Category: Technology

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Design Technology

The Battery That Refused to Leave

A standard AA battery is 50.5 millimeters long and 14.5 millimeters in diameter. It produces 1.5 volts. It weighs roughly twenty-three grams, about as much as a sheet of paper folded twice. In a Costco bulk pack, forty-eight of them together weigh a little over a kilogram — the heft of a hardcover book, or a decent cantaloupe. Most people buy them without thinking much about it. They go in the cart the way paper towels go in the cart.

The size has been in continuous production since 1907, when the American Ever Ready Company first manufactured it for use in early penlights. For the first four decades of its existence, the AA battery was what might be called an informal standard — widely used, commonly understood, but not officially codified. That changed in 1947, when the American National Standards Institute fixed the dimensions and voltage in writing. The naming convention itself had come earlier, out of a series of meetings in the 1920s between government officials and battery manufacturers who were trying to bring order to a proliferating market. They began with A for the smallest practical cell, then moved outward — B, C, D — for larger sizes. When smaller cells were needed later, the alphabet doubled back on itself: AA, AAA, AAAA. Running out of letters in both directions is its own kind of history.

What the standards committee built, whether they thought of it this way or not, was a commons. The word is precise. A commons is something no one owns and everyone can use — a pasture, a fishery, a language. The AA battery became a commons of power. Any battery from any manufacturer, made to the specification, would work in any device built to receive it. The chemistry inside could vary — zinc-carbon, alkaline, lithium, nickel-metal hydride — but the housing stayed the same. No license was required. No negotiation. A manufacturer building a flashlight in 1965 did not need to solve the battery problem. A company making a remote control in 1985 did not need to negotiate with a power supplier. The relationship between a device and its energy source belonged to no one, which meant it was available to everyone.

In 1959, an Eveready scientist developed the first commercially available alkaline AA, which lasted five to eight times longer than the zinc-carbon version it was designed to replace. The devices followed the power. Transistor radios. Portable tape players. Handheld games. Cameras. Each decade brought a new category of device that found the AA battery waiting for it, already standardized, already available at every drugstore and grocery checkout lane in the country. The commons kept growing because the commons was free to enter.

Apple, eventually, decided the idea was wrong.

The iPhone, introduced in 2007, had no user-replaceable battery. Neither did any iPod before it, any iPad after it, any MacBook, any AirPod, any Apple Watch. The power source in an Apple product is sealed inside the device, charged through Apple’s own cables and connectors, managed by Apple’s own software. This is not a cost-cutting measure or an engineering compromise. Apple’s products cost more than their competitors’, not less, and the sealed battery is part of what justifies the price. The company’s founding argument — refined over decades, made explicit in every product announcement — is that hardware and software and power, designed together and optimized together, produce a better result than any open standard can achieve. The AA battery asks nothing of you except that you insert it correctly. Apple has decided that is insufficient.

Tesla arrived at a similar conclusion by a different route. Where Apple sealed the power source to improve the user experience, Tesla sealed it to own the energy relationship entirely. The Supercharger network — Tesla’s proprietary charging infrastructure, built out across highways and cities at enormous expense — is not interoperable with other electric vehicles, or was not for most of its history. A Tesla charges at a Tesla station. The battery chemistry, the cell format, the thermal management, the software that governs charging and discharge — all of it is developed in-house, at Tesla’s gigafactories, for Tesla’s vehicles. The company has spent more time and money thinking about batteries than almost any organization outside of a national laboratory. But the battery it produces is not a commodity. It belongs to the car. The car belongs to Tesla’s ecosystem. The customer belongs there too.

Both companies are making a version of the same argument: that the future of technology is integrated, that the best products are closed products, that power should be managed rather than swapped. They have built that future, or a version of it, for the customers who can afford to live inside it.

Warren Buffett, in 2014, bought the thing neither of them wanted.

Berkshire Hathaway’s acquisition of Duracell from Procter & Gamble was structured as a stock swap — Berkshire exchanged its $4.7 billion stake in P&G for full ownership of the battery company, recapitalized with $1.8 billion in cash. The tax advantages were real and significant; Berkshire had held the P&G shares since the company’s acquisition of Gillette in 2005, and the cost basis was $336 million. A cash sale would have produced a substantial capital gains bill. The swap avoided that. Buffett is attentive to such things.

But the more durable rationale was simpler. Buffett has spent sixty years looking for businesses that are easy to understand, that generate predictable cash, that sell something people buy out of habit. See’s Candy. GEICO. Coca-Cola. The common thread is not glamour but persistence — products whose value proposition does not need to be reinvented, whose customers return not because they have been excited but because they have been satisfied, reliably, for a long time. Duracell has twenty-five percent of the global battery market. It has been the category leader for decades. The people who buy it at Costco are not making a considered choice between competing technologies. They are buying what they have always bought.

The Costco pack of forty-eight is, in Buffett’s framework, infrastructure. Not the infrastructure of data centers or power grids — the quiet infrastructure of daily life, the kind that gets restocked when the supply runs low and otherwise goes unnoticed. Smoke detectors. Remote controls. Children’s toys. Wireless computer mice. Clocks on kitchen walls. The devices that run on AA batteries are not going away, and the economics of replacing them — not just the devices but the habits, the muscle memory, the universal availability of the standard — are formidable. Buffett is not betting that the AA battery will conquer the future. He is betting that it will remain in the present for a very long time.

Two different visions of where technology is going, then, expressed in the form of capital allocation. Apple and Tesla have built sealed ecosystems and asked their customers to enter. Buffett bought the battery for the people who haven’t. The AA cell, fifty millimeters long and fourteen and a half millimeters wide, 1.5 volts, unchanged in its dimensions since a group of manufacturers met in the 1920s to agree on something everyone could use — it sits at the back of a kitchen drawer in most houses in America, waiting for the smoke detector to chirp.

Categories
AI Silicon Valley Technology

The View from the Edge

“Living on the edge” usually means you’re taking risks. One of the guests on the More or Less podcast used it the other way: as a diagnosis. A description of people who’ve lost their depth perception.

From where they sit, it looks like everyone is moving. The feeds are full of demos. The group chats debate which model won the week. Colleagues are building agents that book their dentist appointments and summarize their email while they sleep. David Sparks is selling a Robot Assistant Field Guide. The frontier feels like the present tense — not where things are heading, but where things already are.

When everyone around you has already crossed a threshold, you stop being able to see the threshold. You mistake the edge for the center.

The primary point — that the tech community wildly overestimates how much ordinary people want AI in their lives — lands harder when you hold it against that image. It’s not that the industry is wrong about the technology. It’s that it has miscalibrated the desire. Most people aren’t trying to optimize their Tuesday. They’re just trying to get through it. An always-on personal agent isn’t a solution to a problem they’re carrying.

Think about the woman in the Safeway parking lot, sitting in her car for three minutes before going in, scrolling back through her texts to find the thing her husband asked her to pick up. Egg product and cheddar cheese. She finds it, pockets her phone, and goes inside. The whole problem — the forgetting, the retrieval, the solution — lasted less time than it takes to read about it. She didn’t need an agent. She needed three minutes and a text thread she already had.

The edge distorts in a specific way: it makes appetite look like inevitability. From out there, adoption feels like a question of when, not whether. But whether is a real question. Most technology that could be woven into daily life never is — not because people couldn’t learn it, but because they didn’t want what it offered badly enough to bother.

The view from the edge is intoxicating. Everything looks like signal. But the middle is where most people live, and from there the signal looks a lot more like noise.

Which is why WWDC matters more than any model release this year. Apple doesn’t sell to people living on the edge. It sells to people who just want their phone to work. If Apple makes AI invisible enough — tucked into the camera, the keyboard, the thing that finds your photos — it stops being something you adopt and becomes something you already have. That’s a different motion entirely. Not convincing people they want AI. Delivering it before the question occurs to them.

Whether Apple can actually pull that off is a separate argument. But the watershed, if it comes, won’t look like a frontier crossing. It’ll look like a Tuesday that went slightly smoother than usual. Most people won’t even notice the edge they just walked past.

We will find out in a week or so.

Categories
Technology

The Silence of Glass

There is a moment, right before surgery, when the anesthesiologist asks you to count backward from ten. You get to seven, maybe six, and then the world goes clean and white. Scientists have a word for the material responsible for that transition: borosilicate. The same compound in the syringe barrel is in the telescope mirror trained on the Andromeda galaxy, in the fiber strand carrying the surgeon’s consultation with a colleague three thousand miles away, in the smartphone screen the patient’s wife is staring at in the waiting room, hands shaking, refreshing nothing.

Glass is everywhere and we have made it invisible, which is the oldest trick civilization knows.

Vaclav Smil argues in Making the Modern World that the most consequential material of the last two centuries is not steel or silicon or oil. It is float glass — invented by Alastair Pilkington in 1959, when he watched dishwater spread across his kitchen sink and understood something that had eluded glassmakers for four hundred years. Pour molten glass onto a bath of molten tin and it finds its own level. It becomes, on its own, perfectly flat. Every window, phone screen, solar panel, and architectural facade descends from a man watching his wife do dishes.

What Smil doesn’t quite say — though you feel it accumulating across his pages — is that glass is the one material that consistently mediates between the inner and the outer. Not metaphorically. Literally. It stands at the boundary and says: you may look, but you may not touch.

The fiber optic cable looks like nothing. Pull back the orange jacket and you find strands thinner than a human hair, each one pure silica glass so precisely drawn that a photon launched into one end will emerge after sixty miles having lost less than five percent of its energy. That number seems impossible. It is a kind of miracle achieved through obsessive purity: any contaminant at the molecular level, any stress in the crystal lattice, any deviation in the core diameter, and the light scatters and dies. Underneath every ocean, through every mountain, connecting data centers in Virginia to servers in Singapore, there are hundreds of millions of kilometers of this material, laid in darkness, carrying light.

I think about that sometimes when I hit send. The electrons leave my keyboard, convert to photons at some local junction, and then travel — genuinely travel, as light through glass — to wherever they are going. There is something devotional about it, though I can’t quite say why. Maybe it’s the invisibility. Maybe it’s the faith required — that the thing you release will arrive, intact, somewhere it has never been.

Glass is in the MRI machine and the X-ray plate and the laboratory flask where the drug was first synthesized and the vial where it is stored and the syringe through which it enters the body. Glass does not react. It does not corrode. It does not leach. This chemical inertness, which seems like absence, is actually the whole point. Medicine needed a container that would hold the thing without becoming it.

There is also glass in the eye reading the label on that vial. The human lens is, optically speaking, a soft glass. It focuses, ages, clouds — cataracts are the eye’s glass going milky — and the surgeon replaces it with an intraocular lens engineered to behave like glass. We have spent considerable effort making fake versions of something the body was already doing.

For most of human history, clear glass was expensive, fragile, and small. Window glass in medieval Europe admitted light hazily, like looking through ice. Clear vision was for churches, which is perhaps why we came to associate light with the sacred — it literally arrived, in those buildings, in a way it did not arrive anywhere else. Then Pilkington’s tin bath made clarity cheap, and the world changed in ways nobody fully catalogued because the change was so pervasive: big windows, watched experiments, extended growing seasons, telescopes reaching farther, microscopes going smaller. Each a story of glass making a distance crossable that was not crossable before.

The screen I am writing this on is glass. The Corning Gorilla Glass on this display is an alkali-aluminosilicate sheet, chemically strengthened through ion exchange, harder than most knives, clear enough that the pixels look like they are sitting on the surface rather than behind it. Apple spends considerable engineering effort making the glass seem like it isn’t there. The ideal phone screen is invisible. A window to computation.

And yet the glass is the thing you actually touch. All day. More than you touch almost anyone. The glass is warm from your hands. It has learned, in a way, the pressure of your thumbs.

Glass is the material of thresholds — it makes the threshold visible, makes it possible to stand at a door and see all the way through before you decide whether to enter. We built the internet through it. We see our loved ones through it. We study cancer through it. We watch the news through glass that traveled to us through glass captured by cameras with glass sensors launched on satellites with glass lenses through a sky that is itself, technically, a lens — bending and filtering the light from everything that has ever been.

In the hospital waiting room, the wife is still holding her phone. The screen has gone dark. She taps it. It lights up. She looks at her own reflection for a moment — the screen a mirror now — before the notification arrives and the glass goes transparent again, the way it always does, showing her something other than herself.

That is what glass does. It waits. It holds. And then, when there is something to show, it gets out of the way.

Categories
AI Business Investing Technology

The Scarcity Portfolio: Navigating Sovereign Debt, Wafer Bottlenecks, and Orbital Compute

Today I was watching the interview of Gavin Baker by Patrick O’Shaughnessy on his Invest Like the Best podcast. Like prior conversations this was another fascinating excursion into the mind of a sophisticated and very successful tech venture investor.

During the conversation, Patrick asked Gavin what agents he was using that were especially helpful and he mentioned one which summarizes YouTube podcasts and videos for him. Like most of us Baker just doesn’t have the time to watch or listen to them himself so good summaries are really helpful.

Turns out I’ve been working on a Google Gemini Gem that does this for me. When Baker mentioned his I fired up the new Gemini 3.5 Flash model and asked it to summarize the Baker interview.

Later in the conversation Baker used the term “battlefield AI” which caused me to go back to Gemini again to learn more about that. The results were so interesting that I asked Gemini to create a syllabus for a semester class on these subjects. After that I asked it to convert our whole conversation into a Markdown file so I could share it. You’ll find it below.

I found this whole experience pretty stunning. I came away very impressed with Gemini 3.5 Flash both for the quality of the responses but also the sheer speed. Wow!

Anyway I hope you enjoy the following!

Continue reading “The Scarcity Portfolio: Navigating Sovereign Debt, Wafer Bottlenecks, and Orbital Compute”
Categories
AI Technology

The Bathwater Problem

Gary Kamiya was writing about the Tenderloin when he said it, but the line has been following me around: “The problem is that by saving the baby, you also save the bathwater.”

The pattern is remarkably consistent across every major information technology. Each one arrives promising to liberate the deserving — the faithful, the learned, the civic-minded — and each one immediately, inevitably, arms everyone else too. Gutenberg’s press was understood by its champions as a device for spreading the true Word; within decades it was the primary infrastructure for Protestant schism, Catholic counter-propaganda, astrological almanacs, and pornography. The reformers got their Bible. They also got their pamphlet wars.

The telegraph was greeted as a force for peace — shared information would make war irrational, commerce would bind nations. It also became the nervous system of commodity speculation, financial manipulation, and the first truly industrial-scale news hoaxes. The telephone: connection and the crank call, the crisis line and the threatening voice in the dark. Radio: FDR’s fireside chats and Father Coughlin. Television: Murrow taking down McCarthy, and also fifty years of manufactured consent. The internet: the largest library ever assembled and the largest sewer.

The pattern isn’t coincidental. It’s structural. Each technology expands what’s possible for human expression and coordination — and human expression and coordination contain both the noblest and the worst of us in roughly fixed proportion. The tool doesn’t change the ratio. It scales both sides of it.

What’s interesting historically is how each generation believes their technology will be different — that this time the architecture can be designed to select for the good. The internet era produced the most elaborate version of this belief: algorithmic curation would surface truth, network effects would reward quality, the wisdom of crowds would outcompete misinformation. Instead it turned out that engagement was the attractor, and outrage was the highest-engagement content. The bath got hotter.

The AI moment is the same belief system, restated with more technical sophistication. But the Kamiya line stands. You are saving a baby, and you are saving bathwater, and no one has yet designed a tub that can tell the difference.

The question isn’t whether the bathwater comes with the baby. It always does. The question is whether you turn on the tap.