Scale

How I found the book

I was nerding out with a coworker about MLIR as it indirectly plays a big part in the “AI” space. Aside I am starting to see “AI” as the most broadly applicable but over marketed use of GPUs. Games and Crypto coming before it. Quoting Jonathan Blow “Software has been free‑riding on hardware” and “Attention is all you need” came out in 2017.

Anyways my coworker pointed me towards Jim Keller. Never having heard of the guy, I was curious. I looked up the interviews he had done recently, and picked one to listen to. I don’t recall much standing out from the interview other than he mentioned the book Scale and that the output of companies is roughly the square root of the people that work there. Finding that interesting, I wrote down the name of the book and, a few weeks—or maybe a month—later, I decided to listen to it.

First impressions

The book is pretty dense; it goes over a huge array of topics and sources, and in audio form it’s just a lot to process. But it was very interesting and full of factoids about the world. A few highlights for me were:

• Drugs scale sublinearly with the size of the mammal (RIP Tusko).

• Temperature has an exponential effect on many things in our world beside climate.

• Companies will almost always die where cities are different.

Those might not be very enticing factoids, but I think the book is worth starting and giving the book a try. I started to see the pattern that you find in a TV series where they put a different spin on the theme of the show each episode. In this case it was “here is this scaling factor in our world” and some interesting factoids in that area. The pattern was different enough each time that I enjoyed it. After 20 hours I was ready for something different—perhaps a book best absorbed in smaller doses.

To be honest some sections were somewhat depressing, but it wasn’t trying to market, or sell anything which I appreciate. Just a seemingly smart, well‑connected guy doing essentially a PHD level book report on the patterns in our world, leaning on his physics background but attempting to dumb it down enough that a normal person could get something out of it.

There are rules to our world, and we have used the language of math to describe it the best we can. He even lists the rough ratios of a lot of this data. The number 4 is important. Trying to absorb all of it in a single pass is a bit of an overload, and I mostly just listened for a long time and tried to pick up what I could. I wouldn’t say the book changed my life, but it did give me some perspective on the world. A bit depressing in sections but running from the problem only helps you sleep for a bit.

Wanting to give a summary or a reason why you should read or listen to the book was what spawned this post. In hindsight of how dense it was and how little I am able to site from it makes me want to give it another listen and take notes for a better report.

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