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The Only Unbreakable Law [video]

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Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]

#21
post #16

Having watched Casey's Handmade Hero series since day-1, I've always found him to be highly skilled and insightful. While not a game developer myself, learning from his approach to first-principles software development and code optimization has paid dividends in my day to day work nonetheless.

I've found him passionate and smart. But rarely right. Like him bashing SOLID principles. It read like a man arguing against hammers, and instead suggesting using drills (which is fine if you need to drill a hole but bad advice if you want to hammer a nail). Like yeah, SOLID is over used and over-stated, but they were invented to stop certain set of problems.

Not to mention that the “S” in SOLID is closely related to what he is talking about here, namely that a software component ought to be related to only one specific source of changes – i.e. a box in an org chart – in order to minimize the risk of it being changed badly and consequently break something. This implies that you should have a connection between the org chart and the code, in order for the changes in the code over time to not constantly break the code.

Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]

#22
post #16

Having watched Casey's Handmade Hero series since day-1, I've always found him to be highly skilled and insightful. While not a game developer myself, learning from his approach to first-principles software development and code optimization has paid dividends in my day to day work nonetheless.

I've found him passionate and smart. But rarely right. Like him bashing SOLID principles. It read like a man arguing against hammers, and instead suggesting using drills (which is fine if you need to drill a hole but bad advice if you want to hammer a nail). Like yeah, SOLID is over used and over-stated, but they were invented to stop certain set of problems.

With both Casey and Jon Blow I find that if I mentally prefix what they say with "When developing AAA games..." then they are almost always right. Much of it doesn't transfer far outside that domain.

Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]

#23
post #18
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please spare us from truth-seeking and leave that to the philosophers. What? Parent is litteraly saying don't trust a model that has no predictive power. You're saying leave model evaluation to philosophers. Last time we did that we did that we had theory of four elements and phlogiston.

No. I am saying leave truth/truthfulness to philosophers. Every model has predictive power. Even the God model. It predicts something existing; rather than nothing. Of course, it is a worthless prediction but it is a prediction.

> No. I am saying leave truth/truthfulness to philosophers.

I think you mean scientists. I.e., construct an experiment validate, etc.

God model the least possible predictive power imaginable.

Also, according to philosophers, God must exist because it's a perfect being. And a perfect being must exist because it is perfect. They are like people left in a sensory deprivation tank hallucinating random patterns into a sensible picture.

Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]

#24
post #17

Conway's "law" is such a cop-out excuse for shipping shitty software... There's no such law of nature that says you must ship shitty software. Enterprises ship shitty software because the average tenure of their developers is 2 years, and they have no incentive to improve things beyond what's necessary to pay the bills.

I mean at the end of the day it boils to few things. - Entropy - Capitalism - Greed To not be vague, user greed for features and less for performance cause increase in complexity. A complex system is by definition more chaotic and harder to optimize. And Capitalism rewards doing just a bit better than competition. I.e. optimize your time on quickest things that gives most users satisfaction.

> And Capitalism rewards doing just a bit better than competition. I.e. optimize your time on quickest things that gives most users satisfaction.

More specifically, capitalism doesn't reward the worker for doing software architecture better at all, just rewards the company. So the workers will naturally make the politically safe choice for software architecture and not care whether that is right, which means making it look like the org chart.

Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]

#25
post #14
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So let me try to understand what you're saying here, and correct me if I'm wrong. Is this a mischaracterization of a subset of your claim: "Scientists do not care if their models are truthful, but they do care that their models are useful."?

Or is there just a correlation between truthfulness and usefulness of a model...

No. “False” models can still make accurate and useful predictions.

The Ptolemaic/geocentric models still work, even if the mathematics are a bit unwieldy.

Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]

#26
post #23
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I am saying leave truth/truthfulness to philosophers. Every model has predictive power. Even the God model. It predicts something existing; rather than nothing. Of course, it is a worthless prediction but it is a prediction.

> No. I am saying leave truth/truthfulness to philosophers. I think you mean scientists. I.e., construct an experiment validate, etc. God model the least possible predictive power imaginable. Also, according to philosophers, God must exist because it's a perfect being. And a perfect being must exist because it is perfect. They are like people left in a sensory deprivation tank hallucinating random patterns into a sen…

No. I mean precisely what I said.

Science does not pursue truth. Philosophy does.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism

Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]

#27
post #26
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No. I am saying leave truth/truthfulness to philosophers. I think you mean scientists. I.e., construct an experiment validate, etc. God model the least possible predictive power imaginable. Also, according to philosophers, God must exist because it's a perfect being. And a perfect being must exist because it is perfect. They are like people left in a sensory deprivation tank hallucinating random patterns into a sen…

No. I mean precisely what I said. Science does not pursue truth. Philosophy does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism

Philosophy divorced from experiment just devolves into navel gazing and batshit insanity.

Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]

#28
post #25
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or is there just a correlation between truthfulness and usefulness of a model...

No. “False” models can still make accurate and useful predictions. The Ptolemaic/geocentric models still work, even if the mathematics are a bit unwieldy.

They work well enough that navigation can still be done by them (apparently the tables/math is easier than the “correct” ones).

Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]

#29
post #10
post #8

A law that doesn't make predictions isn't a law. A law that is not falsifiable isn't a law. It is an unscientific belief. It's truly incredible to me that people, like the person in this video, can speak with such confidence about how, for example from this video, "if we look at an org chart for an organization, and we look at the structure of the products that it produces, we would expect them to basically just be c…

Please spare us from truth-seeking and leave that to the philosophers. In science/engineering we care about instrumentalism, not truth. All models are wrong. Some are useful.

Truth is just that which corresponds to or is a reflection of reality. Anyone who thinks otherwise is thinking too hard.

The true nature of reality might be unknowable, but science is a means to move towards it.

Re: The Only Unbreakable Law [video]

#30
The law holds for human orgs for a reason beyond "communication". No business unit that is asked to contribute to a project would allow its contribution to take a form different from a discrete, quantifiable module. The 5-person team in the lecture came up with a 5-pass compiler because none of the 5 people were willing to have an unquantifiable contribution indistinguishable from having not shown up to work in the first place.

The case with software classes and components is different. None of those inanimate object care if their contribution is measurable, so the law does not apply as strongly with respect to them.

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