3 ms·

That concept of efficency as opposite of stability seems a bit fallacious in the strong case - inefficency itself can and has caused systems to collapse which i

That concept of efficency as opposite of stability seems a bit fallacious in the strong case - inefficency itself can and has caused systems to collapse which is the exact opposite of stability. Cache/reserve and efficency is itself complicated and situational if it helps or hurts efficiency. Overfitting it could make it fragile but it also depends upon relative costs for what a blind pursuit of efficiency goes for. If something is cheap enough like data storage there will be plentiful slack because slimming it down is irrelevant to efficiency - why bother going with custom 4KB chips when economy of scale means a 250 MB one is cheaper and better? It just isn't worth trying to cut corners there. A laggard damped system would take longer to get into a "bad state" assuming the environment doesn't demand rapid changes as the baseline to survive. Bad state is relative as always - one can doom themselves both by leaping onto the "next big thing" which isn't and by sticking to the buggy whip and musket when others have cars and automatic rifles.

kibwen 6y ago
I think you're both talking about different ideas here. Efficiency is good. But redundancy is also good (necessary, even, for a resilient system), and the problem is that you can always increase efficiency by removing redundancy, so it does get removed by short-sighted efficiency-optimizers. Topically, in the past week we've seen two giant companies, Adobe and Canon, lose unimaginable amounts of user data. If they had had backups, which are a form of redundancy, this would not have been a problem. But the backups were too expensive--too inefficient--and so now customer trust in their service is absolutely destroyed.
rightbyte 6y ago
If you are strong everywhere you are weak everywhere. The article is you plain out wrong. The problem is the lack of a strategic reserve, not efficiency in itself.

kibwen 6y ago

I think you're both talking about different ideas here. Efficiency is good. But redundancy is also good (necessary, even, for a resilient system), and the problem is that you can always increase efficiency by removing redundancy, so it does get removed by short-sighted efficiency-optimizers. Topically, in the past week we've seen two giant companies, Adobe and Canon, lose unimaginable amounts of user data. If they had had backups, which are a form of redundancy, this would not have been a problem. But the backups were too expensive--too inefficient--and so now customer trust in their service is absolutely destroyed.

rightbyte 6y ago

If you are strong everywhere you are weak everywhere. The article is you plain out wrong. The problem is the lack of a strategic reserve, not efficiency in itself.