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This is actually not unusual in nature. Complex systems become more complex over time and resist becoming simpler. One day they instantly become simple again (c

This is actually not unusual in nature. Complex systems become more complex over time and resist becoming simpler. One day they instantly become simple again (collapse).

BRAlNlAC 7y ago
I like this, I even wish it had a name because I have observed it frequently, but upon some reflection it really only seems to be the product of certain organized situations and perhaps even just an artifact of our own pattern recognition. Are these new collapsed systems really less complex or just easier for our brains to think about? Natural(chaotic) systems certainly don’t seem to follow that logic unless I’m mistaken. Thinking of a river system, it seems that it is just in a state of flux, making little wins across the system all the time, but also becoming more complex due to inputs. If we consider a star system I have trouble identifying how the system doesn’t become permanently less complex as energy is radiated away over time. (Although I’m clueless on how to actually model either sort of complexity appropriately) That said, it appears to me that as soon as we start to tread against entropy we might notice this phenomenon cropping up. Life seems to “collapse” on new designs and human understanding too seems to collapse, but in both cases it seems that only the system complexity collapses, not the entity complexity. I think that the collapse of the complexity of the surrounding system is the result of outside stimulus causing additional entity complexity to be added to the total complexity. In a stable, complex, system this has the potential for massive system destabilization, but it is not certain and it doesn’t seem to be the nature of complex system themselves to inherently collapse on less complex states, rather it is the result of stimulus. Moreover, if we look at total complexity, does it really become less complex or does the complexity just shift from the system to the entity?
- specialist 7y ago
  "...wish it had a name..." IIRC, I think first read the phrase "complexity catastrophe" in the book Design Rules: The Power of Modularity. Per the authors, it's when a system becomes so complex (interdependent) that the cost of any further changes far outweigh the expected benefit. https://www.amazon.com/Design-Rules-Vol-Power-Modularity/dp/0262024667 https://www.amazon.com/Design-Rules-Vol-Power-Modularity/dp/...
- setr 7y ago
  >I even wish it had a name because I have observed it frequently At least trend-wise, it’d probably look similiar to a malthusian catastrophe (population reaches environment carrying capacity at time n, and then (greatly) overshoots it at time n+1, resulting in mass die off due to starvation, taking the population well below carrying capacity)
- Razengan 7y ago
  > wish it had a name because I have observed it frequently, but upon some reflection it really only seems to be the product of certain organized situations and perhaps even just an artifact of our own pattern recognition. In The Matrix movies that is sort of a key premise of their world setting. There are words like reset, reboot, reload for it. But I don't think it's a given, not all complex systems are prone to collapse; some systems, once past a given point, may even perpetuate their complexity practically indefinitely. Consider life on Earth: even if a cataclysm occurs that results in mass extinctions, new life will eventually take over, in millions if not "mere" thousands or hundreds of years. Until Earth itself no longer exists that is. Same goes for galaxies and the Universe at large.
- cpeterso 7y ago
  Hyrum's Law: "With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody." http://www.hyrumslaw.com/ http://www.hyrumslaw.com/
  - Too 7y ago
    https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
umvi 7y ago
> Complex systems become more complex over time and resist becoming simpler. One day they instantly become simple again (collapse). I bet this is true of governments as well, since governments are systems.
- dev_dull 7y ago
  The idea is actually from Jared Diamond’s “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”.
- balnaphone 7y ago
  See also Joseph Tainter's "The Collapse of Complex Societies" (1988). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter
marcus_holmes 7y ago
I just spent two weeks removing an unused feature from my product. It's amazing how, despite being unused, it affected such a huge amount of the rest of the system (well, either that or my code is not separated properly). I can understand how a truly complex system becomes "don't touch it except to add things, you have no idea what depends on that chunk of code"
- abraae 7y ago
  I like leaving old code littered around, either commented out or disabled by feature flags. Then, when my energy/concentration levels are too low for real work, it's a strangely satisfying task going back and cleaning up and finally deleting that stuff.
  - throwaway6734 7y ago
    I am going to give this a shot. Thank you!
  - sjf 7y ago
    While this may be fine for you, it sucks for people reading the coding and searching it. Reading code is already a high concentration task, having to purposely ignore blocks of non-functional code makes it harder than it has to be. Also, now I can't just grep the codebase, I need to see the surrounding code as well to see if the search results are valid.
    - abraae 7y ago
      That is totally true when the code is behind a feature flag, rather than commented out. Most people can skip commented code just fine, since it looks like... commented out code, rather than comments intended to be read. But even in the feature flag case, it serves a purpose by allowing old code to be removed in 2 stages rather than 1 (divide and conquer). It means the old code still compiles, just in case it needs to be reinstated in a hurry.
      - 7y ago
elbasti 7y ago
This is a minor plot point in the sci fi novel "A deepness in the sky", where a spacefaring culture has their systems built on top of so many, ancestral layers of software, that there is a career called "code archeologist" that dives deep into the bowels of systems to find undocumented functionality.
- iforgotpassword 7y ago
  I totally can imagine how in the future there are these archeologists among all those JavaScript devs working for them trying to understand that weird language that Chrome was once written in, still in use decades after the company that built it went away. Countless attempts to improve anything in that ancient code base failed since by that point, every little quirk that browser exposed was depended on by some essential system running a power plant, hospital or internet core infrastructure. So the archeologists rather try to find even more quirks that can be abused for performance.
- Tsiklon 7y ago
  This is also a point in the Warhammer 40,000 Lore. some 18,000 years from now, Humanity advanced science and technology to nearly godlike extremes, and suffered a fully regressive collapse lasting close to another 10,000 years. The fallout of this means that all 'modern' technology is operated upon by tech-priests, who blindly perform rituals upon equipment to ensure it's 'machine spirit' is satisfied. This ensures that the equipment will properly function. All knowledge as to how the most advanced equipment operates is lost - all that's left is how to produce some of the lesser pieces. Caches of templates to produce standardised equipment are highly treasured. These ancient and supremely advanced caches produce extremely detailed designs for the entire supply chain required to build a single item. A template to provide for a slightly sharper knife is as desirable to the Imperium as another template to provide for a 55 Meters tall armoured war machine.
awalton 7y ago
> Complex systems become more complex over time and resist becoming simpler. Deserves repeating. At my job, it's repeatedly discussed as a feature to be an engineer who removes the most code. Most engineers are net positive, the few are break even... but the true greats are the ones who're able to go negative. Pink diffs are the best diffs.
- iforgotpassword 7y ago
  This is true. We hacked our internal web front end to show a big thumbs up next to commits that are net negative as a little motivator. It was mostly meant as a joke but sometimes it is satisfying to see that after a long refactoring session.

This is actually not unusual in nature. Complex systems become more complex over time and resist becoming simpler. One day they instantly become simple again (collapse).

BRAlNlAC 7y ago

I like this, I even wish it had a name because I have observed it frequently, but upon some reflection it really only seems to be the product of certain organized situations and perhaps even just an artifact of our own pattern recognition. Are these new collapsed systems really less complex or just easier for our brains to think about? Natural(chaotic) systems certainly don’t seem to follow that logic unless I’m mistaken. Thinking of a river system, it seems that it is just in a state of flux, making little wins across the system all the time, but also becoming more complex due to inputs. If we consider a star system I have trouble identifying how the system doesn’t become permanently less complex as energy is radiated away over time. (Although I’m clueless on how to actually model either sort of complexity appropriately) That said, it appears to me that as soon as we start to tread against entropy we might notice this phenomenon cropping up. Life seems to “collapse” on new designs and human understanding too seems to collapse, but in both cases it seems that only the system complexity collapses, not the entity complexity. I think that the collapse of the complexity of the surrounding system is the result of outside stimulus causing additional entity complexity to be added to the total complexity. In a stable, complex, system this has the potential for massive system destabilization, but it is not certain and it doesn’t seem to be the nature of complex system themselves to inherently collapse on less complex states, rather it is the result of stimulus. Moreover, if we look at total complexity, does it really become less complex or does the complexity just shift from the system to the entity?

specialist 7y ago
"...wish it had a name..." IIRC, I think first read the phrase "complexity catastrophe" in the book Design Rules: The Power of Modularity. Per the authors, it's when a system becomes so complex (interdependent) that the cost of any further changes far outweigh the expected benefit. https://www.amazon.com/Design-Rules-Vol-Power-Modularity/dp/0262024667 https://www.amazon.com/Design-Rules-Vol-Power-Modularity/dp/...
setr 7y ago
>I even wish it had a name because I have observed it frequently At least trend-wise, it’d probably look similiar to a malthusian catastrophe (population reaches environment carrying capacity at time n, and then (greatly) overshoots it at time n+1, resulting in mass die off due to starvation, taking the population well below carrying capacity)
Razengan 7y ago
> wish it had a name because I have observed it frequently, but upon some reflection it really only seems to be the product of certain organized situations and perhaps even just an artifact of our own pattern recognition. In The Matrix movies that is sort of a key premise of their world setting. There are words like reset, reboot, reload for it. But I don't think it's a given, not all complex systems are prone to collapse; some systems, once past a given point, may even perpetuate their complexity practically indefinitely. Consider life on Earth: even if a cataclysm occurs that results in mass extinctions, new life will eventually take over, in millions if not "mere" thousands or hundreds of years. Until Earth itself no longer exists that is. Same goes for galaxies and the Universe at large.
cpeterso 7y ago
Hyrum's Law: "With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody." http://www.hyrumslaw.com/ http://www.hyrumslaw.com/
- Too 7y ago
  https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/

umvi 7y ago

> Complex systems become more complex over time and resist becoming simpler. One day they instantly become simple again (collapse). I bet this is true of governments as well, since governments are systems.

dev_dull 7y ago
The idea is actually from Jared Diamond’s “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”.
balnaphone 7y ago
See also Joseph Tainter's "The Collapse of Complex Societies" (1988). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter

marcus_holmes 7y ago

I just spent two weeks removing an unused feature from my product. It's amazing how, despite being unused, it affected such a huge amount of the rest of the system (well, either that or my code is not separated properly). I can understand how a truly complex system becomes "don't touch it except to add things, you have no idea what depends on that chunk of code"

abraae 7y ago
I like leaving old code littered around, either commented out or disabled by feature flags. Then, when my energy/concentration levels are too low for real work, it's a strangely satisfying task going back and cleaning up and finally deleting that stuff.
- throwaway6734 7y ago
  I am going to give this a shot. Thank you!
- sjf 7y ago
  While this may be fine for you, it sucks for people reading the coding and searching it. Reading code is already a high concentration task, having to purposely ignore blocks of non-functional code makes it harder than it has to be. Also, now I can't just grep the codebase, I need to see the surrounding code as well to see if the search results are valid.
  - abraae 7y ago
    That is totally true when the code is behind a feature flag, rather than commented out. Most people can skip commented code just fine, since it looks like... commented out code, rather than comments intended to be read. But even in the feature flag case, it serves a purpose by allowing old code to be removed in 2 stages rather than 1 (divide and conquer). It means the old code still compiles, just in case it needs to be reinstated in a hurry.
    - 7y ago

elbasti 7y ago

This is a minor plot point in the sci fi novel "A deepness in the sky", where a spacefaring culture has their systems built on top of so many, ancestral layers of software, that there is a career called "code archeologist" that dives deep into the bowels of systems to find undocumented functionality.

iforgotpassword 7y ago
I totally can imagine how in the future there are these archeologists among all those JavaScript devs working for them trying to understand that weird language that Chrome was once written in, still in use decades after the company that built it went away. Countless attempts to improve anything in that ancient code base failed since by that point, every little quirk that browser exposed was depended on by some essential system running a power plant, hospital or internet core infrastructure. So the archeologists rather try to find even more quirks that can be abused for performance.
Tsiklon 7y ago
This is also a point in the Warhammer 40,000 Lore. some 18,000 years from now, Humanity advanced science and technology to nearly godlike extremes, and suffered a fully regressive collapse lasting close to another 10,000 years. The fallout of this means that all 'modern' technology is operated upon by tech-priests, who blindly perform rituals upon equipment to ensure it's 'machine spirit' is satisfied. This ensures that the equipment will properly function. All knowledge as to how the most advanced equipment operates is lost - all that's left is how to produce some of the lesser pieces. Caches of templates to produce standardised equipment are highly treasured. These ancient and supremely advanced caches produce extremely detailed designs for the entire supply chain required to build a single item. A template to provide for a slightly sharper knife is as desirable to the Imperium as another template to provide for a 55 Meters tall armoured war machine.

awalton 7y ago

> Complex systems become more complex over time and resist becoming simpler. Deserves repeating. At my job, it's repeatedly discussed as a feature to be an engineer who removes the most code. Most engineers are net positive, the few are break even... but the true greats are the ones who're able to go negative. Pink diffs are the best diffs.

iforgotpassword 7y ago
This is true. We hacked our internal web front end to show a big thumbs up next to commits that are net negative as a little motivator. It was mostly meant as a joke but sometimes it is satisfying to see that after a long refactoring session.