4 ms·

Most things are strange, missing, broken for mundane reasons that you can't do much about. The space of new ideas is huge, but almost all new ideas are bad. One

by gizmo 4y ago

Most things are strange, missing, broken for mundane reasons that you can't do much about. The space of new ideas is huge, but almost all new ideas are bad. One strategy I really like is to think of technologies you couldn't build 5 years ago but are just barely possible today. That's where yesterday's bad ideas become today's good ideas. For example, laptops and phones produced 20 years of incremental improvements in li-ion batteries, and suddenly electric cars are "unlocked".

jasmer 4y ago
'almost all ideas are bad' This is not the way to look at it. 'Ideas' are too early to be judged as good or bad. Ideas are fodder, they are there to be moulded into things that are good or bad. Often ideas are just foils to help you think. They are so contextual as well: 'full screen smartphone' was maybe only possible by Jobs, with that much direct and coercive power over engineers. Motorola CEO was not going to pull it off. But Apple did work with motorola to make a 'music phone' as an experiment. I think your note about 'yesterday's ideas' is bang on.
JackFr 4y ago
"With a big enough engine even a brick will fly." - famous quote about the F-4, which captures that much of early airplane development was engine development rather than aeronautics. It's no coincidence that Glenn Curtiss got his start in motorcycles before moving onto aircraft. I think to some extent we are seeing the same thing with the latest AI models, where if you just throw enough parameters and GPU's at a problem, you can get pretty good results. In a way, I see some parallels to aircraft, in that it was important to study birds as the best example of heavier than air flyers early on, but understanding the nuances of the biomechanics of flapping wasn't necessary to surpass them.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- htrp 4y ago
  You can get improve the low hanging fruit through brute force ... but there is a lot of low hanging fruit. Model architecture cleverness will eventually outpace more GPU time, but for now the roi on GPU time is higher than clever design.
bob1029 4y ago
> One strategy I really like is to think of technologies you couldn't build 5 years ago but are just barely possible today. Streaming gaming is something I am still laser-focused on. Our networks are only getting faster. I feel there is a gigantic opportunity here that is being passed up by efforts like Stadia. To do this thing correctly, the game engine itself needs to be developed with these concerns in mind. Expectations of things like having GPUs available on the same machine that is servicing player input events should be eliminated. The simulation itself may benefit from being distributed across multiple nodes connected via a low-latency network. The future of shard-less, million player MMO worlds will not be feasible if every player's computer will be required to replicate and render all of that game state.
- Aperocky 4y ago
  > The future of shard-less, million player MMO worlds will not be feasible if every player's computer will be required to replicate and render all of that game state. I think the problem here isn't render, on that scale you'll have to shard on the server end anyway.
- cjwebb 4y ago
  What kinds of things do you think has to change with game engines? Sharding would have to happen to handle geographic distance between people, wouldn't it? I’m curious to hear your thoughts.
  - bob1029 4y ago
    You can still do things like client-side prediction with streaming, but imagine if you controlled all of the clients and could always trust them. You could have the actual simulation running in a big bunker in Ohio somewhere on entirely synchronous terms (<1ms node-to-node), with a bunch of "player" nodes geo-distributed talking to the shared simulation and operating with CSP. The game concept itself can be engineered around vertical scale constraints. For instance, imagine flight routes in WoW. If the cost to take a flight was modulated by the system load in the desired target region, you could create a much more seamless way to make this work. Think about real-world flight routes and system demand... The determinism goes down a lot for the technology owner, but the effect is much more compelling to the end customer.
FranGro78 4y ago
Progress in the technology landscape, which makes previously impossible ideas barely possible, sounds like just the thing wardley maps are good for.
kqr 4y ago
A similar strategy is to find things which were invented 10–100 years ago but considered insignificant then, but due to changing environments can be adapted to be useful today in a way that wasn't possible then. My day job is to work on software working with self-organising maps, which were last popular in 1980. As far as I know, they were never really used for anything significant then. The reason we can be so successful using them is that we discovered a relatively new environment in which they can improve profits fairly immediately: e-commerce.
- jasonb05 4y ago
  Man I love SOMs. When Kohonen's book came out in 2000, I read that thing a bunch of times. Seems like an expensive way to structure a "this is like" or "people also bought" compared to an SVD.
  - kqr 4y ago
    The reason we prefer SOMs is that we have been able to get them to produce good results with less data than e.g. an SVD. They're also more open to domain expert diagnostics and tweaking.

by gizmo 4y ago

jasmer 4y ago

'almost all ideas are bad' This is not the way to look at it. 'Ideas' are too early to be judged as good or bad. Ideas are fodder, they are there to be moulded into things that are good or bad. Often ideas are just foils to help you think. They are so contextual as well: 'full screen smartphone' was maybe only possible by Jobs, with that much direct and coercive power over engineers. Motorola CEO was not going to pull it off. But Apple did work with motorola to make a 'music phone' as an experiment. I think your note about 'yesterday's ideas' is bang on.

JackFr 4y ago

"With a big enough engine even a brick will fly." - famous quote about the F-4, which captures that much of early airplane development was engine development rather than aeronautics. It's no coincidence that Glenn Curtiss got his start in motorcycles before moving onto aircraft. I think to some extent we are seeing the same thing with the latest AI models, where if you just throw enough parameters and GPU's at a problem, you can get pretty good results. In a way, I see some parallels to aircraft, in that it was important to study birds as the best example of heavier than air flyers early on, but understanding the nuances of the biomechanics of flapping wasn't necessary to surpass them.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
htrp 4y ago
You can get improve the low hanging fruit through brute force ... but there is a lot of low hanging fruit. Model architecture cleverness will eventually outpace more GPU time, but for now the roi on GPU time is higher than clever design.

bob1029 4y ago

> One strategy I really like is to think of technologies you couldn't build 5 years ago but are just barely possible today. Streaming gaming is something I am still laser-focused on. Our networks are only getting faster. I feel there is a gigantic opportunity here that is being passed up by efforts like Stadia. To do this thing correctly, the game engine itself needs to be developed with these concerns in mind. Expectations of things like having GPUs available on the same machine that is servicing player input events should be eliminated. The simulation itself may benefit from being distributed across multiple nodes connected via a low-latency network. The future of shard-less, million player MMO worlds will not be feasible if every player's computer will be required to replicate and render all of that game state.

Aperocky 4y ago
> The future of shard-less, million player MMO worlds will not be feasible if every player's computer will be required to replicate and render all of that game state. I think the problem here isn't render, on that scale you'll have to shard on the server end anyway.
cjwebb 4y ago
What kinds of things do you think has to change with game engines? Sharding would have to happen to handle geographic distance between people, wouldn't it? I’m curious to hear your thoughts.
- bob1029 4y ago
  You can still do things like client-side prediction with streaming, but imagine if you controlled all of the clients and could always trust them. You could have the actual simulation running in a big bunker in Ohio somewhere on entirely synchronous terms (<1ms node-to-node), with a bunch of "player" nodes geo-distributed talking to the shared simulation and operating with CSP. The game concept itself can be engineered around vertical scale constraints. For instance, imagine flight routes in WoW. If the cost to take a flight was modulated by the system load in the desired target region, you could create a much more seamless way to make this work. Think about real-world flight routes and system demand... The determinism goes down a lot for the technology owner, but the effect is much more compelling to the end customer.

FranGro78 4y ago

Progress in the technology landscape, which makes previously impossible ideas barely possible, sounds like just the thing wardley maps are good for.

kqr 4y ago

A similar strategy is to find things which were invented 10–100 years ago but considered insignificant then, but due to changing environments can be adapted to be useful today in a way that wasn't possible then. My day job is to work on software working with self-organising maps, which were last popular in 1980. As far as I know, they were never really used for anything significant then. The reason we can be so successful using them is that we discovered a relatively new environment in which they can improve profits fairly immediately: e-commerce.

jasonb05 4y ago
Man I love SOMs. When Kohonen's book came out in 2000, I read that thing a bunch of times. Seems like an expensive way to structure a "this is like" or "people also bought" compared to an SVD.
- kqr 4y ago
  The reason we prefer SOMs is that we have been able to get them to produce good results with less data than e.g. an SVD. They're also more open to domain expert diagnostics and tweaking.