaders, only barbarians worry about such defensive concerns. We are open, tolerant, kind, compassionate, welcoming. No amount of evidence can convince us that other groups might do us harm. And hence, we brainwash our children who become our politicians; we rejoice in the rape of our societies because this proves that we are kind. It is a mixture of what I discussed in The Parasitic Mind and what I'll be presenting to the world in my next book Suicidal Empathy. I frankly am running out of optimism; I'm bereft of hope. I fight every day at great personal and professional cost. But how can you change anything when your society is hellbent on committing orgiastic suicide?

@MsMelChen Well, democracy is messy. But, it works in the end.

The messiness of democracy is a feature not a bug, but what’s going on in the West - in particular France, UK, and the US - with wild swings between political extremes, with no faction really getting leaders that they actually want, and the constant murmur of rigged political processes is making things very easy for autocrats in Beijing, Moscow and Tehran to say to their people: See? You really don’t want what the West is selling. We have a better system. If liberal democracy was a brand, its PR is really tanking right now

Check out my latest article: Artificial Intelligence--Why Now? linkedin.com/pulse/artifici… via @LinkedIn

@EvanKirstel Full Self Driving

😳 #captionthis

@MsMelChen Because you're a badass.

May I ask why I was served this ad

Don't forget! Join YAGEO Group along with DigiKey for our upcoming technical seminar, where we're dedicated to simplifying the process of choosing inductors. Secure your spot today – REGISTER NOW! hubs.la/Q02219TH0

@__mharrison__ Too bad they won't be able to read legacy Python code. 🙁

After my Python "training", my students still don't know how to use the %s formatting specifier in a print statement. 🤦 That's because I teach them f-strings. 😜

Our components don't work up a "sweat" in your high power AI applications. Get the latest scoop on low-loss, high-power💪 components from @YageoCorp in my @ttiinc Market Eye post. 👇 tti.com/content/ttiinc… #AI #electronics #ArtificialIntelligence

"KEMET has some of the most innovative capacitor technologies in the industry."-@SteveTaranovich in Electronic Design Magazine. One such @KEMETCapacitors technology is our Class I MLCC: KC-LINK for high power designs. Check out his technical article 👇 electronicdesign.com/technologies/p…

What's new at @YageoCorp? Read all about it in my interview with Markt&Technik. Learn about the latest developments in #capacitors and #magnetics and our expansion in #sensors. 👉elektroniknet.de/e-mechanik-pas…

@MsMelChen @Aella_Girl My stable wife is crazy enough for me. Life is interesting enough.

@Aella_Girl Interested in this response. Do men want crypto (volatile) or S&P 500 (stable)? Do men wanna fuck crypto but marry S&P 500? Been told that the “crazies” bring “spice” to a boring, mundane life. Women who are stoic / have low emotional dynamic range are apparently boring 🤷‍♀️

straight men: is it kinda hot actually when a girl is 'crazy' - gets mad at you for random things, emotional and unpredictable, etc.?

Comprehensive article on different #capacitor types--their characteristics and applications. digikey.com/en/articles/wh…

@ylecun LLM--Like owning an AK-47 Ballpen--Like owning a handgun

- Engineer: I invented this new thing. I call it a ballpen 🖊️ - TwitterSphere: OMG, people could write horrible things with it, like misinformation, propaganda, hate speech. Ban it now! - Writing Doomers: imagine if everyone can get a ballpen. This could destroy society. There should be a law against using ballpen to write hate speech. regulate ballpens now! - Pencil industry mogul: yeah, ballpens are very dangerous. Unlike pencil writing which is erasable, ballpen writing stays forever. Government should require a license for pen manufacturers.

@MsMelChen First World problem, but I sympathize.

Update: found a Starbucks. I am home. Thank heavens for Venti coffee. What passes for a “large” at any other coffee spot in the UK is laughable.. it’s basically coffee for ants

I’m not even in real Europe (🇬🇧) and the coffee situation is already pissing me off. Like why on earth can’t I find half-and-half anywhere? Dude looked at me confused and then sniggered when I asked for a “creamer.” So you only put ordinary milk in coffee? Why? So gross.