Efficiency is the removal of redundancy.
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Efficiency is the removal of redundancy. Redundancy is a necessary element of resilient systems. The unbounded search for efficiency has one result: brittleness.
Why not make each individual step as efficient as possible and then gather them together in a redundant system?
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I'm all for global chains of distribution: specialization is real and you won't ever grow bananas in Alaska (even if Iceland showed it is technically possible last century), manufacture a computer chip in Paris or produce wine in Greenland, but we as consumers have to accept and understand that having pineapple out of season anywhere in the planet is not reasonable at the prices we're used to paying. In some French super markets I've seen signs on the produce next to the price with the country of origin and helpful information of when the growing season is. I found that as an excellent nudge for the almost entirely fictional homo economicus. I'd like us to surface that information to everyone for everything. Maybe that way people would understand just how connected we are.
@ekuber honestly, I want to take part in forming a future where every region is self-sufficient for people's basic needs and the things we trade globally are those that improve quality of life
but not like, say, the plastic car parts the machine I was sat at produced in Germany (out of oil probably from the Americas) that then were sent to Argentine to be made into half-finished products, and then sent on to other countries to be made into complete cars
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Efficiency is the removal of redundancy. Redundancy is a necessary element of resilient systems. The unbounded search for efficiency has one result: brittleness.
@ekuber so true, customer at work wants to.use all resources on database servers all the time. Issue there is they now cannot fail over to DR site
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Why not make each individual step as efficient as possible and then gather them together in a redundant system?
@jrdepriest @ekuber is each step going to continue being redundant? Because if each step is as efficient as possible, that's a single point of failure at each step and future steps won't solve that
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Efficiency is the removal of redundancy. Redundancy is a necessary element of resilient systems. The unbounded search for efficiency has one result: brittleness.
@ekuber I want that on my Teams background so every time I’m in a planning and budgeting meeting it’ll be there when anyone looks at me
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Efficiency is the removal of redundancy. Redundancy is a necessary element of resilient systems. The unbounded search for efficiency has one result: brittleness.
@ekuber
Examining the structures of dependencies which create democracies and autocratic regimes, produces a similar mapping to resiliency and brittleness, using a core analogical model of "binding energies". https://johntinker.substack.com/p/democracy-fascism-and-binding-energies -
@c_merriweather "limitations are good for innovation" is a good one that covers art and engineering
@c_merriweather @ekuber I keep telling my peers and students, that good engineering starts with well defined constraints.
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@swallez so many small things that add no cost but have a material impact. I always think of the legislation forcing plastic bottle caps to remain attached by default. Such a small thing, such a large impact on both loose trash and recyclability. There are so many small changes we can do that no one would bat an eye at that would improve all our lives. So many others that people would have kneejerk reactions towards that would be beneficial to all.
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Efficiency is the removal of redundancy. Redundancy is a necessary element of resilient systems. The unbounded search for efficiency has one result: brittleness.
@ekuber
Agreed. Years ago, a group of us visited the NUMMI car factory, joint venture of GM and Toyota. They started with talk about place & methods, emphasizing importance of Just in Time logistics… and were quite embarrassed when, during our visit, the production line stopped because some truck coming from L.A. got delayed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI
The brittleness of hyper-efficient systems leading to societal collapse was one of the themes of A Deepness in the Sky: -
One thing I keep seeing is the same lessons being learned across different disciplines: pilots and doctors learning about the importance of checklists, road and industrial machine engineers learning about safe by default design, industrial and software UX designers learning about how to best make machines and humans talk to each other. We need more cross pollination. Across industries. Across borders. Across people. That's how we build a better future. And for that we need to listen.
@ekuber
Aim for the best, expect the worst and plan for it. Its a generic concept that works in all areas.
Its also an understanding that optimism and pessimism are false constructs when practical realism enters the chat. -
@swallez so many small things that add no cost but have a material impact. I always think of the legislation forcing plastic bottle caps to remain attached by default. Such a small thing, such a large impact on both loose trash and recyclability. There are so many small changes we can do that no one would bat an eye at that would improve all our lives. So many others that people would have kneejerk reactions towards that would be beneficial to all.
@ekuber True! And for me, for things other than food, this also starts with questioning myself "do I really need it?". Not always easy as a geek that loves home automation, but even there I try to stay frugal. I also repair a lot of things. We changed our dishwasher recently after 35 years and many repairs, basically my entire adult life 😅
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@sandorspruit @ekuber we do that as well, we have a subscription with a very local farmer who prepares a box of vegetables and fruits every week. They don't produce everything, but everything is seasonal and organic. And every week is a surprise: "what are we going to eat this week?" 😛
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One thing I keep seeing is the same lessons being learned across different disciplines: pilots and doctors learning about the importance of checklists, road and industrial machine engineers learning about safe by default design, industrial and software UX designers learning about how to best make machines and humans talk to each other. We need more cross pollination. Across industries. Across borders. Across people. That's how we build a better future. And for that we need to listen.
@ekuber
It reminds me of people trying to figure out gravity before it was common knowledge. They ascribed the fact that stuff falls down to god or any other outlandish idea.The same happens if you ask a liberally educated person to explain cooperation.
They use individualism, idealism, utopianism, reinvent the wheel.
We have tools for this for over 100 years. It is called planned economy, socialism and materialism. Its dead easy but the knowledge has been forcefully replaced.
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@jrdepriest @ekuber is each step going to continue being redundant? Because if each step is as efficient as possible, that's a single point of failure at each step and future steps won't solve that
If you have error checking and loops or retries, it might. If future steps verify what comes out of previous steps, it might.
My point is that you can have a redundant overall process with efficiency in the individual pieces and that just focusing on overall efficiency in general doesn't make sense.
But that assumes you get to design the whole system and understand all the inputs, outputs, and failure modes. And whatever passes for a threat model, fault tolerance, and risk appetite. Or possibly regulatory requirements or contractual obligations. Or how much time you have to build it.
Anybody who says "we only focus on efficiency" is vastly oversimplifying.
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Efficiency is the removal of redundancy. Redundancy is a necessary element of resilient systems. The unbounded search for efficiency has one result: brittleness.
@ekuber This reminds me of an argument I had with management of the network operations center where I worked. I made a beautiful point about "pickle factory staffing" versus "firehouse staffing" but it took them months to see my point.
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@ekuber
It's a cross-and multi-disciplinary group looking at how high-reliability organizations can, do, and should work, how systems fall, and how the human parts of those systems help them not fail completely.
https://www.resilience-engineering-association.org/Good starting places in the literature are Dekker's "A Field Guide to 'Human Error'", the Woods paper "The Theory of Graceful Extensibility: Basic Rules that Govern Adaptive Systems", and (from a different end of the community) Leveson's Engineering a Safer World.
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Efficiency is the removal of redundancy. Redundancy is a necessary element of resilient systems. The unbounded search for efficiency has one result: brittleness.
@ekuber and boy has private equity prospered by gutting all the redundancy they can find while leaving the rest of us to deal with the inevitable system failures.
capitalism sure is efficient when we let capitalistic vultures define efficiency
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I'm all for global chains of distribution: specialization is real and you won't ever grow bananas in Alaska (even if Iceland showed it is technically possible last century), manufacture a computer chip in Paris or produce wine in Greenland, but we as consumers have to accept and understand that having pineapple out of season anywhere in the planet is not reasonable at the prices we're used to paying. In some French super markets I've seen signs on the produce next to the price with the country of origin and helpful information of when the growing season is. I found that as an excellent nudge for the almost entirely fictional homo economicus. I'd like us to surface that information to everyone for everything. Maybe that way people would understand just how connected we are.
@ekuber i think it's an EU regulation that you have to indicate the origin of fruits and vegetables. This is certainly the case in Italy too, they generally indicate regional production too. And it does impact sales somewhat, but people buy out of season fruit from abroad just the same, cause it's a cultural issue.
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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Sesso: quando capita
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Interessante, ma...
Ci sono due trade-off che per me rendono inaccettabile questo setup.
LLM remoto. Non credo neanche un po' al fatto che non venga in qualche modo salvato o ingerito perché la mancanza di fiducia è un mio bias.
Il solito discorso etico sull'addestramento degli LLM a scapito della sistematica violazione del diritto d'autore
Dare accesso in scrittura ai canali di comunicazione che impersonano me come individuo o che hanno accesso alle mie risorse di computing, a qualcosa di cui non ho il controllo e che potrebbe allucinare in qualunque momento.
Alla fine erano 3.
Insomma, se devo riassumere con una metafora, mi sembra la classica situazione de "Lo strano caso del Dottor Jekyll e Mr. Hide" (inteso nel senso dello sperimentare su di sé gli effetti di farmaci ignoti, un cliché di fine '800).
Riconosco il pregio tecnico della soluzione, ma anche che è un gioco a cui non vorrei rischiare di giocare. Forse con account completamente burner, inclusi i feed RSS, ma non con i gruppi telegram con persone vere per dire. Ma questo apre un altro capitolo sull'aspetto etico... Quindi boh.
Comunque bel set-up!
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Ragioniamo insieme.
A mio avviso la dicitura di sesso sui documenti dovrebbe proprio essere tolta.
Se ci pensiamo non serve assolutamente a nulla se non allɜ tuɜ partner e in alcuni casi specifici al tuo medico.
Perché lo deve conoscere lə cassierə del Pam o lə vigile dell'angolo non si è mai capito.
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Lo stato di New York potrebbe essere il sesto a introdurre una moratoria su nuovi data center. Un fronte bipartisan sempre più vocale, in nome dell'affordability (e non solo), è in rotta di collisione con l'ordine esecutivo di Trump.
Si parva licet (componere magnis), ma in Italia come siamo messi a progetti di data center, visto il nostro mix energetico?
https://www.wired.com/story/new-york-is-the-latest-state-to-consider-a-data-center-pause/
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早晩間 소프트웨어 엔지니어 커뮤니티로서의 聯合宇宙를 어필하는 韓國語 글을 하나 써 봐야겠다.
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@mym i have seen it before but it is a fave :D
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@elCelio la Meloni of course
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@gino
eh? chi ha detto questo?
