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.
There's a book on this theme by Tom DeMarco, _Slack_. The general idea is that complete optimization causes fragility; to be robust requires slack to handle emergencies, and to innovate.
A bit old now -- from 2001 -- but we still haven't learned the lesson, so...
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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
If I'd written a(nother) book it would have been called "Failure Modes". They repeat. -
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 Don't forget to include those in the arts. We are able to think beyond the various professional boxes to literally see bigger pictures.
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undefined oblomov@sociale.network shared this topic
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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
Even within the field of distributed computing "achieving high reliability is expensive".Leslie Lamport, 1984, "Using Time Instead of Timeout for Fault-Tolerant Distributed Systems"
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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 like psychiatrists for robots..
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@ekuber
Are you familiar with the Resilience Engineering Association? If not, I have a real treat for you.@dymaxion i am not!
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@ekuber Don't forget to include those in the arts. We are able to think beyond the various professional boxes to literally see bigger pictures.
@c_merriweather "limitations are good for innovation" is a good one that covers art and engineering
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@dymaxion i am not!
@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.
Die allzu hart sind, brechen.
Die allzu spitz sind, stechen
Und brechen ab sogleich,
Und brechen ab sogleich.
(Wolf Biermann) -
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
Safe by default design has been a principle of green chemistry for nearly 4 decades, today with the additional aspect of sustainability (safe and sustainable by design). -
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:
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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@Antonio1959 io non ci sono su FB e xitter ma auguro stormshit adeguato
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@Antonio1959 Pietro Zantonini, una guardia giurata di 55 anni, è deceduto la notte dell'8 gennaio 2026 a Cortina d'Ampezzo (BL), durante un turno di vigilanza in un cantiere per le Olimpiadi Milano-Cortina 2026, con temperature di circa -15°C/-18°C. L'uomo, operativo in condizioni estreme, aveva segnalato turni lunghi e tutele inadeguate.
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@muffa
Disamina più lucida che abbia letto in molti mesi. Grazie di aver condiviso!
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:: La Meloni ne ha le palle piene. Quasi quanto gli italiani di lei.
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Montanari su Nove: “Le parole di Salvini su Askatasuna? La vera cosa che mette a rischio l’Italia è che lui sia ministro” https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2026/02/08/montanari-su-nove-le-parole-di-salvini-su-askatasuna-la-vera-cosa-che-mette-a-rischio-litalia-e-che-lui-sia-ministro/8283954/
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@Dunpiteog @thatgiga @marcoboh
Alle elementari, in quel postazzo di Novara, classi separate e INGRESSO SEPARATO! 🤦
Dalle medie in poi, miste...
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Aperti la domenica? Non per forza. La terza via "equilibrata" di Unicoop Firenze
Alle casse e nei reparti dei supermercati lavorano la domenica su turnazione solo 2.400 lavoratori su un totale di 9mila: la decisione “sostenibile” ha dato risultati anche in termini economici, con un andamento positivo delle vendite... Domani farò la spesa alla Coop!
