Rhyd Media is the canonical home for long-form essays, Letters from Brazil, and Places — dispatches on culture, systems and place, delivered as text, audio, and video.
Two weeks later, I'm still thinking about a lunchbox. That seems ridiculous when I write it down. The bathroom renovation is finished. The windows are fitted. The men who worked on the house have moved on — another job, another customer, another day. Life has carried on…
Author's note: This piece is a companion to The Golem in the Server Rack and Musk As A Service . Those two argued about silicon and capital — what's being built, and whether it pays back. This one is about a different layer, the one underneath the silicon and the…
My son is eight years old and obsessed with football. This should not be remarkable. We live in Brazil. Here, football is the national religion. Boys arrive home from the maternity ward in club shirts. Grandparents buy footballs before they buy books. Entire family trees are…
Author's note: A companion piece to The Golem in the Server Rack . Golem argued the silicon underneath the AI buildout will commoditise faster than the buildout assumes. This piece asks the next question — what happens to the equity positions priced for that buildout…
At 21 he flew to Brazil for a girl. Months later he was married with a kid. A few years after that he was divorced, broke, and couldn't scrape together the airfare home — and he didn't see Australia again for six years. Two decades later, he's still here. In the…
Author's note: I build software, not chips, but you don't need to be a silicon fabricator to see when an industry is pouring concrete for the wrong building. The trillion-dollar bet currently being placed on hyperscale GPU infrastructure is the wrong bet, and what…