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Hello
Hello. This is the online home of Irshaad Vawda. I’m originally a systems1 in the INCOSE sense of the word, not the IT sense engineer, turned consultant. I have a deep interest in the energy transition (how might we bring infrastructure to the 600mn Africans without access to electricity.) I’m also an aspiring entrepreneur.
Things are very much still under construction. Thanks!
Latest Content:
NEWSLETTER, Decarbedium: Tech-bros are coming for the electricity | 15 Oct 2023
“Less than the price!” - Nat Friedman
It’s almost always a good idea to charge more for your product than it costs, and this is exactly what Github is doing with it’s AI product Copilot, according to former Github CEO Nat Friedman. Friedman weighed in after a WSJ story claimed that Github was losing money on Copilot.
We all know that normal economics don’t apply to tech companies because, you know, the “user is the product” or “scaling” for monopoly or some such catch phrase, but it does seem that at least Copilot is subject to normal finance. The broader point of the WSJ piece is however around how tech cos are struggling to turn AI into profit, due at least in part to high energy costs needed for the compute part of the product.
NEWSLETTER, Decarbedium: Lazard is firming it’s study | 15 Oct 2023
I finally got around to the much talked-about Lazard study. It’s interesting for sure, but this podcast with George Bilicic from Lazard who heads up the work on the study was even more interesting.
Yes, he did touch on the “firming” calcs they did in this year’s study, and he said some important things about modelling and resolution, but I’ll avoid that discussion here. Mostly I found his comments on the “meta details” of the study intriguing and worth exploring.
NEWSLETTER, Decarbedium: Freedom for the megawatts | 25 March 2023
Almost weekly I meet someone moving to Cape Town from Joburg, and this seems like a very natural response when I look around at the growing number of potholes I need to avoid daily. Well, at least a very natural response for a middle class family.
One of the topics that comes up regularly in these conversations is the reduced loadshedding in CT, which is clearly an awesome reason to move. The odd thing about it though, is the vague libertarian undertone with which its couched. It seems to say, “in CT we can be free of these national shackles and therefore free from loadshedding.”
Every time I hear this, I think “except that won’t work.” This drive for an independently operating electrical grid feels instinctively to be misplaced and misguided (my brain goes “techno-economically too expensive, socio-politically infeasible.,” and “the-last-10% problem is surely compounded at this scale”). But hey, where are the MODELS to tell us, amiright2this is such a great tweet
Sometimes my Nani (maternal grandmother) reminds me of how, when I was around 6 or 7 years old, I used to play at the back of my grandparents little linen and habby store in Potchefstroom building all sorts of things with the empty cardboard boxes that stock used to arrive in.
It was habby/material/linen shop, and as all proprieters of habby will tell you, you end up with enough cardboard poles, plastic reels, and material off-cuts to keep a (aspiring engineer) kid happy for days. Mostly I built housing type stuff, but none of the cardboard structures maintained any structural integrity.
A few years later, in my Mayfair West Primary school in Johannesburg, my friends and I made and sold darts (see Figure 1 in the margin - I rebuilt it and oh the nostalgia!). A sheet of paper, a needle, four matches and some thread was all you needed for a (useless) dart. Mrs Meyer put an end to that, but not before I thought of connecting the dart to the inside of a Bic pen, which has this spring in it that when opened, allows you to shoot a white plastic cap quite some distance. Essentially a dart gun. Again, I never managed to make the integration between Bic cap gun and dart work, but I remain quietly chuffed at the idea.
GARDEN: Sea Shanties are socio-technical systems too, see | 31 January 2020
Oh no dude, everything is a socio-technical system to you!
Well, yes. Everything is a socio-technical system to me, yes. But not all systems are created and evolved equally. TikTok, for example, is to my mind a social media company that sits in the (auspicious) category of Twitter. The only one since Twitter to shift the needle, really. Snap, Insta etc were all just pretenders to the throne. Tik-tok is an entirely different beast, with an architecture that deserves it’s own digital gardening note.
Forget Polymaths, maybe we should be “socio-techs”
The polymaths get much media attention. I’ve seen Elon Musk called a polymath, and few people attract attention like he does. The thing is, I think polymaths are rare geniuses, unusually gifted individuals. People whom nature / God have favoured with remarkable talents in multiple domains. Outliers on the talent spectrum.
If this is true, then the entire concept of polymaths is fairly useless to us more ordinary people, other than a source of entertainment and inspiration. To be fair though, the more attainable concept of “generalist” and “integrator” has also received a fair amount of attention, particularly recently. I saw Bill Gates (who is started to appear in my writing a little more than is healthy) reading a book called Range, which encourages breadth of experience over depth of experience (I haven’t read the book).
BLOG: Does my model look f(l)at in this parameter? | 22 March 2020
Newton apparently discovered calculus while in isolation during the plague, so similarly this is my attempt at profundity.
Firstly, I’ve never seen anything like COVID-19 in my life. It’s completely up-ended my life. I’m currently self-isolating after my recent travels, and I’m frankly pretty scared of the virus
BLOG: Sociology and the best TV ever made | 19 February 2020
For someone that’s borderline Extremely Online, the lack of a Twitter header image is pretty poor form on my part. Yet, thousands of tweets and likes later, I was still header-less.
“Here at the coal-face, things are real” my old boss used to say. While we were building a coal fired power station (Medupi), he was referring more to the idea of “real work,” as opposed to the work, according to him, our bosses did (“fiddle with PowerPoint”).
