taylor-town-5siv9a.txt (7922B)
1 [1]taylor.town 2 [2]about [3]now [4]spam [5]rss [6]hire 3 4 cloaca maxima 5 6 When to Build Millennia Sewers 7 8 In the mid-1800s, [7]every building in central Chicago was raised 10ft (30m). 9 Yes, they literally used [8]jackscrews to lift entire city blocks up 10 one-by-one. 11 12 Chicago had to [9]hotfix production because they built the city on the 13 shoreline of Lake Michigan, where filth accumulated without natural drainage. 14 They lifted the entire city after it was built so they could add sewers and 15 prevent flooding. 16 17 For comparison, Rome’s [10]Cloaca Maxima (“Greatest Sewer”) is still in-use 18 after 2,400 years. 19 20 So why didn’t Chicago just build it right the first time? 21 22 • [11]Irreversible Decisions 23 • [12]Unintended vs. Unforeseen 24 • [13]Always Scale Down 25 • [14]Labor & Materials 26 • [15]Awful Architecture 27 28 Irreversible Decisions 29 30 Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – 31 one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, 32 slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and 33 don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you 34 were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions. But most decisions aren’t 35 like that – they are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If 36 you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the 37 consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. 38 Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment 39 individuals or small groups. 40 41 As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the 42 heavy-weight Type 1 decision-making process on most decisions, including 43 many Type 2 decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful 44 risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently 45 diminished invention. We’ll have to figure out how to fight that tendency. 46 47 – [16]Jeff Bezos 48 49 The Cloaca Maxima didn’t magically start out as the Greatest Sewer. It began as 50 an open-air canal, then was modified and renovated and connected to the 51 aqueducts. 52 53 The Romans probably made mistakes, but they didn’t make any wrong irreversible 54 decisions. To build something that lasts, make sure the architecture is correct 55 where it counts. 56 57 The Chicago sewage disaster was technically reversible, but extremely expensive 58 and painful. 59 60 Put “wiggle-room” in your architecture. Plan for repairs. Add backdoors, 61 engine-hoods, seams, and spaces. Emergency plans are generally cheap to include 62 in early phases of design. 63 64 Unintented vs. Unforeseen 65 66 [17]Exxon executives knew that CO₂ emissions would harm Earth. 67 68 Exxon willfully ignored its own research. Climate change was unintended but not 69 unforeseen. 70 71 Prophets are silenced when apocalypses seem bad for business. 72 73 But remember – all apocalypses are opportunities for entrepeneurship. Exxon 74 could’ve made billions by diversifying themselves with renewable energy. They 75 acted against their own self-interest by ignoring their facts. 76 77 To prevent long-term disaster, solve the hard problem of aligning incentives. 78 Build systems so that all constituents predict and prevent impending doom. 79 80 Transparency thwarts [18]own goals. It’s difficult to do stupid things when you 81 do stupid things publicly. 82 83 Always Scale Down 84 85 There’s really two ways to design things. You can either sort of start with 86 small things and scale them up or you could start with big things and scale 87 them down… 88 89 So suppose you want to build a system for like 10,000 people to use 90 simultaneously. One way of doing it would be to start with the system, 91 design it for 10 people and test it like that and scale it up 10,000. The 92 other way would be to design it for like 100,000,000 people – I mean do the 93 design for that – and then scale it down to tens of thousands. You might 94 not get the same architecture. You might get a completely different 95 architecture. In fact, you would get a different architecture. 96 97 And I think it’s a really bad idea to start at a design for 10 or 100 98 things and scale it up. It’s better to start with an architecture that you 99 know will work for a few trillion things and scale it down. It will 100 actually be less efficient when you’ve got your 10,000 things than when you 101 scaled up, but you’ll know that you’ll be able to scale it up later. So 102 it’s good. 103 104 So rather than ask, “how do we get to five nines?”, let’s make it more 105 interesting! Let’s start at 9,999 nines reliability and scale it down. 106 107 – Joe Armstrong from [19]Systems that run forever and self-heal and scale 108 109 If you can afford it, throw a few extra zeroes on your designs. 110 111 Labor & Materials 112 113 Carefully compare lifetime, labor, and materials. 114 115 lifetime repair labor materials 116 asphalt 20 years moderate $ $ 117 concrete 30 years difficult $ $$ 118 stone 100+ years easy $$$$ $$$ 119 120 Pay particular attention to labor – 9 women can’t make a baby in 1 month. 121 122 Exercise for the reader: Which is cheaper, a Nespresso machine or a [20] 123 percolator? 124 125 Awful Architecture 126 127 Sometimes there are no tradeoffs. 128 129 Some decisions are awful in every dimension. 130 131 [21]Dvorak keyboards reduce finger fatigue using the same materials as QWERTY 132 keyboards. 133 134 [22]Juicero famously launched a high-tech product that was inferior to 135 traditional juicers [23]in every comparable way: 136 137 After taking apart the device, venture capitalist Ben Einstein considered 138 the press to be “an incredibly complicated piece of engineering”, but that 139 the complexity was unnecessary and likely arose from a lack of cost 140 constraints during the design process. A simpler and cheaper 141 implementation, suggested Einstein, would likely have produced much the 142 same quality of juice at a price several hundred dollars cheaper. 143 144 If you want to create lasting sewers, study sewer architecture and its impacts. 145 What do good sewers have in common? What do bad sewers look like? What 146 tradeoffs exist with sewage systems? Are there any promising-yet-untested sewer 147 designs? Why do sewers go into disrepair? What societal factors prevent sewers 148 from being made in the first place? Who truly controls the sewers? 149 150 Great architects think ahead, but don’t let ambitions run amok. They anticipate 151 irreversible changes and second-order effects. They consider all the costs – 152 labor and materials and maintenance and environmental impact. They always stay 153 ahead-of-schedule and within their budget. And despite the overwhelming 154 constraints, great architects build millennia sewers whenever and wherever they 155 can. 156 157 158 References: 159 160 [1] https://taylor.town/ 161 [2] https://taylor.town/about 162 [3] https://taylor.town/now 163 [4] https://newsletter.taylor.town/ 164 [5] https://taylor.town/feed.xml 165 [6] https://taylor.town/hire-me 166 [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago 167 [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_%28device%29#House_jack 168 [9] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/blhec6/fixing_bugs_in_production/ 169 [10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaca_Maxima 170 [11] https://taylor.town/millennium-sewer#irreversible 171 [12] https://taylor.town/millennium-sewer#unintended 172 [13] https://taylor.town/millennium-sewer#scale-down 173 [14] https://taylor.town/millennium-sewer#labor-materials 174 [15] https://taylor.town/millennium-sewer#awful 175 [16] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312516530910/d168744dex991.htm 176 [17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_denial 177 [18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Own_goal 178 [19] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/cNICGEwmXLU?start=433 179 [20] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_percolator 180 [21] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_keyboard_layout 181 [22] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero 182 [23] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero#Criticism