https://www.cobblestonepub.ie/
_- Steve
Saturday, January 17, 2026
Friday, January 16, 2026
Thursday, January 15, 2026
From Tokens to Burgers – A Water Footprint Face-Off
AI and water: One extremely large AI data center has about the same water footprint as 2.5 In-N-Out Burger locations. One burger is about the same water use as 7 million interactions with an LLM.
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/from-tokens-to-burgers-a-water-footprint
_- Steve
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/from-tokens-to-burgers-a-water-footprint
_- Steve
Wednesday, January 14, 2026
Tuesday, January 13, 2026
Engineering
Several books stand out for capturing the intense, high-stakes world of **large-scale engineering projects**—including the technical challenges, team dynamics, management pressures, bureaucratic hurdles, politics, and human drama—much like Tracy Kidder's *The Soul of a New Machine* (about the frantic race to build a new minicomputer at Data General) and Charles Murray's *Apollo: The Race to the Moon* (co-authored with Catherine Bly Cox, detailing the engineering, organizational, and political epic of NASA's moon program).
Here are some of the strongest recommendations that deliver a similar immersive, narrative-driven feel:
- **Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed** by Ben Rich and Leo Janos
This is a classic in the genre. It chronicles the secretive, high-pressure development of groundbreaking aircraft like the U-2 spy plane and SR-71 Blackbird at Lockheed's advanced projects division. It vividly portrays the engineering ingenuity, deadline crunches, resource battles, innovative management (often bypassing bureaucracy), and interpersonal tensions in massive, classified aerospace efforts—echoing the "skunkworks" intensity and outsider energy in *Soul of a New Machine*, while matching *Apollo*'s scale in technical ambition and government-industry politics.
- **The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation** by Jon Gertner
A deep dive into Bell Labs' massive, collaborative projects that birthed transistors, lasers, Unix, and much of modern computing/communications. It captures the culture of large R&D teams, creative problem-solving under loose-but-high-expectation management, resource allocation fights, and the blend of genius and grind in long-term, high-impact engineering—similar to the organizational scale and innovation drive in *Apollo*, with echoes of *Soul*'s team obsession.
- **The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering** by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
Drawing from Brooks' experience leading IBM's massive OS/360 project (one of the largest software efforts of its era), this timeless book dissects the realities of big, complex projects: why adding people makes things worse, the politics of deadlines, communication breakdowns, and the human/organizational side of engineering at scale. It's more essay-based than pure narrative, but it profoundly captures the frustrations and insights of large-project management, much like the lessons embedded in *Soul of a New Machine*.
- **One Giant Leap: Iconic Photos from Apollo 11** or more relevantly, broader Apollo-focused works like **One Giant Leap** by Charles Fishman (focusing on the engineering and manufacturing behind the program)
These build on Murray's book by highlighting overlooked aspects of the massive industrial effort—supply chains, workforce scale (hundreds of thousands involved), and problem-solving under existential pressure—offering complementary views of the same moonshot bureaucracy and triumph.
Other strong contenders that come up frequently in discussions of similar "big project" experiences:
- **House** by Tracy Kidder himself — shifts to residential construction but nails the interpersonal, budgetary, and logistical chaos of a real-world build project.
- **The Innovators** by Walter Isaacson — covers multiple large-scale computing/internet projects with team and institutional drama.
- **Failure Is Not an Option** by Gene Kranz — NASA's mission control perspective on Mercury-to-Apollo, heavy on real-time crisis engineering and team coordination.
If you're drawn to the gritty, human-side realism of engineers grinding through impossible deadlines amid corporate/government politics, *Skunk Works* and *The Idea Factory* are probably the closest spiritual successors overall. They deliver that same sense of awe at what massive teams can achieve—and the toll it takes.
— Steve Smith
Here are some of the strongest recommendations that deliver a similar immersive, narrative-driven feel:
- **Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed** by Ben Rich and Leo Janos
This is a classic in the genre. It chronicles the secretive, high-pressure development of groundbreaking aircraft like the U-2 spy plane and SR-71 Blackbird at Lockheed's advanced projects division. It vividly portrays the engineering ingenuity, deadline crunches, resource battles, innovative management (often bypassing bureaucracy), and interpersonal tensions in massive, classified aerospace efforts—echoing the "skunkworks" intensity and outsider energy in *Soul of a New Machine*, while matching *Apollo*'s scale in technical ambition and government-industry politics.
- **The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation** by Jon Gertner
A deep dive into Bell Labs' massive, collaborative projects that birthed transistors, lasers, Unix, and much of modern computing/communications. It captures the culture of large R&D teams, creative problem-solving under loose-but-high-expectation management, resource allocation fights, and the blend of genius and grind in long-term, high-impact engineering—similar to the organizational scale and innovation drive in *Apollo*, with echoes of *Soul*'s team obsession.
- **The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering** by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
Drawing from Brooks' experience leading IBM's massive OS/360 project (one of the largest software efforts of its era), this timeless book dissects the realities of big, complex projects: why adding people makes things worse, the politics of deadlines, communication breakdowns, and the human/organizational side of engineering at scale. It's more essay-based than pure narrative, but it profoundly captures the frustrations and insights of large-project management, much like the lessons embedded in *Soul of a New Machine*.
- **One Giant Leap: Iconic Photos from Apollo 11** or more relevantly, broader Apollo-focused works like **One Giant Leap** by Charles Fishman (focusing on the engineering and manufacturing behind the program)
These build on Murray's book by highlighting overlooked aspects of the massive industrial effort—supply chains, workforce scale (hundreds of thousands involved), and problem-solving under existential pressure—offering complementary views of the same moonshot bureaucracy and triumph.
Other strong contenders that come up frequently in discussions of similar "big project" experiences:
- **House** by Tracy Kidder himself — shifts to residential construction but nails the interpersonal, budgetary, and logistical chaos of a real-world build project.
- **The Innovators** by Walter Isaacson — covers multiple large-scale computing/internet projects with team and institutional drama.
- **Failure Is Not an Option** by Gene Kranz — NASA's mission control perspective on Mercury-to-Apollo, heavy on real-time crisis engineering and team coordination.
If you're drawn to the gritty, human-side realism of engineers grinding through impossible deadlines amid corporate/government politics, *Skunk Works* and *The Idea Factory* are probably the closest spiritual successors overall. They deliver that same sense of awe at what massive teams can achieve—and the toll it takes.
— Steve Smith
Sunday, January 11, 2026
Thursday, January 08, 2026
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