3 ms·

Im down there with you and want to take a peek upstairs. Im tired of being stuck in 1985. You've banged one bit, you've banged a billion.

ThrowawayR2 8y ago
It's an ugly place. Immensely bloated libraries and frameworks, frequent churn of technologies based on what's the hot new buzzword of the moment, and everything feels like it's pretty much half-baked. "Memory efficiency? Need heard of it. What's that?" "CPU cycles? Just burn as much as you want because they're free!"
- aswanson 8y ago
  Change is good though, change is the only constant. Better to be in a state of flux than a static, dead-end field where time stands still.
  - ThrowawayR2 8y ago
    Change for the sake of improvement (whether successful or not) is good. Change for the sake of change is just a waste of time and energy. I see far too much of the latter in the web world.
  - vokep 8y ago
    The key is balance between chaos and order. Too much change all the time and things are too chaotic for anything good to stick. Too little and nothing ever changes (orderly but pointless). Just right and things continually improve.
- 8bitsrule 8y ago
  Like the difference between A.I. and I.
SkyMarshal 8y ago
Fwiw, cryptocurrencies need that kind of engineering approach. They are resource-constrained in a different way than embedded systems. In embedded systems the resource constraints are known more or less exactly, and you work within those constraints to fit in as much capability as possible. With cryptocurrencies operating in a heterogenous open network, it's never clear exactly what resources are available, only that there's a tradeoff between resource consumption and security (eg, tamper resistance of the shared ledger/datastore). The more resources consumed by the protocol/client, the fewer are the users with the hardware capable of running it, the more clients and miners migrate to data centers and larger professional operations. Centralization increases the odds that a single entity/cartel/attacker can disrupt the network. Cryptocurrencies that are extremely efficient can run on a wider variety of hardware, resulting in greater inclusiveness, participation and tamper resistance via decentralization. A major area of research is how to reduce resource consumption in these systems and keep them decentralized and tamper resistant.

ThrowawayR2 8y ago

It's an ugly place. Immensely bloated libraries and frameworks, frequent churn of technologies based on what's the hot new buzzword of the moment, and everything feels like it's pretty much half-baked. "Memory efficiency? Need heard of it. What's that?" "CPU cycles? Just burn as much as you want because they're free!"

aswanson 8y ago
Change is good though, change is the only constant. Better to be in a state of flux than a static, dead-end field where time stands still.
- ThrowawayR2 8y ago
  Change for the sake of improvement (whether successful or not) is good. Change for the sake of change is just a waste of time and energy. I see far too much of the latter in the web world.
- vokep 8y ago
  The key is balance between chaos and order. Too much change all the time and things are too chaotic for anything good to stick. Too little and nothing ever changes (orderly but pointless). Just right and things continually improve.
8bitsrule 8y ago
Like the difference between A.I. and I.

SkyMarshal 8y ago

Fwiw, cryptocurrencies need that kind of engineering approach. They are resource-constrained in a different way than embedded systems. In embedded systems the resource constraints are known more or less exactly, and you work within those constraints to fit in as much capability as possible. With cryptocurrencies operating in a heterogenous open network, it's never clear exactly what resources are available, only that there's a tradeoff between resource consumption and security (eg, tamper resistance of the shared ledger/datastore). The more resources consumed by the protocol/client, the fewer are the users with the hardware capable of running it, the more clients and miners migrate to data centers and larger professional operations. Centralization increases the odds that a single entity/cartel/attacker can disrupt the network. Cryptocurrencies that are extremely efficient can run on a wider variety of hardware, resulting in greater inclusiveness, participation and tamper resistance via decentralization. A major area of research is how to reduce resource consumption in these systems and keep them decentralized and tamper resistant.