As it turns out, it has only been a month and a half!1 That’s absolutely crazy!

The first cold call already feels like ancient history, and even my small habits have changed: I tap my wallet when getting on the bus, and no longer mistakenly tap my phone (my transit pass is now a physical card). I don’t just scroll to the very bottom when selecting an address drop down (Washington is near the bottom of the list of states. Massachusetts is not).

The summer is already a blur too. I remember waiting at an intersection in Shenzhen to capture the evening traffic. When was that? Late May? Early August?

If a month and a half already feels like a year, how much of it will I remember in ten years? In fifty? And how much could anyone else piece together?

Subscribe now

An entire society in fast-forward

Leslie Chang’s “Factory Girls” tries to answer that question for an entire city. It follows the lives of migrant women from rural villages in China, who have gone to work in factories in the city of Dongguan, just north of that Shenzhen intersection.

The factory girls are perhaps the most “high-agency” people around. They switch jobs. Move to a different part of town. Bluff their way into an industry or position they have zero experience in. Take courses after work. Copy down sections of self-help books in their journals with the same devotion as scholars copying Buddhist or Confucian texts.

They. just. don’t. give. up.

The city around them moved just as fast, to the point where Chang bought two city maps with bus schedules and found that the routes on both had already changed. Studies of migrant workers from the mid-1990s described a world that no longer existed a decade later. In her words, “things were happening too quickly to be written down.”

My family’s fast-forward

Growing up, my ancestors were frequently cited as mythical figures or cautionary tales, similar to a fairy tale (”your grandfather ate shrimp chips instead of his diabetes medicine… and died!” or “your great-grandfather fought the Japanese Empire and became a mayor after liberation!”).

This summer in Korea, I went looking for the true version. Our extended family was massive (my great-grandmother’s sister alone had eight kids), so I decided to take the logical approach to reduce the search space: focus on the most legendary and ancient ancestors. This meant that my ancestor that supposedly was a mayor would take priority over the five that did an MBA in the 90s and went into investment banking. Enlightened by the wisdom of Leslie Chang and armed with Claude Code, I set out to sift fact from legend.

Some of the legends were true.

By the standards of rural Korea in the early 1960s, my great-grandfather, Cho Dong-keun, and his wife, Kim Eui-soon, were affluent.2 Cho was mayor of the town of Byeong-yeong and ran several businesses as well. This meant that they had a house with a clay roof, as opposed to a straw roof. The house had electricity and a landline phone (number: 7). They also had a bank account balance of $75, and a diet that didn’t consist of rice and anchovies dipped in sauce (although they were vegetarian most meals, not by choice).

Yet all nine of their children, my grandmother among them, left to attend school in Seoul. From 1960 to the present, Byeong-yeong’s population went from approximately 10,000 to 1,500.

My grandparents’ generation left for the same reason as the Dongguan girls: their opportunities in the countryside were limited. When I asked my grandmother why she left her village after elementary school, she gave a very simple answer: “There wasn’t much for me here.”

Those decades were not gentle. My ancestors went through many hardships and kept going. My great-grandfather was imprisoned by the Japanese Empire during World War II. They lost family during the Korean War. After political changes and illnesses, the Cho family’s fortunes declined swiftly in the late 1960s, and they ended up in poverty. My grandfather was tortured in Korea’s dictatorship era.

Share

What didn’t make it to me

The facts were relatively easy to dig out, but getting at how people felt was much harder.3 I tried to ask my relatives what it was like navigating such pain and chaos. Failing that, I tried to ask surviving elders in Byeong-yeong how they felt. For the most part, I was unsuccessful, seldom getting an answer that wasn’t “it was a hard time.” Of course, my terrible journalistic skills are probably to blame.4 The other part of the problem was that some things had simply been forgotten. My grandmother, for one, couldn’t remember her father’s birthday.

So I had the big picture, but very few of the details. Ironically, the one person who did write the details down was the shrimp chips grandfather. He passed away when I was 3, so I don’t remember him at all, and all I have are the photos of him playing 굴렁쇠 (rolling a hoop with a stick) with me.

Years later, on a visit to Korea, I discovered that he had left behind a vast trove of journals. Piles and piles, probably thousands of pages in total. I only spent about half an hour reading through them before the dust activated my allergies, but it gave me a glimpse into a different life. Where ten cents was precious. Of a 22-year-old making the 10-hour train journey from Busan to the big city of Seoul to take the civil service exam. I jumped to another pile and found stories of a father bringing home his paycheck in a thick envelope, and buying chicken for his three children with some of that money.

Looking back, that half hour told me more about what life felt like back then than every “it was a hard time” I’ve heard since. At the time, though, I didn’t give it much thought beyond “oh, that’s cool!” A few days later, I also discovered his stamp collection. That was in better condition, and since I was flying back to America that week, I only had space in my bag for one. So I carried the stamps to America in the hopes of making some money, and the journals stayed behind at my grandmother’s house.

The stamps turned out to be worthless. Alas, alas, alas. I had sacrificed my wrist to lug that massive bag.

When I returned to Korea in late 2022, my grandmother’s house had been renovated, complete with LED lights and an air conditioner I could control from my phone. The first thing I headed to was the cabinet with the journals. It was entirely gone. Other casualties of the renovation included my broken airsoft gun, my father’s tai chi textbooks, and an empty suitcase. Curiously though, the pre-pandemic frozen rice was still in her freezer.

My guess is that, to a family that had spent decades surviving and then building new lives, a pile of dusty notebooks just didn’t look like anything worth keeping. What is history, if not a luxury afforded to those who can survive? Thanks to the sacrifices of my parents’ generation, their parents, and their parents, I am at a place where I can take the time to research the unsung heroes of the past.

Subscribe now

Onwards, to Boston

Similar to my ancestors, I left home. I felt that my opportunities were limited in Seattle and decided to attend law school. All in search of a better life, like countless before me. Admittedly, the stakes are a little lower. My great-grandfather went to prison, while the worst thing that has happened to me so far is a cold call.

I’ve been telling friends lately that I’m trying to collect cool experiences like one might collect Pokémon cards. Once you’ve collected these cool experiences, you can go back on them and reflect on them and have fun that way. Law school has been a ridiculous booster pack so far.

The catch is that you have to remember them first.

When I was working, I would optimize my walk to the bus stop. Google said it was a 16-minute walk from the office to the bus stop back home, but I walk fast, and it took me 13 minutes to actually walk it. This meant I had to leave my desk 15 minutes before the bus left, fill my water bottle, take the elevator down, and start walking. I would get to the main intersection with 9 minutes left. Six at the final straightaway. Then the stop, with 2-3 minutes to spare.

But as my editor (Anthropic Claude Opus 5.5) was prompting me for details of my life in Seattle, I found myself forgetting how many minutes it took to walk to the bus stop. I had to look at Google Maps! I remembered that I’d optimized the walk, but not any of the numbers.

Now I am doing the same optimization for my commute to school. Class starts at 8:30 AM, and I want to get there a few minutes early, so I aim to be at school by 8:20. According to Google Maps, Harvard Square is an 11-minute walk from the law school. Boston people walk fast, which means Google’s walking time estimate is accurate. But I have to detour to my subterranean locker to pick up my books, which adds another 3 minutes. Add the 10-minute bus ride, and that means the 7:55 bus. The buses here come continuously, like a stream of water, so none of this is actually necessary. Old habits die hard. I’ll probably forget these too, so here they are, written down.

So I think it is a good idea to pause every once in a while and look back at how far I have come. That way, a few years later I will be able to reflect on it and remark: “that was a fun time,” like I do for my working years.

Things are happening too quickly to be written down. I’m going to try anyway. How, exactly, is unclear. This post is a start.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this blog post, it would be awesome if you can like, comment, and subscribe!

Take the handheld “calculator pads” or the “complete laundry that can be packed in a small closet and will work entirely automatically.” What about the screen-based “book-viewers?” We can also write essays using just our voice, and project stupidly complex equations onto walls.

All of this runs on computer chips. And a chip starts as basically a slab of sand. You splash it with some light-sensitive chemicals, and shine light to etch patterns on it. Repeat with different materials, and some patterns become microscopic switches called transistors, others the metal wiring between them. Millions of those switches make a chip.

You can now run electricity into it and turn it on and off. That’s literally what computing is. And we don’t have any moving parts!

The first transistor was the size of a finger. But if we make them smaller, we can open up new frontiers, even create some of these science-fiction technologies.1 And over the past 80 years, we made them smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until the patterns we print are thousands of times thinner than a human hair.

But how?

Let’s look at the light. You can’t just use good ol’ fashioned light. According to some fancy math that caused me to faint the moment I saw it, the smaller the wavelength of the light, the smaller the patterns on the silicon can be. And if we want patterns the size of viruses, you need special light with small wavelengths. The kind that comes out of a crying dragon’s mouth. Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) light, with a wavelength about 40 times smaller than visible light.

Subscribe now

Where do you even get light like that?

You need a machine that ejects 50,000 tin droplets per second, each the size of a white blood cell, at 250kph. They all have to be the same size and speed, so the ejector vibrates at a frequency that breaks the stream into identical droplets. A laser then shoots each tin droplet twice. First to flatten it (allowing for better light absorption), then to vaporize it fully. Each blast is basically a mini supernova, and out comes the EUV light.

But there will be tin atoms that stick to the collection mirror, making it impure. So the chamber has to be filled with hydrogen, which binds with the remaining tin to create another gas. This then gets sucked out and replaced with new gas at the speed of a hurricane to manage heat. Exactly the right amount of oxygen also needs to be sent in to clean the mirrors further.2

From there, mirrors bounce the light onto the silicon. Most materials absorb EUV light, so it has to be bounced off special mirrors onto the silicon. They have to be precise at the atomic level. They have to be precise at the atomic level. For some of them, if one were the size of the world, the tallest bump would only be as tall as a playing card. This is over a thousand times smoother than a regular mirror.

The explosions also misalign the mirrors, requiring a calibration system precise enough to hit a penny on the moon.

The light hits the light-sensitive coating on the silicon and leaves a trace that can be etched and filled with wires etc. Repeat 10-100x, and you have a chip. In this process, the stages of the machine slam back and forth at tens of g’s. It can only be off by 5 silicon atoms. Absolute bonkers.

Share

Any sufficiently advanced technology supply chain is indistinguishable from magic.

You might picture these chips as the work of wizards perfecting a craft, like the smiths folding steel into katanas, the metalworkers of Europe, or the porcelain masters of Korea. But none of them really worked alone either. A katana came out of a whole chain of people: the ones who smelted the steel, the ones who burned the charcoal, the polishers, and the lord who paid for it. The chip is the same kind of thing. It’s just been blown up to a scale no single person, or even a single company, can hold in their head. 5,000 companies supply 100,000 parts for the machine.3 It’s disassembled, put in 7 747s, and shipped. The newest ones cost around $400M each.4

The DoE and Bell Labs funded the early research behind all this back in the 80s and early 90s. Pushing it further got expensive, so the big American chipmakers and the national labs formed a consortium to fund the research. But you also have to turn research into machines. Building lithography machines was its own industry, run by three companies: Nikon, Canon, and a small Dutch company called ASML. Nikon and Canon eventually dropped out, and ASML was the last one standing. And it almost didn’t make it. Prototypes came in the 2000s, but getting them production-ready took years and left customers furious. ASML bet the company on EUV, and only shipped a working machine after Intel, Samsung, and TSMC put in more money.

And the EUV machine is only a tiny part of the chip story! You need a market that supports these massive capital investments, and you need these business leaders who steer and pivot these large organizations. You need state support to kickstart and nurture the private market, but it needs to be hands-off enough to let that market function.5 And of course, all those decisions are being made on the grand chessboard that is geopolitics.6

This big machine, and where its chips are made, are the culmination of politics, economics, business, market conditions, and technology. You need all of that to etch runes thousands of times smaller than a human hair, which underpin all of modern civilization. It’s incredible! But not magic.7

And then you go to Taiwan, you see the exterior of the TSMC factories, and alongside the tree lined boulevard and scooter bike lanes you know the most complex machines mankind has made are churning out the smallest objects. And then it’s just cool.8

The Future of Tribal Knowledge

Thank you for reading! This is a new style of writing for me, and your honest feedback will be most welcome.

Please subscribe below to not miss out on new posts! I am actively working on several posts to publish in Q3, including:

• A science fiction short story

• Why it might be desirable to get pecked in the head by a bird

• A trilogy of posts on Korean culture, infrastructure, and economic development

Sources / further reading

- Veritasium, “The World’s Most Important Machine” (video)

- ASML. “The basics of microchips” (https://www.asml.com/en/technology/all-about-microchips/microchip-basics)

- ASML, “Making EUV: from lab to fab” (https://www.asml.com/en/news/stories/2022/making-euv-lab-to-fab)

- Neil Hacker, “The world’s most complex machine,” Works in Progress (https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-worlds-most-complex-machine)

- Brian Potter, “How ASML Got EUV,” Construction Physics (https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-asml-got-euv)

- Chris Miller, Chip War (Scribner, 2022) (this book is awesome)

The photos etched themselves in my mind. I needed to experience something that beautiful in person. I resolved that after the LSAT, I would go.

Trip 1: The dayhike

Fast forward eight months, I am in Big 5 Sporting Goods buying a backpack for my Enchantments trip. I take a “spam call” that turns out to be my law school acceptance.

My friends and I dayhike the 18-mile trail the following week. We march for 13 hours but barely stop to take pictures. My legs abandon me for three days afterwards. It is too fast. I need to go back and camp there.

Hidden tips for the Enchantments permits

As it turns out, camping in the Enchantments requires permits. Getting them is an adventure in its own right. About 70% are allocated through a lottery in March, while the rest are available through a daily lottery.2

There are different permit types for specific hiking zones. The “Core Enchantments Zone” is the most prestigious, as it lets you camp in the area where all the best views are. Unfortunately, securing Core permits through the lottery is a fool’s errand, with a 1% success rate. That is why I’d recommend applying for the “Snow” or “Colchuck” zones and day-hike 2-3 miles up to the Core. Those are vastly easier to get.3

If you didn’t win the lottery, all hope is not lost. One option is to log onto the permit website at 7am on April 1st, when unclaimed permits and cancellations are released. When the clock turns 7, quickly refresh the page and click to select a date. One year, a friend with insane reflexes snagged a permit by clicking right at 7:00:01.

Of course, the ultimate fallback option is the dayhike.4

Trip 2: Two nights isn’t enough

I get permits for two nights and go back a month later. I feel I barely scratched the surface. There are so many nooks and crannies that I have not explored. So many shots that I missed.

That trip did teach me a few lessons about camping here:

How to not be attacked by invisible, invincible creatures. I wake up an hour before sunrise and start reading a book on my phone inside my tent. A few minutes into reading, a small, dark, eight-legged creature climbs onto my phone from my sleeping bag. I instantly recognize that it’s a tick, which has probably been feeding on my blood all night. In my panic, I try to crush it using a tissue and the tip of my fingernails. Unfortunately, due to its exoskeleton, I deal no damage even after applying pressure for a minute. I immediately throw my phone (with the tick on it) outside the tent, which cracks the screen. At least I got a fun story to tell.

To prevent ticks from feeding on your blood and transmitting diseases, I recommend treating your clothes with permethrin.

Cameras are relatively waterproof. My first night, I went to do some astrophotography with my low-quality tripod that came as a free accessory. While taking a long exposure, the tripod promptly fails, sending the camera tumbling down a ledge into the lake. I fish out the camera and it is dead. The following day, I put the camera out to dry in the sun. I check every hour, but it doesn’t turn on. My spirits fall each time. I’d beaten 100-to-1 odds to be here, but I was going to go home with nothing to show for it. Alas. The sun sets, and the camera comes back to life. The autofocus has failed, but they say the pros use manual.

Staying Connected. Being in the middle of nowhere, the vast majority of the Enchantments has no cell signal. However, if you have Verizon, there is a small spot (approximately 50-100 square meters) where you get 3-4 bars of 4G LTE (47° 28’ 43.932” N 120° 48’ 6.192” W).

Trip 3: Cashing Out

I go back the following October. October in the Enchantments is a gamble. You can get golden larches or a foot of snow.5 We got the larches :) We spend our entire first day just getting up to the core Enchantments, two full days exploring the area, and a final day descending.

The Enchantments has pit toilets, usually located in a secluded corner of the forest. One day, I follow the signs but get a bit lost. As I try to locate the restroom, I see a pair of goats in the forest. This is the shot from 2020. I finally get what I came for.

That night, I sip tea over sunset at the aptly named Paradise Lake. This is the most beautiful hike I have ever done.

Thank you for reading! This is a new style of writing for me, and your honest feedback will be most welcome.

Subscribe now