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Squeeze the hell out of the system you have

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Re: Squeeze the hell out of the system you have

#201

Post by agrippanux »

roughly wrote: post #184
fuzztester wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmuth_von_Moltke_the_Elder Moltke's thesis was that military strategy had to be understood as a system of options, since it was possible to plan only the beginning of a military operation. As a result, he considered the main task of military leaders to consist in the extensive preparation of all possible outcomes.[3] His thesis can be summed up by two statements, one famous and one l…

I’m reminded of the Eisenhower line: “plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”

Also Moltke: “no plan survives contact with the enemy”

Re: Squeeze the hell out of the system you have

#202

Post by batch12 »

i_like_apis wrote: post #34

I’m reminded of one of my favorite sayings: You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time. You may want to ignore that this this comes from Donald Rumsfeld (he has some great ones though: “unknown unknowns …”, etc.) I think about this a lot when working on teams. Everyone is not perfectly agreeable or has the same understanding or collective goals. Some may be subop…

Sounds like he may have been a Shania Twain fan - "Dance with the One That Brought You" is the similar phrase I've heard

Re: Squeeze the hell out of the system you have

#203

Post by nostrademons »

bachmeier wrote: post #179
i_like_apis wrote: post #34

I’m reminded of one of my favorite sayings: You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time. You may want to ignore that this this comes from Donald Rumsfeld (he has some great ones though: “unknown unknowns …”, etc.) I think about this a lot when working on teams. Everyone is not perfectly agreeable or has the same understanding or collective goals. Some may be subop…

That's the right attitude for an employee. If management says something like that, look for a new job. It's not sustainable to compete with fewer resources than your opposition. There's a reason college sports is going through a passionate realignment right now.

The way to win with fewer resources than your competition is to convince them it's not a competition. Or even better, to not let them know you exist.

Re: Squeeze the hell out of the system you have

#204

Post by el_nahual »

rovolo wrote: post #157
roughly wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rumsfeld's got some great quotes, most of which were delivered in the context of explaining how the Iraq war turned into such a clusterfuck, and boy could that whole situation have used the kind of leadership Donald Rumsfeld's quotes would lead you to believe the man could've provided.

JFYI, the "Unknown Unknowns" quote is from before the invasion (2002-02-12). It was deflection on whether there was evidence of Iraq building WMDs or of cooperating with e.g Al Qaeda. > Q: Could I follow up, Mr. Secretary, on what you just said, please? In regard to Iraq weapons of mass destruction and terrorists, is there any evidence to indicate that Iraq has attempted to or is willing to supply terrorists with wea…

I haven't read the transcript of this conversation in a long time, but thank you for sharing it.

The sophistry of his argument is extreme.

Yes, of course there are always "unknown unknowns"-- but the statement "there is no evidence that Iraq is supplying WMDs to terrorists" is not a statement made in a vacuum, in which all permutations of known/unknown are equally likely.

Re: Squeeze the hell out of the system you have

#205

Post by roughly »

tedunangst wrote: post #80
i_like_apis wrote: post #34

I’m reminded of one of my favorite sayings: You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time. You may want to ignore that this this comes from Donald Rumsfeld (he has some great ones though: “unknown unknowns …”, etc.) I think about this a lot when working on teams. Everyone is not perfectly agreeable or has the same understanding or collective goals. Some may be subop…

Mattis "the enemy gets a vote" is another good reminder of reality, although people get very angry about it. Useful in terms of security, privacy, DRM, etc.

I work in an area with particularly clever and motivated users, and this quote pops to mind now and again when I learn about some of the hacks they’re using to get around some of the more optimistically designed systems they’ve been provided.

Re: Squeeze the hell out of the system you have

#206

Post by eru »

earthboundkid wrote: post #193
marcosdumay wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember it correctly (it was a long time ago), he never fully supported the war. It didn't take a genius to notice that the goals set by the presidency were (literally) impossible and not the kind of thing you do achieve a war. But whatever position he had, Iraq turning into a clusterfuck wasn't a sign of bad leadership by his part. It was a sign of bad ethics, but not leadership. His options were all of gettin…

As history, this is completely incorrect, but beyond that, if you don’t believe in the mission of the President in committing an act of war, you have a responsibility to resign, and it can’t be bracketed as “bad ethics”. Anyway, another historical point besides what the other commenters have said is that Rumsfeld believed in “transformation” which meant you could do more with less in modern war. He was totally wrong…

Funny enough, if you go by what's written in the US constitution, their president can't actually go to war.

But thanks to enough loop holes, they can get into 'special military operations' (to misappropriate a recent term).

Re: Squeeze the hell out of the system you have

#207

Post by roughly »

nerdponx wrote: post #127
macNchz wrote: post #121

In my experience, in web apps built on top of ORMs there is often a TON of low hanging fruit for query optimization when database load becomes an issue. Beyond the basics of "do we have N+1 issues", ORMs sometimes just don't generate optimal queries. I wouldn't want to built a complex production web app without an ORM, but being able to eject from it sometimes is key. Profile real world queries being run in productio…

I'm working on something right now with the Python ORM SQLAlchemy. It turns out that getting it to use RETURNING with INSERT is not trivial and requires you to set the non-obvious option `expire_on_commit=False`, which doesn't guarantee use of RETURNING, but is supposed to use it if your db driver and database happen to support it and the ORM happens to support it for that particular combination of driver and databas…

I don’t mean this as a slight on SQLAlchemy - it does a lot of things very well and provides a ton of levers and knobs - but it’s absolutely the first place I look when I’m looking for performance improvements.

A friend used to say Zookeeper was where the crazy lived in any application that used it - sqlalchemy is where the slow lives in any application that uses it.

Re: Squeeze the hell out of the system you have

#208

Post by scottlamb »

zengid wrote: post #109

The solution they went with, squeezing juice out of the system by finding performance optimizations, brings me so much joy. It reminds me of Richard L. Sites's book _Understanding_Software_Dynamics_ where he basically teaches how to measure and fix latency issues, and how at large scales, reducing latency can have tremendous savings. Measuring and reasoning about those issues are hard, but the solutions are often sim…

> Measuring and reasoning about those issues are hard, but the solutions are often simple. For example, on page 9 he mentions that "[a] simple change paid for 10 years of my salary." I hope to someday make such an impactful optimization!

I did that at Google more than once. They use a tremendous amount of machine resources and have excellent performance tools [1], so it's fertile ground.

There are a lot of other smart people around though so if you find a big opportunity there's probably a reason no one else has jumped on it. Maybe technical, maybe organizational. As an example of the latter, Google doesn't usually reward this kind of thing except when there's a resource crunch. Like, maybe I got a peer bonus (~$100) for one of them. I certainly didn't a 10% commission or a promotion or the ability to keep getting a paycheck without showing up for the next 10 years or whatever. As a general rule, they'd prefer engineers work on growing revenue than on reducing cost. Whether this is the right policy or not is kind of above my pay grade...

[1] e.g. https://research.google/pubs/pub36575/

Re: Squeeze the hell out of the system you have

#209

Post by cozzyd »

waprin wrote: post #105
roughly wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Žižek has a followup to that quote: "What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the "unknown knowns," the things we don't know that we know." I've found it's really critical during the project planning phase to get to not just where the boundaries of our knowledge are, but also where are the things we're either tacitly assuming or not even aware that we've assumed. An awful lot of postmortems I've been a part…

I really enjoy the concept of unknown knowns, but I don’t agree with your example, which is an unknown unknown. To me the corporate version of the unknown known is when a a project is certainly doomed, for reasons everyone on the ground knows about, yet nobody wants to say anything and be the messenger that inevitably gets killed, as long as paycheck keeps clearing. An exec ten thousand feet from the ground sets a “v…

In the case of the Iraq war, the unknown knowns were probably key...
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