3 ms·
This is like saying your amazing lock-free architecture is scalable, as long as you define scalable to mean "at most one thread."
by whoisburbansky 5y ago
This is like saying your amazing lock-free architecture is scalable, as long as you define scalable to mean "at most one thread."
- shkkmo 5y agoHuh? Just because something is scalable, doesn't mean it is scalable indefinitely. There very clearly exists a scale at which fishing is sustainable and a scale at which it is not. You can argue what the tipping point is, but you can't argue with that fundemental premise.
- whoisburbansky 5y agoI phrased this quite poorly; my quibble isn't with the concept of scaling or that it's possible to fish sustainably at some defined scale. I was getting at the idea that most people's definition of doing something _at scale_ is going to be well above the tipping point, in the same way that processing data _at scale_ usually invokes rows of server racks, and not a single thread on a dinky laptop.
- shkkmo 5y ago"Scalability" means that you can adjust the scale at which you are operating. The definition of "At scale" just means operating at whatever is a sufficient scale to solve the problem at hand. If you only need one dinky laptop to solve the problem, you can operate at scale with a dinky laptop. So "fishing at scale" is fishing at a scale that statisfies the demand for fish. Since demand for fish will drop as sustainabile fishing regulations increase costs, there is absolutely a way to fish at scale sustainably.