5 ms·

The author is probably getting at Charles Moore's ideas on how to build a system. He is a genius and madman. The man takes a problem and builds his own hardware

The author is probably getting at Charles Moore's ideas on how to build a system. He is a genius and madman. The man takes a problem and builds his own hardware then software to solve that particular problem as efficient as possible. It's crazy. It also takes a long time, but he gets what is pretty much the most minimal stack from A-Z and understands the full thing. Obviously, most people can't do that due to less skill and time allowed.

Joker_vD 6y ago
Indeed the author does. I recommend reading that blog post [0], it's rather well-written and enjoyable. The thing is, "genius" doesn't scale. At some point, if you want to scale production up, you'd need more people. And most of them won't be geniuses, they will be normal people, in the very literal sense of the word "normal": they'll be somewhere in the middle of the bell curve on most of the parameters; and even the number of parameters in which they're outliers too will be in the middle of some bell curve. So either your tools and processes accommodate normal people, or your company won't make it. Heck, even if you somehow manage to gather together 10 geniuses, it's a (biased) coin toss whether they'll work together productively. And that means you will at some point arrive at systems (and organizations!) that nobody comprehends in entirety. At this stage you can only hope that those systems managed to grew up resilient, that is, that they can be maintained, repaired, and extended on a piece-by-piece basis. Sometimes they can't be (cf. most government departments/small-to-medium businesses at the latest stages of their life cycle), so they collapse and are (eventually) replaced by something else. Sometimes it turns out that the organization that had collapsed was your whole civilization and now you're in the the Dark Ages. That sucks, but the only way out of the Dark Ages is gradually building up a new complex system, and while it will start from a small and seemingly perfect new way to run things, it will eventually, grow large and incomprehensible in its entirety—if it doesn't, it will be supplanted by the one that can grow so, there is really no escape from this. [0] https://yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack-machines.html https://yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack-machines...
- dfischer 6y ago
  If there is no escape from this then I’m gutted from my sense of purpose. I envision a world where all concepts are accessible without genius or contrived complexity. I don’t agree with the bell curve intuitively. I feel that it’s a result of the overwhelming bad programming baked within humanity between institutionalized education and incentives within our economies. Environmentally it caters to averaging the average and incentivizing complexity with pseudo-genius. True genius is simplicity in my eyes. True genius can take a complex idea and give it the affordance where one can reason about it without intense training or remembering. Their skill may not be great in navigating, but it’s accessible to understand. Perhaps I’m optimistically doomed. However that’s the world I want to build towards.
  - 7thaccount 6y ago
    I want that world as well and generally agree with you, but the reality of modern life can be complex. Think of the biology of the human body or practically any other industry. I've been out of college for about a decade and have moved roles several times at my company and I've only managed to learn a sliver of the complexity of my department. We have public documents that are thousands of pages long and that doesn't even get into the software. It's true that a much simpler solution exists like the industry did prior to computers, but it was probably an order of magnitude less efficient. Now we save large amounts of money at the expense of much higher complexity. You need a lot more people because each person can only specialize in a few things and has to abstract away the rest and trust that other co-workers are taking care of the other parts that you don't understand. It's frustrating, but I think most industries have this. Think of a nuclear power plant. There are hundreds of systems and processes. Is it even possible to learn them all in a single career past a bare minimum? What about outside the plant? The plant connects to the transmission grid which is operated by an entity and you have power marketers which sell your plant's output into a market which is operated by another organization running sophisticated software to optimize the region. There are several regulatory bodies involved from the NRC to the State Utility Commissions, to NERC & FERC that all have some regularory jurisdiction over you. Once your electricity gets on the distribution grid it is handled by utilities and so forth. The world is just insanely complex. Could it be simpler? Yes, but there is an efficiency cost to that as well. Chuck Moore's chips are cool, but do they solve any current problems? If they were significantly better, people would be jumping on them. The reality is they're probably better for some niche uses. Certainly not enough to leave the confines of Windows or Linux with a traditional toolchain. Even without all the inertia it would be a tough sell. I don't know anything about complexity theory, but I imagine computer science is under the same rules as the rest of the universe. This also might be where Chesterton's Fence is relevant. We shouldn't argue to take down the fence when we don't know why it was put up to begin with.

Joker_vD 6y ago

Indeed the author does. I recommend reading that blog post [0], it's rather well-written and enjoyable. The thing is, "genius" doesn't scale. At some point, if you want to scale production up, you'd need more people. And most of them won't be geniuses, they will be normal people, in the very literal sense of the word "normal": they'll be somewhere in the middle of the bell curve on most of the parameters; and even the number of parameters in which they're outliers too will be in the middle of some bell curve. So either your tools and processes accommodate normal people, or your company won't make it. Heck, even if you somehow manage to gather together 10 geniuses, it's a (biased) coin toss whether they'll work together productively. And that means you will at some point arrive at systems (and organizations!) that nobody comprehends in entirety. At this stage you can only hope that those systems managed to grew up resilient, that is, that they can be maintained, repaired, and extended on a piece-by-piece basis. Sometimes they can't be (cf. most government departments/small-to-medium businesses at the latest stages of their life cycle), so they collapse and are (eventually) replaced by something else. Sometimes it turns out that the organization that had collapsed was your whole civilization and now you're in the the Dark Ages. That sucks, but the only way out of the Dark Ages is gradually building up a new complex system, and while it will start from a small and seemingly perfect new way to run things, it will eventually, grow large and incomprehensible in its entirety—if it doesn't, it will be supplanted by the one that can grow so, there is really no escape from this. [0] https://yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack-machines.html https://yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack-machines...

dfischer 6y ago
If there is no escape from this then I’m gutted from my sense of purpose. I envision a world where all concepts are accessible without genius or contrived complexity. I don’t agree with the bell curve intuitively. I feel that it’s a result of the overwhelming bad programming baked within humanity between institutionalized education and incentives within our economies. Environmentally it caters to averaging the average and incentivizing complexity with pseudo-genius. True genius is simplicity in my eyes. True genius can take a complex idea and give it the affordance where one can reason about it without intense training or remembering. Their skill may not be great in navigating, but it’s accessible to understand. Perhaps I’m optimistically doomed. However that’s the world I want to build towards.
- 7thaccount 6y ago
  I want that world as well and generally agree with you, but the reality of modern life can be complex. Think of the biology of the human body or practically any other industry. I've been out of college for about a decade and have moved roles several times at my company and I've only managed to learn a sliver of the complexity of my department. We have public documents that are thousands of pages long and that doesn't even get into the software. It's true that a much simpler solution exists like the industry did prior to computers, but it was probably an order of magnitude less efficient. Now we save large amounts of money at the expense of much higher complexity. You need a lot more people because each person can only specialize in a few things and has to abstract away the rest and trust that other co-workers are taking care of the other parts that you don't understand. It's frustrating, but I think most industries have this. Think of a nuclear power plant. There are hundreds of systems and processes. Is it even possible to learn them all in a single career past a bare minimum? What about outside the plant? The plant connects to the transmission grid which is operated by an entity and you have power marketers which sell your plant's output into a market which is operated by another organization running sophisticated software to optimize the region. There are several regulatory bodies involved from the NRC to the State Utility Commissions, to NERC & FERC that all have some regularory jurisdiction over you. Once your electricity gets on the distribution grid it is handled by utilities and so forth. The world is just insanely complex. Could it be simpler? Yes, but there is an efficiency cost to that as well. Chuck Moore's chips are cool, but do they solve any current problems? If they were significantly better, people would be jumping on them. The reality is they're probably better for some niche uses. Certainly not enough to leave the confines of Windows or Linux with a traditional toolchain. Even without all the inertia it would be a tough sell. I don't know anything about complexity theory, but I imagine computer science is under the same rules as the rest of the universe. This also might be where Chesterton's Fence is relevant. We shouldn't argue to take down the fence when we don't know why it was put up to begin with.