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The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up

florentcrivello.com

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Re: The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up

#171

Post by erezsh »

> Streets arranged in grids, people waiting in clean lines, cars running at the same speed…

Grids make it easier to navigate for humans, to plan for public transport, and improves the city's connectivity.

Waiting in clean lines reduces the chances of fighting in the queue.

Cars running at the same speed dramatically reduces the chances of a lethal impact.

And what exactly is the cost of these things? Is a grid that much harder to make? Does anyone want to cancel the dedicated highway, or let cars stop in the middle of it?

I think this author just doesn't understand the concept of efficiency at all.

> “Please clean up your room,” asks the mother. “Fool,” retorts the three-year-old with an eerily deep voice. “Can’t you see the beauty in my glorious chaos?”

Sounds like he's still upset about that..

Re: The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up

#172

Post by anon73044 »

xondono wrote: post #165
ken wrote: post #36

> When computers design things, they look very different. Yes, because the computer assumes they're not going to change. The "tensile structure" looks cool now, but throw it in the back of a truck for 3 months and see if it's still algorithmically perfect. Parts get beat up. Tabs get bent a little. Maybe we'll want to grind off one of those tabs that we're not using because it's in the way, or weld on a new one. With…

The other point I find missing is that this kind algorithmic optimization tends to miss solutions that are quite obvious to "system designers" due to local maxima (evolutionary roadblocks). For instance, nature has not figure out how to evolve wheels even in flat regions.

Counter point: the tumbleweed.

Also, you're assuming that wheels are the most efficient design for traveling, but bullions of dandelions seem to spread their seeds every year along with dozens of other plants.

Re: The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up

#173

Post by fragmede »

nradov wrote: post #122
lsc wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 sto…

An ODBII is helpful for basic stuff but it doesn't get you very far with modern cars. Most manufacturers now have specialized proprietary scanners which are needed for any complex repairs, especially for anything electronic. Those scanners are extremely expensive and sometimes only sold to authorized service centers.

Are these manufacturers called BMW, by any chance? They sell this authorized "computer module" replacement part for $400. But if you take it apart, there's a 50 cent fuse inside that was blown. Replacing the fuse does no good without access to the proprietor BMW software, because the module will refuse to work after the fuse is replaced until it is reset using their software. Which means you have to pay for a whole new module. However not all manufacturers are like that. After I change the oil on my Honda, there's a silly little dance to reset the oil life indicator, but nothing too crazy. The Toyota Corolla is a favorite for self-driving car enthusiasts due to the hackability of its lane-guidance system into something fuller. I'm also disappointed in some of the directions the future has taken us (it's frustrating to me how hard it is the replace user-servicable parts inside a lot of laptops, eg Apple), but not all manufacturers are the same and talking about the situation as if they are is too abstract to be useful, say, when looking for your next car.

Re: The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up

#174

Post by jeroennoels »

cookiecaper wrote: post #123
pizzaparty2 wrote: post #53

Sorry but there's no excuse for crap code. If it's hard to understand then time is lost every time you have to work with it. You shouldn't defend it by trying to assign positive attributes to it (its effecient. ...yeah). Maybe there's nothing good about bad code and we should use being called out on it as an opportunity for improvement. No, lets double down on our delusions of superiority by telling ourselves that cr…

Code, at least the way we currently write it, is a fundamentally lossy transfer. The coder has the context in their head; they understand what's happening up to that point, what they want to happen now, and what needs to happen later. Writing code is translating those concepts and ideas into a specialized step-by-step list of machine instructions. In the course of writing the concepts in a dumbed-down format for an i…

Upvoted. See also: "Programming as theory building" by Peter Naur.

Re: The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up

#175

Post by jazzdev »

PeterStuer wrote: post #167

I'm a 'lover of chaos'. My working desks always gather strata of documents, more often than not disheveling onto the surrounding floor. This article however rubs me the wrong way right from the start. 'Cars running at the same speed' aren't "efficiency-destroying" nor about spurious 'appearance'. A controlled laminar flow is incredibly more efficient than chaotic turbulence. It does not get any better later on, when…

Isn't the trend in cities for more mixed-use space?

And wouldn't Uber be more profitable if people lived and worked in different parts of the city?

Re: The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up

#176

Post by stjohnswarts »

ratel wrote: post #125

This article is wrong on so many levels: 1. Theoretical: chaotic and complex are not the same thing. Organized and tidy are neither the opposite from or excluding complex systems. Some very tidy systems can still be mind-boggling complex. Furthermore Chaotic systems have a single underlying order (it might just be impossible to discern), but they are not complex. Complex systems might have multiple orders, none at al…

3. I don't think Uber is less complex, just complex in different areas. Uber's sole purpose is to make its owners more money, currently that means providing a upheaval in the industry and providing easy ride access to humans. When those humans are no long the best (or most obvious way) to make money the capital and investors will move on.

Re: The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up

#178

Post by NoodleIncident »

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #31

Joel has a post about working in a bakery: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/05/11/making-wrong-code-... His idea is that there is a pretty high standard of cleanliness in a bakery, just not the obvious one. A similar "hidden rule" presumably applies to cities etc.

I'm almost certain I've read this article before, but I think I've read a lot more about types since then. In particular, this line is hilarious:

> I’m using the word kind on purpose, there, because Simonyi mistakenly used the word type in his paper, and generations of programmers misunderstood what he meant.

It sure doesn't sound like Simonyi was the one making a mistake here! It sounds like Hungarian notation is what you use to compensate for missing types; it got its bad reputation from people using it for types that the language already provides, because that's easier.

Re: The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up

#179

Post by chewbacha »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #117
chewbacha wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that’s the result of almost 4 billion years of trial and error. I don’t think comparing that to a couple years of engineering trial and error is quite the same :p

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

> Our brains let us iterate orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution can.

I think you need to provide citation for this because I do not accept this assertion at face value as there are 10x the number of single cellular organisms on your body than you have human cells. Biological evolution is proceeding on your own body faster than you can write software. And it's all happening in parallel and concurrently. In fact, every cell, even neurons, are providing feedback into the system of "biology" that includes the entire planet.

To assume that our own cognition is somehow superior to life itself feels full of hubris.

Re: The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up

#180

Post by shrimp_emoji »

scotty79 wrote: post #166
pif wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A complaint that you can't swap liver... I'm not complaining! I'm grateful to evolution for providing me such a wonderful mechanism called body. But, I suppose you don't work in software development, do you? I say so because you, rightfully, took "maintenance" in its literal meaning, like "maintaining it the way it always was". Unfortunately, in software development (and maybe other professions) maintenance mean si…

> "he died because he drank poison" > "he died because the crappy developer left an unfixed bug in his Liver plugin" Rather "He died because dna replication wasn't perfect and caused his liver to develop cancer", but I don't fully agree with article author either. Chaos is a result of optimising for efficiency but also by doing do very gradually in a piecemeal manner. This kind of process can lead to local optima tha…

>Rather "He died because dna replication wasn't perfect and caused his liver to develop cancer", but I don't fully agree with article author either.

I think they meant the "unfixed bug" was that the liver can't process the lethal poison (as it does other toxins).

It would be less of a bug than a vulnerability though; imperfect DNA replication leading to cancer is spiritually closer to a bug, IMO.

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