I assume this is a response to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 - July 2025 (417 comments)
Slow
21–30 of 238 posts
Re: Slow
#22[deleted]
Re: Slow
#23This goes hand in hand with the Lindy effect[0]. Some of the examples given in the article are a testament to it. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
I am fairly certain there will be almost as many Ford model Ts running around in 2108 than are running now, but within 30 or 40 years I doubt there will be many cybertrucks that do.
Re: Slow
#24If we look beyond problems that humans solve, well, evolution of diverse and specialized species seems to require time (and be undone by humans going fast)
Re: Slow
#25Nice post! This rhymes with the ideas Cal Newport presents in Slow Productivity.
Next should be a series of posts on the Slow movement.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_movement_(culture)
Post them slowly, i.e. not all on the same day. We need time to read them - slowly.
Re: Slow
#26I'm reminded of the famous story of (I think) the central beam in a building at Oxford. The story goes something like:
The central beam was beginning to fail and the Oxford administration knew they needed to replace it. When they went around for quotes, no one could replace the beam because it was 100 ft in length and sourced from an old growth tree. Such logs were simply unavailable to buy. To solve the issue, the staff begin to look at major renovations to the building's architecture.
Until the Oxford groundskeeper heard about the problem. "We have a replacement beam," he said.
The groundskeeper took the curious admins to the edge of the grounds. There stood two old growth trees, over 150 feet tall.
"But these must be over 200 years old! When were they planted?" the admins asked.
"The day they replaced the previous beam."
Re: Slow
#27Cool list, but to be a party pooper:
> Will Unix Time or TCP/IP ever be replaced? Modified: sure.
UNIX time is already being replaced with a 64 bit value instead of signed 32 bit. TCP/IP has already been replaced, that's QUIC over IPv6 which is what my computer uses every time it connects to Google.
I mean you can claim IPv6 is still "IP" because it shares the same first two letters, but IPv6 is different enough to be easily considered a different protocol.
Re: Slow
#28I'm reminded of the famous story of (I think) the central beam in a building at Oxford. The story goes something like: The central beam was beginning to fail and the Oxford administration knew they needed to replace it. When they went around for quotes, no one could replace the beam because it was 100 ft in length and sourced from an old growth tree. Such logs were simply unavailable to buy. To solve the issue, the s…
Fantastic!
Re: Slow
#29I dunno. I think we should separate out the stuff that fundamentally has to take a long time, like the pitch experiment, from stuff like Notre Dame, which just took a long time because they lacked the resources to do it all at once. Like OK, it takes a long time to build a big church because you need to find all the right rocks or whatever. But the pitch, that’s the universe taking a long time to tell us something. (…
I'm imagining a spectrum between "has to be slow" and "needlessly slow", with a middle slider for that one razor where things take as much time as you give them.
Intentionality is a big theme in math research (so i've heard), where solving "useful" problems isn't the ideal goal. The goal is to solve interesting problems, which might seem useless, but along the way achieve results with much wider implications that would have been impossible to discover directly. Or, how inventions like toothpaste came from space travel research.
(rhetorically) Does an indirect result "justify" a longer, slower project? Is speed an inherent property of the problem, or is it only knowable once it's complete? Or both, in the cases of misused funds?
Re: Slow
#30I'm reminded of the famous story of (I think) the central beam in a building at Oxford. The story goes something like: The central beam was beginning to fail and the Oxford administration knew they needed to replace it. When they went around for quotes, no one could replace the beam because it was 100 ft in length and sourced from an old growth tree. Such logs were simply unavailable to buy. To solve the issue, the s…
I have no idea if this story is true, but it should be.