4 ms·

How many hours, days, weeks of thinking?

• rad_gruchalski 3y ago
  > Axboe shared about his latest interesting Linux I/O performance optimization, "Something I've had in the back of my mind for years, and finally did it today. Which is kind of sad, since it was literally a 5 min job, yielding a more than 6% improvement. Would likely be even larger on a full scale distro style kernel config." Seems irrelevant. From the sound of it this was something that would always have been easy for him to do. He just never got to do it until now.
  • nomel 3y ago
    Even in open source software, the eyes of many will never come close to the brains of one (for better or worse).
  • sophacles 3y ago
    Maybe, maybe not. Lots of stuff gets put in "the back of my mind" because I'm not sure how to do it immediately. Maybe I'll think about it occasionally, or note a consequence like "oh this would be affected if I get around to X". Then when I actually sit down to do it weeks or months later it seams easy - even though when I first thought it I wasn't sure how to even do it. Point being- it's pretty unlikely that something bouncing around the back of someone's head for years would have taken 5 minutes to do right away, just as it's unlikely that it would have taken 6 years if they'd started when they first had the thought. I suspect there's been some amount of thinking, and potentially that other work was subtly influenced by this thought so that finally doing the task was "easy".
    • pdimitar 3y ago
      In my life and career experience, it wouldn't take 5 minutes if you got to it the first time you had the thought. That being said, on average, it would take 5 minutes if you started doing it the 5th - 10th time you thought about it. Definitely doesn't need 6 years indeed. So it seems we very often drag our feet when it comes to thoughts that are already well-baked / perfectly fermented.