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Fast

patrickcollison.com

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Re: Fast

#271

Post by bruce343434 »

throwaway892238 wrote: post #218

Some things are pretty fast considering what they accomplished. The Lockheed A-12 was built 2 years after its designs were approved, with 2 years before that of planning. Still the fastest air-breathing airplane in existence. Its first flight was in 1962. In March 1940, John R. Dunning's team at Columbia University verifies Niels Bohr's hypothesis that uranium 235 is responsible for fission by slow neutrons. August 6…

The Hoover dam getting stronger is just luck, it could have just as well deteriorated if they didn't know it would get stronger.

Re: Fast

#272

Post by RandomLensman »

systemvoltage wrote: post #234
rurp wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Autocracy gets shit done. On certain high profile projects, sure. But autocracy typically embeds a lot of corruption at every level of the system which creates a drag in many ways. A system that prioritizes loyalty and obedience to your superiors more than anything tends to have a lot of waste.

Counter point: Autocracies are actually extremely efficient, but we don't like to admit that. So, we come up with various narratives. Let's be honest, there is plenty of corruption in democracies and autocracies are pretty damn good at infrastructure. Just not an ideal governing structure for individual freedom and things like property rights which we value higher than efficiency of building things fast.

Which autocracies were/are efficient? Were East Germany, the USSR, Mussolini's Italy, or Nazi Germany efficient - not sure they were. They could get certain things done, but that is very different from being efficient (or even effective) in broader sense.

Re: Fast

#273

Post by bmacho »

post-it wrote: post #80
soperj wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are all variables still global unless defined not to be?

No, as of eight years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript_version_history#ES2...

I'd rather say yes.

AFAIK core javascript works exactly like 25 years ago, and they haven't changed anything on it, not removing a single keyword or altering a semantics of any less used function, so your 25 years old javascript programs can still run in modern browsers.

Re: Fast

#274

Post by mike_hearn »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #220
JackFr wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Milgram experiment debunked too https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/rethinkin... https://www.psypost.org/2019/11/unpublished-data-from-stanle... https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/why-almost-everything-yo...

The word "debunk" is doing some heavy lifting in those articles. "....Overall 58 per cent of people actually disobeyed the pushy experimenter [which means that 42 percent didn't.] How can we understand this variability, Reicher asked, if the agentic state is true?" What else would explain it -- and more important, what difference does it make? Milgram found that 42% of people will administer electric shocks to someon…

I believe the debunking is that there's good evidence many of the participants realized they were in an experiment and the other person was an actor, but Milgram hid this in order to get a famous paper.

Re: Fast

#275

Post by mike_hearn »

chrisco255 wrote: post #170
terribleperson wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Runescape was crazy for the time (pre-WoW). A full-featured MMO you could play on a wide variety of computers without downloading or installing anything. All you needed was Java.

All you needed was to download a new monthly version of 50MB of JRE and install it on your virus-prone Windows XP machine and open up about 7 new holes in your system with each patch.

Bear in mind you also had to update Netscape Navigator, IE, Flash and half your apps too. People didn't do it but you were supposed to.

Re: Fast

#276

Post by underwater »

electriclove wrote: post #262
danudey wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US also has billionaires and billion-dollar companies deliberately trying to sabotage these sorts of issues. Elon Musk and his 'Boring Company', for example, going around promising a revolution in transportation and then just... ghosting people.[0] "Don't start your public transport infrastructure, we'll build you something objectively worse and far less scalable for a fraction of the price! Uh actually never min…

Absolutely agree regarding ISPs and Intuit/TurboTax but Boring is not a good example.

Some people think that Hyperloop was purely intended to sabotage the high-speed rail project by creating the false impression there was a cheaper, easier, option on the horizon.

Re: Fast

#277

Post by mymac »

mike_hearn wrote: post #274
CamperBob2 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word "debunk" is doing some heavy lifting in those articles. "....Overall 58 per cent of people actually disobeyed the pushy experimenter [which means that 42 percent didn't.] How can we understand this variability, Reicher asked, if the agentic state is true?" What else would explain it -- and more important, what difference does it make? Milgram found that 42% of people will administer electric shocks to someon…

I believe the debunking is that there's good evidence many of the participants realized they were in an experiment and the other person was an actor, but Milgram hid this in order to get a famous paper.

Does it matter? If someone may or may not be an actor by your judgment is going to cause you to possibly commit an atrocity then you should play it safe and refuse. Just in case...

Re: Fast

#278

Post by rocgf »

> JavaScript. Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days, in May 1995. It shipped in beta in September of that year.

I find this really easy to believe, actually.

Re: Fast

#279

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

mcqueenjordan wrote: post #214
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point. But Git was initially written by one cranky Finn, in ten days. It totally changed the way we all work.

Just want to mention this because this parable gets thrown around a lot. The delta between what git is now and what it was when first released is massive. Junio Hamano has been a absolute force of a maintainer and steward over the interim 18 years (!!) since 2005. This story often gets tossed around, as if to imply all of what git is today was put out by Linus in 2 weeks, but I think it suffers from a bit of a hero w…

That's par for the course, these days.

I was the original author of multiple systems that have lasted decades, but I'll bet that you'd be hard-pressed to find much of my original code, in the current iterations.

Re: Fast

#280

Post by fwlr »

“ The physical infrastructure projects enumerated above occurred before 1970 to a disproportionate degree. Why? ”

If you Google image search “growth of environmental regulation”, there is a huge increase in the slope of those graphs right around 1960-1970. A simple explanation might be that environmental regulation strangled the speed of physical infrastructure building. A more complex explanation might be that environmental regulation, along with other regulation, experienced this massive growth as a symptom of massive growth in management, consulting, and bureaucracy employment - and it is this proliferation of managers and consultants and bureaucrats that have slowed things down.

I do like the second explanation more. The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/where-d...) tells me that “professional and business services”, their catchall for managers and consultants, grew from 2.3% of GDP in 1947 to 12.1% of GDP in 2009. This sextupling of management work could very well correspond to a sextupling of the length (in time) of projects. A mile of road takes just as much asphalt whether you build it in one month or six months, but it takes ~six times as much management when it takes six months.

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