The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up

>Spacial memory and all that, she knew where everything was even though it looked messy.

This is something my wife and I have figured out over time - If it's your own space and nobody else uses it, it's fine to descend to 'chaos' because you can just remember where you last put something.

That model breaks if the space is occupied by more than one person, because where one person put something isn't witnessed by the other person. So, having designated places for things and returning them to their 'home' makes the space most usable by multiple people.

Personally, even for solo spaces, I still favor everything having a home because I don't have a good memory for where things were placed.

Great refutation of functional programming.

Most of the reasons why code is hard to understand will be on a fairly small scale. It is possible to yank that out and replace it, while honoring and respecting any underlying chaotic organization that may have occurred despite the crap quality of the code. (As the article says, this sort of chaotic adaptation requires flexibility and crap code only inhibits that.)

That's pretty much what I've done in this last calendar year, taken two messy systems chaotically (in this article's sense) interfaced with the rest of the company, and upgraded them. I gave them new, hopefully-non-crap code, certainly better documented code, documentation on the system structure, better operational deployment, massive upgrades to security, general speed improvements, and in one case, a fundamental architectural change at the most foundational level even though the surface that the users interacted with hardly appeared to change.

And yet... despite all that, I would not say I "rewrote them from scratch", because I did not simply start with a blank sheet of paper and start scribbling what I think the ideal solution would be. I took the underlying adaptations, respected them, assumed that they likely had a reason even if I didn't know what they were, and built systems that largely dropped into place on top of the old ones rather than being totally foreign bodies that cause cascading requirements for other systems to also be significantly rewritten.

If, in the future, those other systems do get rewritten, I even have some paths prepared (but not yet written) in the code for true architectural upgrades to occur in the future. But in the meantime, I have improved systems that work now.

It's a much better approach to replacing a system that denying the chaotic adaptations. Even "crap code" can be mined for them, and they are not generally the crappiness itself.

Why not? Our brains let us iterate orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution can. It's how we built civilization.

>half of the breakage in modern cars seems to require interfacing with the computer to at least clear an error flag.

Yes, you need an odbII tool. they are not expensive by the standards of decent '80s automotive tools (the cost of 'minimum viable analog tools' has dropped precipitously during my lifetime. )

The cheapest ODBII tools are bluetooth, and there is a cornucopia of apps to interface with them in the app store. You can get one that is easier to use that doesn't require a phone for $100 that will work for most problems on most cars.

(Of course, the more expensive ODBII tools are better, I'm given to understand, and allow you to do more, but you can do a lot with the cheap junk; and resetting the codes is generally the most basic functionality; unless you've got a fancy car, even the cheapest one that fits your brand should work for that. )

Having come of age at a time when I was driving and repairing (older) carberuated vehicles, I personally think that fixing a carb is like a thousand times harder than interfacing with the ODB system. Modern injection systems just solve so many problems without trying.

My experience of the modern diagnostic systems is that it's actually way easier. The scan tool saves you so much time and effort vs. the old manuals "go to page 5 if it doesn't X, 32 if it does" A lot of the time, the cheap scan tool gives you a code and description; you punch that into a search engine and you get a goddamn video of someone doing the repair. It's amazing compared to screwing around with an exploded parts diagram. (I mean, from the perspective of someone who isn't really a car guy) - I mean, there's always problems the scantool doesn't catch, but... I mean, I'm talking about all this from a shadetree perspective, there have always been a lot of automotive problems I couldn't fix, just 'cause I'm not an automotive specialist.