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Dispatch 5 (and various misc. updates)

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[1]taylor.town
[2]about [3]now [4]hire [5]rss [6]spam
cloaca maxima
When to Build Millennia Sewers
In the mid-1800s, [7]every building in central Chicago was raised 10ft
(30m). Yes, they literally used [8]jackscrews to lift entire city
blocks up one-by-one.
Chicago had to [9]hotfix production because they built the city on the
shoreline of Lake Michigan, where filth accumulated without natural
drainage. They lifted the entire city after it was built so they could
add sewers and prevent flooding.
For comparison, Rome’s [10]Cloaca Maxima (“Greatest Sewer”) is still
in-use after 2,400 years.
So why didn’t Chicago just build it right the first time?
* [11]Irreversible Decisions
* [12]Unintended vs. Unforeseen
* [13]Always Scale Down
* [14]Labor & Materials
* [15]Awful Architecture
Irreversible Decisions
Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly
irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made
methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and
consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the
other side, you can’t get back to where you were before. We can call
these Type 1 decisions. But most decisions aren’t like that – they
are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a
suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the
consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back
through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high
judgment individuals or small groups.
As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the
heavy-weight Type 1 decision-making process on most decisions,
including many Type 2 decisions. The end result of this is slowness,
unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and
consequently diminished invention. We’ll have to figure out how to
fight that tendency.
– [16]Jeff Bezos
The Cloaca Maxima didn’t magically start out as the Greatest Sewer. It
began as an open-air canal, then was modified and renovated and
connected to the aqueducts.
The Romans probably made mistakes, but they didn’t make any wrong
irreversible decisions. To build something that lasts, make sure the
architecture is correct where it counts.
The Chicago sewage disaster was technically reversible, but extremely
expensive and painful.
Put “wiggle-room” in your architecture. Plan for repairs. Add
backdoors, engine-hoods, seams, and spaces. Emergency plans are
generally cheap to include in early phases of design.
Unintented vs. Unforeseen
[17]Exxon executives knew that CO₂ emissions would harm Earth.
Exxon willfully ignored its own research. Climate change was unintended
but not unforeseen.
Prophets are silenced when apocalypses seem bad for business.
But remember – all apocalypses are opportunities for entrepeneurship.
Exxon could’ve made billions by diversifying themselves with renewable
energy. They acted against their own self-interest by ignoring their
facts.
To prevent long-term disaster, solve the hard problem of aligning
incentives. Build systems so that all constituents predict and prevent
impending doom.
Transparency thwarts [18]own goals. It’s difficult to do stupid things
when you do stupid things publicly.
Always Scale Down
There’s really two ways to design things. You can either sort of
start with small things and scale them up or you could start with
big things and scale them down…
So suppose you want to build a system for like 10,000 people to use
simultaneously. One way of doing it would be to start with the
system, design it for 10 people and test it like that and scale it
up 10,000. The other way would be to design it for like 100,000,000
people – I mean do the design for that – and then scale it down to
tens of thousands. You might not get the same architecture. You
might get a completely different architecture. In fact, you would
get a different architecture.
And I think it’s a really bad idea to start at a design for 10 or
100 things and scale it up. It’s better to start with an
architecture that you know will work for a few trillion things and
scale it down. It will actually be less efficient when you’ve got
your 10,000 things than when you scaled up, but you’ll know that
you’ll be able to scale it up later. So it’s good.
So rather than ask, “how do we get to five nines?”, let’s make it
more interesting! Let’s start at 9,999 nines reliability and scale
it down.
– Joe Armstrong from [19]Systems that run forever and self-heal and
scale
If you can afford it, throw a few extra zeroes on your designs.
Labor & Materials
Carefully compare lifetime, labor, and materials.
lifetime repair labor materials
asphalt 20 years moderate $ $
concrete 30 years difficult $ $$
stone 100+ years easy $$$$ $$$
Pay particular attention to labor – 9 women can’t make a baby in 1
month.
Exercise for the reader: Which is cheaper, a Nespresso machine or a
[20]percolator?
Awful Architecture
Sometimes there are no tradeoffs.
Some decisions are awful in every dimension.
[21]Dvorak keyboards reduce finger fatigue using the same materials as
QWERTY keyboards.
[22]Juicero famously launched a high-tech product that was inferior to
traditional juicers [23]in every comparable way:
After taking apart the device, venture capitalist Ben Einstein
considered the press to be “an incredibly complicated piece of
engineering”, but that the complexity was unnecessary and likely
arose from a lack of cost constraints during the design process. A
simpler and cheaper implementation, suggested Einstein, would likely
have produced much the same quality of juice at a price several
hundred dollars cheaper.
If you want to create lasting sewers, study sewer architecture and its
impacts. What do good sewers have in common? What do bad sewers look
like? What tradeoffs exist with sewage systems? Are there any
promising-yet-untested sewer designs? Why do sewers go into disrepair?
What societal factors prevent sewers from being made in the first
place? Who truly controls the sewers?
Great architects think ahead, but don’t let ambitions run amok. They
anticipate irreversible changes and second-order effects. They consider
all the costs – labor and materials and maintenance and environmental
impact. They always stay ahead-of-schedule and within their budget. And
despite the overwhelming constraints, great architects build millennia
sewers whenever and wherever they can.
References
1. file:///
2. file:///about
3. file:///now
4. file:///hire-me
5. file:///feed.xml
6. https://newsletter.taylor.town/
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_(device)#House_jack
9. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/blhec6/fixing_bugs_in_production/
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaca_Maxima
11. file:///var/folders/q9/qlz2w5251kzdfgn0np7z2s4c0000gn/T/L81887-9224TMP.html#irreversible
12. file:///var/folders/q9/qlz2w5251kzdfgn0np7z2s4c0000gn/T/L81887-9224TMP.html#unintended
13. file:///var/folders/q9/qlz2w5251kzdfgn0np7z2s4c0000gn/T/L81887-9224TMP.html#scale-down
14. file:///var/folders/q9/qlz2w5251kzdfgn0np7z2s4c0000gn/T/L81887-9224TMP.html#labor-materials
15. file:///var/folders/q9/qlz2w5251kzdfgn0np7z2s4c0000gn/T/L81887-9224TMP.html#awful
16. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312516530910/d168744dex991.htm
17. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_denial
18. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Own_goal
19. https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/cNICGEwmXLU?start=433
20. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_percolator
21. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_keyboard_layout
22. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero
23. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero#Criticism