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The Bottleneck
Whatever is slowest decides what a system can do. Each installment follows one bottleneck from the moment it began to bind to the moment something else took its place.
Computing · 2 minMachine Intelligence and the Human Constraint on Civilizational ScaleFor most of history the constraint was too little information. As that reverses, the limit moves to comprehension: progress may depend less on generating answers than on making thePart 1
Computing · 18 minHow Arithmetic Became MachineryIn the Second World War a computer was a job title. Tracing the path from human calculators and firing tables through punched cards, relays and ENIAC to the transistor, as calculatPart 2