I once cleaned up my sister's room. I thought I was doing her a favor but she was mad at me for a week! In hindsight I should have known better. Spacial memory and all that, she knew where everything was even though it looked messy. The article is not talking about the kind of tidiness that is the hallmark of a well-run workshop, IMO. That kind of tidiness is part of what makes more efficiency in that context.
The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up
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Re: The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think AI would turn reality into a Rube Goldberg machine, but rather that it would create so much complexity that we can't see through it.
The Matrix. I always thought it would be interesting to have a prequel about the first person to escape. Office Space meets X Files, and the order of the complexity slowly becomes more apparent, until the movie turns into Playtime.
I am not sure the story suggests a first person escaped. More like there were always some people who never got captured and added to the matrix who freed others.
Re: The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up
#23Clutter and tidying is simply a time debit/credit ledger.
If you had unlimited time, you would tidy and organize everything in real time. However, we don't have unlimited time and so we borrow time from the future by leaving things slightly messy.
The behavior to avoid, as in money ledgers, is not using the ledger but never paying it back.
Re: The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up
#24I really like this article. Certainly makes me think about my own biases towards "straight lines" as the most "efficient" way of doing a job.
Re: The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up
#25> London's tube map only uses 45° angles to aid its human readers. Now can you see the humanness in mainboard design? What was that russian electronic board design software where nothing is vertically/horizontally aligned, no trace is straight?
Don't about the russian software, but for any high-speed PCB design the trace layout matters and 90-degrees bends are to be avoided. On motherboards you'll often see lines that have an extra squiggle or two to equalise the length (and thus delay) because they happened to have a shorter distance to cover.
Re: The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Matrix. I always thought it would be interesting to have a prequel about the first person to escape. Office Space meets X Files, and the order of the complexity slowly becomes more apparent, until the movie turns into Playtime.
I am not sure the story suggests a first person escaped. More like there were always some people who never got captured and added to the matrix who freed others.
It's been implied that the machines might have built Zion on purpose. Including freeing first people to live in it in every iteration.
Re: The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huge corporations and governments are kind of like hybrid silicon/meat AIs and that's exactly what they've done. I think this is the most likely outcome.
No, corporations and governments flatten and simplify everything until they can understand it. The next step, once we have powerful enough systems, is to embrace the chaos and use it. E.g. older houses were hand-built, but nowadays houses are built with straight walls and standardised heights for everything so that mass-produced furniture can fit in them. But if in the future our furniture is made on-demand by AIs, t…
I work for a large size corporation but one which is a quarter the size of many fortune 100s. I guarantee you almost no one knows how things work or are done beyond their immediate scope. Much of my life is spent just trying to glean an understanding of some adjacent function or trying to convince people above me that things they believe about how things work are not actually reflective of how they actually work.
A Rube Goldberg machine usually accomplishes one task. Corporations at scale don’t resemble them mostly because, as there are a multitude of concurrent tasks in flight, the Rube Goldberg machines are neither complex nor absurd enough.
Re: The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up
#28I mean that image of the 'before/after 'topological optimization' seems like a poor analogy.
>confirming that our intuitive preference for “straight line” designs has nothing to do with performance
As the first is made to be made because of its 'straight lines'. You can see the welds and logic in it, as something easily made.
While the second is something only achievable via 3D-Metal printing or possibly very complex 5 axis CNC.
Re: The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up
#29Hmm, I thought that Amazon was famous for how they standardized their cross-company software? (With AWS as a side effect.) Or is this not the case anymore?
If standardized means APIs, yes. If standardized means anything to you about implementation, even at the level of “don’t reimplement what another team - or even another part of your own team - already implemented” then no.
Re: The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not sure the story suggests a first person escaped. More like there were always some people who never got captured and added to the matrix who freed others.
It's been implied that the machines might have built Zion on purpose. Including freeing first people to live in it in every iteration.
Yes, but I think that is probably a backsplanation from later movies. I you only watch the first (xkcd:566) it felt more like there was a first person escaping.