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The Religion of Speed

graybeard.ing

101–110 of 166 posts

Re: The Religion of Speed

#101
post #93

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. My learnings about speed: * people tend to not measure things and when they actually do bother they tend to measure the wrong things, the things of immediate comfort * measurements, when executed correctly, are objective with numeric evidence, thus some people are wholly incapable of measuring things for the same reasons some people cannot introspect * people tend to guess at measures…

>Rowers have a word for this frictionless state: swing... Recall the pure joy of riding on a backyard swing: an easy cycle of motion, the momentum coming from the swing itself. The swing carries us; we do not force it. We pump our legs to drive our arc higher, but gravity does most of the work. We are not so much swinging as being swung. The boat swings you. The shell wants to move fast: Speed sings in its lines and…

Hmmm, so it sounds like the root cause isn’t really about “speed” at all… but something else?

For example, someone in a meeting saying things lacking credibility and everyone else just goes along with it anyways. Then it snowballs meeting after meeting.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#102

Impossible to disagree with the author, and yet something seems missing in the discussion... Let me check: Ctrl-F, 'deadline' 0 result. Oh, yeah, that's what missing from the discussion. And without any trolling, I'm curious about what the author would have to say about this matter. Not all "need for speed" comes from a vacuum. Is it always legit ? Should we push back ? Sure. Do we always meaningfully, practically, r…

I'm the author.

Deadlines are artificial constraints (typically, some deadlines are unshakable—eg "we have to launch the payload when conditions are clear") that, imo, distract from the actual goal or task at hand.

Sadly, a deadline is more often used as an excuse to rush, and not because the deadline itself is of material consequence (e.g., meeting a vendor's production deadline is unshakable).

Instead, the more common reality is that someone in a position of limited agency uses the deadline as a sort of mental whip. This may get a result faster, but rarely is the work that was rushed solely to meet a deadline the best the team/individual was capable of. More often, you get a broken mess that now necessitates wasting more time later cleaning it up (this is the part I think traps a lot of people; it's a stealing from Peter to pay Paul situation).

When I've discussed this in the past, most misinterpret my point through too binary a lens. This isn't some hippie dippie idealist "just, like, do whatever maaan" kind of take.

Instead, it's a suggestion for those in an environment that's always "moving fast" but rarely if ever hitting the mark. This leads to papering over the obvious problem: the team or individual responsible for the bad work is rarely someone of pure incompetence and more often is just under completely imagined pressure that doesn't exist (beyond the confines of the minds involved).

I'm not naive, of course you can't blanket apply this line of thought to every situation (especially in corporate America). I'm more so angling at "have you considered that rushing is the reason everything you ship falls apart and doesn't meet its goals?"

Case in point: FedEx deployed some new dashboard software for their employees doing package handling. I came in to drop off a MacBook I was sending in for repair. While scanning it in, the system just broke (in the "it ain't doing the thing no more, ma" sense). The clerk was able to manually scan it, so skipped the system and gave me a receipt. A week later, Apple never got the laptop. I start calling around frantically, now having to do work I shouldn't be doing. It was determined that the label printed (the one I got a receipt for) wasn't the "correct" label to scan (that was hidden under another label already on the box). This led to weeks of unnecessary phone calls re-explaining the situation to various employees, now arguing with me about a mistake FedEx made.

Eventually, Apple called it a mulligan after a month and sent me a new laptop.

My point: whatever caused the FedEx team to rush had a ripple effect of wasting inordinate amounts of time and costing Apple $5K. Why? Because whoever built that dashboard software rushed and made an otherwise simple idea into a half-working, frustrating mess. This is the type of situation I have in mind when I tell others "we need to slow down."

Like I alluded to in the post, it's not about moving slow as a matter of psychological comfort, but as a means to avoid creating messes in the present (and future) in service of an arbitrary deadline that's less rooted in necessity and more so in fulfilling the ego of whoever is in charge. That's a tough pill to swallow, I get it, but like most things, the actual problem isn't the process or reality, it's the human mind convincing itself of things that just aren't true.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#103
post #99
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the author is having a kind of idealistic, relaxed view of work. Moving quickly, even if you break things, has a clear advantage over being perfectionistic, waiting to get feedback, building things that are not needed. These are obvious lessons of agile management. Even if they are not absolute, maybe that post is meant as some kind of relative statement, in general, speed is a good thing. More speed than you…

> Moving quickly, even if you break things, has a clear advantage over being perfectionistic, waiting to get feedback, building things that are not needed. The entire point of slowing down is so you don't do this. Understand the problem well first, so you don't waste time building something that was never viable in the first place. The author isn't advocating for perfect. You have to understand the problem well enoug…

Author here. This is the correct interpretation of what I was getting at.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#104
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's irrelevant... The spending commitment OpenAI has for 2030 is larger than the projected AI infra market in 2030. And we still haven't seen a proof that agents contribute positively to consumers ROI. It's a capital misallocation problem, a number problem, that has nothing to do with subjective feelings regarding LLMs

In that case, if the numbers do work out and labs make shit load of money, would you agree you were mistaken?

no... please actually look at the information we know about AI vendors and how much debt they have. OpenAI is projected to have more than $20B in losses for 2026. They wouldn't _just_ need to make a shit ton of money, they would need to first become profitable, then do a shit ton of money while staying profitable, for multiple years, just to match their spending commitment. That's not even taking in account their ROC and company valuation

Re: The Religion of Speed

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case, if the numbers do work out and labs make shit load of money, would you agree you were mistaken?

no... please actually look at the information we know about AI vendors and how much debt they have. OpenAI is projected to have more than $20B in losses for 2026. They wouldn't _just_ need to make a shit ton of money, they would need to first become profitable, then do a shit ton of money while staying profitable, for multiple years, just to match their spending commitment. That's not even taking in account their ROC…

Sure but if they do make money and profit, your concern would have been invalid in hindsight wouldn’t it?

Your concern seems to be profitability of OpenAI but that’s easily falsifiable. I’m not saying it’s 100% but I’m saying if they do turn out profitable, your concern wouldn’t have been valid.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no... please actually look at the information we know about AI vendors and how much debt they have. OpenAI is projected to have more than $20B in losses for 2026. They wouldn't _just_ need to make a shit ton of money, they would need to first become profitable, then do a shit ton of money while staying profitable, for multiple years, just to match their spending commitment. That's not even taking in account their ROC…

Sure but if they do make money and profit, your concern would have been invalid in hindsight wouldn’t it? Your concern seems to be profitability of OpenAI but that’s easily falsifiable. I’m not saying it’s 100% but I’m saying if they do turn out profitable, your concern wouldn’t have been valid.

depends on the exact chain of events, but if the economics are indeed solved, and AI labs are found to have a sustainable business model, that concern would be addressed. I would still see the technology as anti-human and would still see the concept of an agentic economy as deeply unserious, wasteful, and risky. Not exactly sure what your point is though.

FWIW my concerns aren't only for OpenAI, it's just the poster-child of the AI bubble. SpaceX AI strategy and investment is a complete joke (the S-1 they filled is an insult to a reader's intelligence). Anthropic seems to have been more cautious but has the same fundamental economic problems. Nobody in that whole industry has a moat, the top AI vendors are way too exposed to Chinese/open-weights labs. The datacenters debt investment vehicles (SPVs) look extremely shady and made to obfuscate the underlying assets. The HBM manufacturers seem to be going through one of the most violent boom-burst cycle ever. Oracle is... doing Oracle things, I would be shocked if that company is still alive in its current form in 5y. And so on

Re: The Religion of Speed

#107

If you don’t go fast you deprive your consumers of your product. It’s not clear why that tradeoff is good? There was a recent petition signed by all major AI labs to slow down AI development. Would this author or you guys agree it’s a good thing?

I'm the author.

If you do go fast and don't deprive your customers of your product but the product breaks and doesn't deliver its intended value, is that a better tradeoff?

Re: AI development, I'd say it's foolish to slow down research, but worthwhile for rollouts to the market. The time that should have been used for preparing people/businesses was wasted on fearmongering campaigns. Now we have a fire hose of slop that's out of control.

Why? Rushing.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#108
post #34

You can fail a project not because you were technically wrong about anything, but because you burned your customer out by taking 6 months instead of 6 weeks to find a viable solution to their problem. Speed is a feature from the perspective of your customers. There is economic value associated with it. Consider your state of mind when you call the HVAC tech to fix your broken condensing on an August afternoon in Texa…

Of course! The article agrees with you > Real speed exists. Real speed is what happens when the work is understood, the constraints are clear, the people involved know what they’re doing, and the decisions have been made cleanly enough that execution can happen without constant re-litigation. I think the article is arguing against speed preventing the kind of planning and alignment that makes smooth delivery possible…

So then the article boils down to, doing things well is good and doing things poorly is bad?

Not arguing against speed, just poorly-executed speed.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#109

I agree with all of this, but the inverse is just as bad. Incompetent people will always find a hiding spot through imitation. They will bikeshed and posture like they know what they're talking about. Then they rush anyway at the last minute and still make a mess, or they delegate to someone who will do the same. The actual problem starts at the top of the organization. All it takes is one bad link in the chain and o…

I agree with this. When people say speed, they often mean cycle time. How fast can I iterate towards a working solution to a problem? A low cycle time can hide many flaws in your staff and hiring. Experienced developers can go slower and be more deliberate because they know where they are generally headed, so they need fewer cycles to get there.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#110
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironic that parts of the article feel so AI written. load-bearing this load-bearing that

They don't seem that way to me. I should also note that AI generated content can at times be better than some human generated content

It’s been well thought out and edited but it’s clearly written by AI, and it was obvious long before “load-bearing”. Still - it makes an important point well and is worth reading.
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