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Thesis: Low Earth orbit constellations are a genuine engineering triumph and an unmanaged environmental commons. We are repeating a mistake we have made before. Satellite internet has changed what connectivity means for ships, remote villages, and disaster zones, and it happened faster than most people noticed. I became interested after learning that thousands of satellites had been launched in only a few years. The engineering is remarkable. What troubles me is the pattern:

Thesis: Quantum computing is real science wrapped in unreliable marketing. Error correction is the entire problem, and most predicted applications will never materialize. Quantum computing is described as a technology that will break encryption, design new drugs, and solve problems classical machines cannot touch. It is also, at present, a field where laboratory machines struggle to outperform a laptop on useful tasks. I wanted to understand that contradiction. What I conclud

Thesis: AI will make engineers faster, and that is precisely the danger. The scarce skill is becoming verification, and our education system is not producing it. Artificial intelligence now writes code, generates register-transfer-level hardware descriptions, and optimizes chip floorplans better than experienced humans in some benchmarks. My first reaction was anxiety about whether engineering would still need people. After thinking about it further, my concern shifted. The r

Thesis: Redundant, physically diverse sensing is not an expensive luxury. Camera-only autonomy is an engineering position that trades safety margin for cost, and the record so far favors redundancy. Two philosophies of autonomous driving are being tested in public simultaneously. One holds that because humans drive with two eyes, cameras and sufficiently good software should suffice. The other holds that a safety-critical system should never depend on a single sensing modalit

Thesis: Robot perception is largely solved. What still fails is actuation, power, and control. Videos of humanoid robots walking, opening doors, and folding laundry suggest that robots have finally learned to understand the world. That framing led me to expect that perception was the hard part. Reading about why these machines still struggle outside demonstrations taught me otherwise. Cameras and neural networks have become remarkably good at identifying objects. What remains

Thesis: The grid’s real crisis is not a shortage of generation but a shortage of flexibility and inertia. Software and power electronics matter more than building more plants. I assumed the electricity system was essentially solved. Power plants generate, wires deliver, and switches work. That assumption cracked when I read the account of the April 2025 Iberian blackout: mainland Spain and Portugal lost power for hours not because of a shortage of generation, but because of v

Thesis: No. Physics and economics both argue against it for high power, and pretending otherwise wastes engineering effort. Figure 1. Demonstration of wireless parking charge for an electric vehicle The idea of a world without charging cables is appealing enough that it keeps being promised. Phones charge on pads, some cities have tested wireless bus charging, and demonstrations show electric cars powered by coils buried in roads. I started paying closer attention after watch

Thesis: Solid-state batteries are overhyped for this decade. Manufacturing quality and cheap, safe chemistries will deliver more real progress than any laboratory breakthrough. Battery announcements follow a predictable rhythm. A research group reports a cell with extraordinary energy density, headlines promise the end of range anxiety, and nothing reaches a consumer for a decade. I first noticed the pattern in my own inbox: a technology newsletter announced a “500-mile solid

Thesis: The race is no longer about shrinking transistors. Packaging and memory bandwidth now decide who wins, and most public discussion has not caught up. For most of my life the story of semiconductors has been told as a single number getting smaller: 14 nanometers, then 7, then 3. It is a satisfying story, and it is increasingly wrong. What actually pulled me into this topic was a single line in an article about the GPU shortage: a company had thousands of fully working p

Thesis: The battery is the least interesting part of the electric vehicle. Charging infrastructure and power electronics decide whether EVs win. Every conversation about electric vehicles collapses into a conversation about batteries. How many kilometers? How many kilowatt-hours? I used to think this way too, until I watched a relative circle a shopping-center car park twice because two of the four public chargers were marked “out of service” on the app — the car itself charg