4 ms·

Complexity is always the enemy, but only if you have to deal with it. My car engine is very complex and I don't ever think about it. I don't want to over-state

Complexity is always the enemy, but only if you have to deal with it. My car engine is very complex and I don't ever think about it. I don't want to over-state this, but it's a hell of a lot more important than people think, mostly because it attacks you in little bits here and there. It's never a direct assault. We are creating a consumer society in which we're becoming slaves to the tech. It entertains us, it connects us, it remembers for us, it guides us. All of that might be fine if that's your thing. But there are dark sides too. These kinds of hidden bullshit annoyances are one of the dark sides. The root of the darkness is this: if you steal just a few minutes per day here or there with hung-up text editors and such, how many man-years of productivity are you stealing from mankind? I really think we need to go back to the metal and start designing systems with separate fault-tolerant systems dedicated to being humane to the users by invisibly handling the kinds of things that keep wasting huge parts of our collective lives. Or, as you said, we could just keep adding complexity. That's always the answer, right? sigh

abainbridge 8y ago
> Complexity is always the enemy, but only if you have to deal with it. My car engine is very complex and I don't ever think about it. That's a bad example. My BMW E90 has a gasoline direct injection system, which was state of the art when the car was made 9 years ago. It is very complex and the parts it is made from are very expensive. The BMW specialist tell me the misfire my car has will therefore cost more than £2500 to fix, and even then they'd be guessing. It would be better if car engines were simpler, like they used to be before they had to start passing artificial emissions tests that don't measure the impact for the whole life-cycle of the vehicle.
- DanielBMarkham 8y ago
  It's actually a very good example. I drive a 1978 GMC pickup. Once a year I drop it off at a place and the guy does maintenance. That and adding gas are all that I do. When I travel, I get a rental that somebody else worries about. These things are as complex as we will tolerate. I love new vehicles and have a blast driving them while traveling, but frack if I want to have to update and reboot my car. What kind of living hell is it where everything we touch is complex like this?
  - magduf 8y ago
    This is ridiculous. I have a pretty new car (2015), with GDI, and I sure as hell don't have to "reboot" it. It's been perfectly reliable. The infotainment system does have a few issues, but it has nothing to do with the driveability of the car (the engine, and other critical systems are not tied to it). Modern cars are FAR more reliable than anything made in 1978, this is a simple fact proven by mountains of data. Cars last far longer than they used to; you can easily go 200k or 300k miles with basic maintenance, and I'm sorry, but despite what you might want to believe, that was just not the case in 1978. And BMWs are terrible examples; those cars seem to be designed for expensive and necessary maintenance, so they can extract more profit from their owners. Japanese and American cars aren't like this.
  - nappy 8y ago
    A modern car is far safer, far more reliable, far more efficient, far more powerful, and far better than the environment. The added complexity only makes things better, in this example.
tremon 8y ago
Complexity is always the enemy, but only if you have to deal with it I think that we got to where we are now exactly because of the addition "but only if you have to deal with it". Software consumes many useless cycles exactly because developers on all layers shift their responsibility to deal with complexity to other layers (either the CPU, or the downstream developer). Sometimes it's because they have to, but most of the time it's simply because there's too much distance between producing and consuming developers. being humane to the users "users" all too easily implies end-users only. I'd add that developers also need to be humane to downstream developers (circle of influence and all that), including better API design and better instrumentation hooks. But that latter would be adding complexity :(
joquarky 8y ago
My memory may be faulty, but wasn't this one of the design goals of BeOS? I wonder if there is a chance we could take another try at that.

abainbridge 8y ago

> Complexity is always the enemy, but only if you have to deal with it. My car engine is very complex and I don't ever think about it. That's a bad example. My BMW E90 has a gasoline direct injection system, which was state of the art when the car was made 9 years ago. It is very complex and the parts it is made from are very expensive. The BMW specialist tell me the misfire my car has will therefore cost more than £2500 to fix, and even then they'd be guessing. It would be better if car engines were simpler, like they used to be before they had to start passing artificial emissions tests that don't measure the impact for the whole life-cycle of the vehicle.

DanielBMarkham 8y ago
It's actually a very good example. I drive a 1978 GMC pickup. Once a year I drop it off at a place and the guy does maintenance. That and adding gas are all that I do. When I travel, I get a rental that somebody else worries about. These things are as complex as we will tolerate. I love new vehicles and have a blast driving them while traveling, but frack if I want to have to update and reboot my car. What kind of living hell is it where everything we touch is complex like this?
- magduf 8y ago
  This is ridiculous. I have a pretty new car (2015), with GDI, and I sure as hell don't have to "reboot" it. It's been perfectly reliable. The infotainment system does have a few issues, but it has nothing to do with the driveability of the car (the engine, and other critical systems are not tied to it). Modern cars are FAR more reliable than anything made in 1978, this is a simple fact proven by mountains of data. Cars last far longer than they used to; you can easily go 200k or 300k miles with basic maintenance, and I'm sorry, but despite what you might want to believe, that was just not the case in 1978. And BMWs are terrible examples; those cars seem to be designed for expensive and necessary maintenance, so they can extract more profit from their owners. Japanese and American cars aren't like this.
- nappy 8y ago
  A modern car is far safer, far more reliable, far more efficient, far more powerful, and far better than the environment. The added complexity only makes things better, in this example.

tremon 8y ago

Complexity is always the enemy, but only if you have to deal with it I think that we got to where we are now exactly because of the addition "but only if you have to deal with it". Software consumes many useless cycles exactly because developers on all layers shift their responsibility to deal with complexity to other layers (either the CPU, or the downstream developer). Sometimes it's because they have to, but most of the time it's simply because there's too much distance between producing and consuming developers. being humane to the users "users" all too easily implies end-users only. I'd add that developers also need to be humane to downstream developers (circle of influence and all that), including better API design and better instrumentation hooks. But that latter would be adding complexity :(

joquarky 8y ago

My memory may be faulty, but wasn't this one of the design goals of BeOS? I wonder if there is a chance we could take another try at that.