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Fast

patrickcollison.com

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Re: Fast

#31

Post by soggybutter »

skrebbel wrote: post #21
lemming wrote: post #15

> Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days, in May 1995. And 28 years later, the world is still investing untold millions of dollars, and untold person-years of effort, working around it.

This is getting so old. It’s also dated, modern JS is a pretty great language.

Modern JS is a passable language only after a tremendous amount of time and effort was invested to retrofit it as such. For all of the purported isomorphic benefits, I still don't know why anyone would choose to use it outside of being forced to in browsers

Re: Fast

#32

Post by sterlind »

oli5679 wrote: post #13
mamonster wrote: post #3

Very interesting thing(maybe sample representativeness) is that there aren't any "fast" things from the 2010-2020 decade. Does anyone have anything impressive in mind? Personally can't think of anything myself.

Alphago? I think it only took a couple of years from 2014-16, and it was marked as being decades away by many experts at the time. I also remember lots of ridicule about Instagram only being a year or so old, when it was acquired, and possibly some of the Space X rocket development programs count as ‘fast’ although I don’t know all the details.

The examples in Fast aren't breakthroughs, they're just big engineering projects. AlphaGo's design is quite simple, the estimate of decades was prior to the discovery of the unexpected power of deep neural networks.

Re: Fast

#33

Post by coldcache »

nine_zeros wrote: post #12

Literally every single thing in this list was produced by a group of people moving towards a well-defined, unified goal. But in today's FAANG and FAANG-wannabes, these kinds of efforts are near impossible because of middle-management politics. So much of time goes in stack ranking and performance reviews that no engineer is ever going to collaborate. Perhaps CEOs are so far removed from their employees that they don'…

Reminds me of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pHfPvb4JMhGDr4B7n/recursive-...

Re: Fast

#34

Post by thecopy »

soggybutter wrote: post #31
skrebbel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is getting so old. It’s also dated, modern JS is a pretty great language.

Modern JS is a passable language only after a tremendous amount of time and effort was invested to retrofit it as such. For all of the purported isomorphic benefits, I still don't know why anyone would choose to use it outside of being forced to in browsers

I don't really mind that "a tremendous amount of time and effort was invested" into JS.

It works great for me and my team and we are hugely productive using it. That why. It works and we deliver a lot of value.

Re: Fast

#35

Post by q7xvh97o2pDhNrh »

mamonster wrote: post #3

Very interesting thing(maybe sample representativeness) is that there aren't any "fast" things from the 2010-2020 decade. Does anyone have anything impressive in mind? Personally can't think of anything myself.

The entire ride-sharing/delivery/logistics space was moving ridiculously fast during that time.

Remember those photos of thousands of multicolored bicycles abandoned in fields? Or the scooters being yeeted into the ocean, global riots from taxi drivers, the collapse of the taxi medallion market, regulatory debates in every city/state/country, billions of VC money raised in weeks (or days), the Darwinian M&A scene as companies were devoured in the jungle as quickly as they were founded...

...and, of course, the fact that you could finally push a button and make a bag of groceries appear. (Though the 3,600,000 millisecond latency still isn't great on that one.)

Re: Fast

#36

Post by seti0Cha »

jljljl wrote: post #24

For the Van Ness Bus Line example: one reason there were major delays was because maps of underground sewer lines and plumbing were inaccurate, and needed to be relocated. The 6 years of construction was really a bus lane + major sewer infrastructure project. Which brings up another reason why some of these projects were Fast -- they operated in places where there there wasn't existing infrastructure or residents to…

I can't comment on the bus line example, but the New York Times had a great write-up (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...) about subway building in New York. At least in New York there's a lot more going on than the reasons you point out. Particularly damning is the fact that Paris is successfully building subways at a 10th of the cost in far less time despite having even more constraints around digging.

Re: Fast

#37

Post by djbusby »

soggybutter wrote: post #31
skrebbel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is getting so old. It’s also dated, modern JS is a pretty great language.

Modern JS is a passable language only after a tremendous amount of time and effort was invested to retrofit it as such. For all of the purported isomorphic benefits, I still don't know why anyone would choose to use it outside of being forced to in browsers

All the "good" languages have tremendous effort - it's how they get good. Nothing starts great...it's a journey. We've been watching the sausage being made.

Re: Fast

#38

Post by samtho »

yellow_lead wrote: post #14
entrepy123 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Impressive for sure, not to knock it. But, as I recall reading, the mini HDD for the iPod was already developed by a vendor's R&D, sitting around for a use case. Which Apple decided to take exclusive advantage of. Thus, that iPod offering seemed kind of "revolutionary". But it's not like Apple started the project, then developed all of the tech for it in this time of 290 days. Which is sort of what the summary reads…

Much of these examples similarly lack any info on prior work. i.e mRNA COVID vaccines were completed quickly, after years of prior research.

We are all standing on the shoulders of giants. I don’t see the same criticism for anything else that required prior human knowledge and achievement.

Re: Fast

#39

Post by djbusby »

jljljl wrote: post #26
lemming wrote: post #15

> Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days, in May 1995. And 28 years later, the world is still investing untold millions of dollars, and untold person-years of effort, working around it.

A lot of red-tape and delays in modern projects is contending with debt from "Fast" projects

If done right, the FastThing gets the money flowing to refactor into the GoodThing

Re: Fast

#40

Post by paulddraper »

lemming wrote: post #15

> Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days, in May 1995. And 28 years later, the world is still investing untold millions of dollars, and untold person-years of effort, working around it.

> the world is still investing untold millions of dollars, and untold person-years of effort

because of the positive ROI

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