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Upon arriving at the facility, Bruce handed in his smartphone and passed through metal detectors. He was in awe of the semiconductor production line: Overhead rails carried wafers from one station to another while workers in white protective suits kept the machinery running. “It really just felt like I was touring some kind of living thing that was greater than humans; that was bigger than us,” Bruce recalled.

TSMC made attempts to bridge some of the cultural differences. After the American trainees asked to contact families and to listen to music at work, TSMC loosened the firewall on T phones to allow all staff access to Instagram, YouTube, and Spotify. Some Taiwanese workers attended a class on U.S. culture, where they learned that Americans responded better to encouragement rather than criticism, according to an engineer who attended the session.

Several former American employees said they were not against working longer hours, but only if the tasks were meaningful. “I’d ask my manager ‘What’s your top priority,’ he’d always say ‘Everything is a priority,’” said another ex-TSMC engineer. “So, so, so, many times I would work overtime getting stuff done only to find out it wasn’t needed.”

Training in Taiwan, which typically lasted one to two years, wasn’t all miserable, the Americans said. On the weekends, the trainees traveled across the island, marveling at the country’s highly efficient public transport network. Bruce spent his weekends hiking and frequenting nightclubs. He chatted with the families that run night-market food stalls, and entertained strangers who requested selfies with foreigners.

For the Taiwanese, many of whom planned for extended stays in Phoenix, that meant relocating entire families — toddlers and dogs included — to a foreign country. Many regarded it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to explore the world, practice English, and send their children to American schools. Younger families planned pregnancies so they could give birth to American citizens. “If we are going to have children, of course we will have them here,” a Taiwanese engineer told Rest of World. “As an American citizen, they will have more options than others.”

Many experienced a culture shock. The bustling cities of Taiwan are densely packed and offer extensive public transport, ubiquitous street food, and 24-hour convenience stores every few blocks. In northern Phoenix, everyday life is impossible without a car, and East Asian faces are scarce

“Everything is so big in America,” said one engineer, recalling his first impression. He recounted his wife summarizing her impression of the U.S.: “Great mountains, great rivers, and great boredom.”

Having spent years under the company’s grueling management, they were used to long days, out-of-hours calls, and harsh treatment from their managers. In Taiwan, the pay and prestige were worth it, they told Rest of World — despite the challenges, many felt proud working for the island’s most prominent firm. It was the best job they could hope for.

Sometimes, the engineers said, staff would manipulate data from testing tools or wafers to please managers who had seemingly impossible expectations.

A former TSMC staffer who worked on the education program said managers were instructed not to yell at employees in public, or threaten to fire them without consulting human resources. “They would say, ‘Okay, okay, I get it. I’m not going to do that,’” the employee recalled to Rest of World. “But I think in the heat of the moment, they forgot, and they did do it.”

Chang-Tai Hsieh, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, told Rest of World that TSMC had found the U.S. a challenging environment to operate in because of the complicated regulatory process, strong construction unions, and a workforce less used to the long hours that are commonplace at TSMC in Taiwan.

Sitting in a room together, the engineers admitted that although they had made some progress in acclimating to life in the U.S., TSMC had yet to find a balance between the two work cultures. Some Taiwanese workers complained that management was being too accommodating in giving Americans less work, paying them high salaries, and letting them get off work early.

Handling the vast volume of AI-generated images still requires precise curation, adjustments, and post-production. The prompt is just a starting point. These images rarely manage to stand alone without context; layout, copywriting, and motion need to click in place, and the formula needs to be replicable to create a robust brand system. That’s the right moment to pull in multiple collaborators, bringing expertise and taste into play. It's good to have more time for that.

I use generative AI primarily for concepting and moodboarding. It helps clients imagine what their brand identity could look like. I save time browsing stock image libraries or trying to describe art direction concepts (“It would look like this illustration depicting a car, but it would actually show a jar of cream!”). AI-generated concepts then serve as a brief for skilled illustrators, photographers, and other creatives to build upon.

For early-stage companies, I often use AI-generated images because it's a cost-effective way of creating a library of differentiated visual assets that they otherwise wouldn't be able to afford to produce.

I mostly use Midjourney, TopazAI, Glif.app, Visual Electric, Krea, ChatGPT, Magnific, Adobe Firefly

The beginning is almost never the most compelling or important part. It's just the bit you thought of first, based on your subjective chronology.

Signposting what you're going to write about is good, but starting with an exhaustive list of definitions is extremely boring.

Invoking paleolithic people is an overplayed way to convince us your topic is cosmically important.

Openings need tension – paradoxes, unanswered questions, and unresolved action

Good openings propose problems, pose questions, drop you into an unfinished story, or point at fundamental tensions within a topic. Ideally within the first paragraph or two.

"Good writing starts strong. Not with a cliché ("Since the dawn of time"), not with a banality ("Recently, scholars have been increasingly concerned with the questions of..."), but with a contentful observation that provokes curiosity."A Sense of StyleStephen Pinker

Creating tension in non-fiction work is trickier because your story is (hopefully) constrained by reality. You are not at liberty to invent suspicious murders, salacious extramarital affairs, or newly-discovered-magical-powers to create tension and mystery. You have to deal with the plain, unexotic facts of the world.

Your job becomes much harder if you pick topics with no tension, problems, or puzzles within them. To paraphrase Williams, it is more of a failure to pose an uninteresting problem, than to poorly articulate an interesting one

Your interest in the topic is your best directional clue for finding the tension or interesting paradox. Your urge to write about the thing hopefully comes from a place of curiosity. You have unanswered questions about it. It feels important or consequential for unexplained reasons. You think you've seen things in it other people haven't. Pay attention to that interest.

Problems are a destabilising condition that has a cost for a community of readers that needs a solution. Destabilising condition is just a fancy word for “change” here – a change in the status quo. Put another way, a problem is an expected turn of events, that has undesireable consequences, for an audience who will care about it, that we want to explore solutions to.

Williams is speaking to a community of academic writers in his book. They're trying to present scientific and research problems in plain, objective language, which isn't necessarily what we want to do with narrative writing like blogging or personal essays. We have a little more liberty to put interesting padding around the change, consequences, and solution, such as telling an opening anecdote, or drawing readers in with characters, rich details, and sensory descriptions.

Williams suggests we try to state our problem and then ask a series of so what?'s to get at the underlying problem

For your writing to be worth reading, you need to be exploring something of consequence for someone

When McPhee writes, after first immersing himself in his raw material (field notes, interview transcripts, official documents) for weeks, he then draws a structure for the work. The structure lays out the major themes and scenes he'll work through, in the order that will make them most compelling and coherent.

Developing a structure requires navigating the tension between chronology and theme. Chronology is what we default to, but themes that repeatedly appear want to pull themselves together into a single place. The themes that really matter should be in your opening. Even if the moment that best defines them happens right before the end of the timeline.

Many case studies read to me like school homework: they knew what the answer and the process were “supposed to be” according to the textbook, so made up the story to fit. In reality, as you point out, it’s never smooth and linear. It’s messy and loopish. If you’re doing a good job, you rarely end up with anything remotely like you anticipated when you started out.

abandon your dogmatic and idealistic view of the design process, and keep learning about how flexible, messy, and beautiful it is.

I don’t speak about the “ideal” design process for a simple reason: it doesn’t exist. Design is never linear, and all projects are unique. The point is to show and explain your path from the kick-off to the final result in the portfolio.

If you tell a story, include the details and the things that didn’t work and how you adapted to overcome the problem, the design manager will empathise with you. For the five minutes it takes to read your case study, they’ll be in your shoes. It’ll remind them of all the times when they had similar problems and it’ll make them appreciate you and your struggles as a designer.

To quote Alexis Ohanian, “Pearpop is the marketplace for brand deals for anyone with an audience. I love my agency, UTA, but the traditional agency model cannot support the breadth and diversity of internet creators. There’s no way you can have agents in an office doing all those deals, nor should you. You want a marketplace for that, and that’s what Pearpop has built."

Many of the first users were successful artists/creators who wanted smaller influencers with highly engaged followings to share their content to extend their reach and awareness.

As Pearpop has grown, brands have been drawn to its ability to execute influencer activations directly in a quick, targeted, frictionless, hyper-localized, economically attractive manner. Pearpop’s self-serve marketplace is a win/win for creators and brands because it’s as simple for brands to find creators as placing a Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn ad.

The briefs go out as a type of casting call and brands are instantly/automatically paired directly with relevant creators. Brands can accept all that apply or specify to approve each influencer before they post.

“Brands play an absolutely critical role in the Creator Economy, and technology has the power to streamline access to the most relevant creators for a brand in the same way Uber and Airbnb streamlined access to cars or home rentals. As just one example, Pearpop shrinks the average time it takes to launch an influencer program from 6 weeks to 6 hours,” said Morrison.

Another aspect creators like is how easy it is to “get found” because of both the way they’re listed in the database, and how challenges are shared.

While the “Creator Economy” is experiencing hockey stick growth, the sad reality, is only about 1% of creators earn a living from their content. Social media platforms have been the primary beneficiaries.

The Wall St. Journal reported the top 1% of streamers on Twitch earn more than half of all streamer revenue, and the majority made less than $120 each in the first 3 quarters of 2021. In spite of that, the number of creators increased 48% in 2021

People are taking issue with the claim that media apparatuses are controlled by Capital, but its literally true. The profit motive requires any media source to optimize based on what is profitable while also handing over editorial control to the owners of these media companies.If the main sponsor of a small town paper does something egregious, is it in the paper's interest to report on that if it means losing their funding? Of course not. That is the mechanism for control of media. Like social media censorship for ad placement, any media falls victim to the preferences of their patrons.