The wild thing about computers though is you can use the same materials for a 1 meter bridge as for a 10,000 meter bridge; the kind of scaling laws & economics

The wild thing about computers though is you can use the same materials for a 1 meter bridge as for a 10,000 meter bridge; the kind of scaling laws & economics pervasive in physical engineering apply very differently if you plan ahead and make very smart choices. The Internet gives you global reach for free. B-trees work for storing for 10 items and for 10 billion items. Classic headline “whatsapp scaled to 1 billion users with 50 engineers”. It’s a crazy lever.