Evan O'Hara

“The company’s engineers realized the best approach was to shoot a tiny ball of tin measuring thirty-millionths of a meter wide moving through a vacuum at a speed of around two hundred miles per hour. The tin is then struck twice with a laser, the first pulse to warm it up, the second to blast it into a plasma with a temperature around half a million degrees, many times hotter than the surface of the sun. This process of blasting tin is then repeated fifty thousand times per second to produce EUV light in the quantities necessary to fabricate chips.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“In the early 2010s, Nvidia—the designer of graphic chips—began hearing rumors of PhD students at Stanford using Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) for something other than graphics. GPUs were designed to work differently from standard Intel or AMD CPUs, which are infinitely flexible but run all their calculations one after the other. GPUs, by contrast, are designed to run multiple iterations of the same calculation at once. This type of “parallel processing,” it soon became clear, had uses beyond controlling pixels of images in computer games. It could also train AI systems efficiently.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“Rodrigo Duterte was not the first politician in the world to declare war on a domestic issue. Wars on poverty, pornography, hunger, obesity, cancer, and drugs have been launched and fought by presidents and potentates long before Duterte moved into Malacañang Palace. None of these wars have so far been won. None of that matters, because for the politician, the declaration is a victory”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing

“A little over a year after Hadi’s release, a UN report found that some 700,000 Palestinians had been arrested since the occupation began, equal to roughly 40 percent of all the men and boys in the territories.”
― Nathan Thrall, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story