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The Religion of Speed

graybeard.ing

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Re: The Religion of Speed

#131

Post by Verdex »

ryandrake wrote: post #119
weiliddat wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this argument, but I don't think the article argues against taking urgency into consideration. Do you have anecdotes about companies or people that actually ignore urgency? I've experienced enough business-critical incidents (or requests) where people across all seniority are just randomly trying stuff, making a mess, without taking time to coordinate, understand the problem, and solve it. It almost always res…

Businesses fake urgency all the time. I guess I have never worked in any of these 'high stakes' companies. My whole career, everything was reportedly urgent, but when you missed the deadline, nobody dies, nobody got fired, you just slipped a little and leadership pretended even more urgency. And if you slipped a lot, people got burned out and quit and leadership would institute 'war rooms' and 'crunch time'. And if y…

It has to be done by next week.

Here it is. It is done.

Great, now we put it on a shelf and ignore it for 6 months.

From my perspective, every time.

Edit: the last time this happened to me, they later revealed that it was going to be shelved for a year.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#132

Post by spencerwgreene »

Nothing in the post is wrong, but there's an anti-pattern where teams resist change, the software ossifies, and people cite these mantras like "slow is smooth and smooth is fast", when in reality the users just want new features shipped on the order of weeks/months, not quarters/years. Users eventually lose patience, leave or fork the code or solve their problem differently, and route around the team that doesn't get stuff done.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#133

Post by toast0 »

drunkboxer wrote: post #86
toast0 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't think of very many first movers that really had an advantage. Maybe if you get a lot of essential patents. Or you get very lucky with timing and capture a large market nobody noticed wasn't serviced. But so many of today's market leaders were late entrants. Sometimes many years late.

JIRA?

JIRA is from 2002, Bugzilla is from 1998, GNATS is from 1992.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#134

Post by twister2920 »

austin-cheney wrote: post #81

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…

> 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

you can't measure everything, and choosing what to measure is an editorial decision that introduces bias.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#135

Post by rglover »

spencerwgreene wrote: post #132

Nothing in the post is wrong, but there's an anti-pattern where teams resist change, the software ossifies, and people cite these mantras like "slow is smooth and smooth is fast", when in reality the users just want new features shipped on the order of weeks/months, not quarters/years. Users eventually lose patience, leave or fork the code or solve their problem differently, and route around the team that doesn't get…

You're right and I'd argue that the approach I'm suggesting in this post gets your delivery schedule more aligned with weeks/months than with quarters/years.

What we have now produces quarters/years delays (and in a lot of cases, an inevitable throwing up of the hands to move on to the next disaster/panic). It's paradoxical, certainly, but the Tortoise and the Hare is one of the most accurate fables ever written (why I keep a little tortoise figurine on my desk).

Older generations understood this and go figure, the world was far more stable. We sold that out in favor of speed and quick profit and now we're in for a serious roller coaster ride. And for what? The illusion of having moved faster in the present at the expense of stability in the future.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#137

Post by kerblang »

Some people are unable to become motivated unless there is pervasive sense of emergency. They will delay their own work to the last possible minute and pull all-nighters just for the excitement. When those people get promoted to management they can be hell to work for, having concluded that the only way to motivate themselves holds for everyone else as well.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#138

Post by simianwords »

dgellow wrote: post #126
simianwords wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s what you said earlier > It's a capital misallocation problem, a number problem, that has nothing to do with subjective feelings regarding LLMs Now you say > 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. You can see how someone might be confused with this. Is it your subje…

No, I don’t see the confusion. There are a lot of distinct issues with LLMs. In my initial message I made it clear I was talking about the economics issues. > your concern would be invalid if the AI companies overall make profit. If they don’t, then you would have been right on the point of being careful. No, that’s fallacious reasoning. If the AI vendors are currently profitable that doesn’t mean the concerns regard…

This thread is emblematic of the HN view of AI. It starts with some vague concerns - you specify that it is a purely economic concern and not subjective feeling. After being asked that if the economics work out would your concern be proved wrong, you then started mentioning things like anti-human and piling up a random list of other topics.

Essentially you have made your concern utterly unfalsifiable - however the material world situation pans out in AI, your concern would be validated. There's a lot of emotion in all this and its a good idea for you to separate it out from your real objective concerns.

Re: The Religion of Speed

#139

Post by simianwords »

rglover wrote: post #107
simianwords wrote: post #32

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 t…

> 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?

Its not a good tradeoff if it breaks it enough that people move off your product, I obviously concede that.

Ultimately a firm should be incentivised to improve their long term profits after accounting for externalities to the world. Fast or slow is an implementation detail.

>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.

Its not clear that your subjective view of slop is reason enough for the world to slow down on AI rollout and I'm glad I don't live in a world that doesn't necessitate slowing down due to whims and fancies of a few people's subjective aesthetic takes.

Ironically for me, all the companies _do_ want to slow down their pace for reasons related to actual safety. I think you would appreciate the cause and the foresight (if any).

https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/

Re: The Religion of Speed

#140

Post by Zacharias030 »

jeremyjh wrote: post #110
placebo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agree exactly!

If every use of AI was like this, I perhaps wouldn't have this slight allergic reaction to it, but as it stands, this voice and rhythm has become associated with bad lazy grifting writing.

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