Another area of hidden complexity is doors in video games. Almost no game has life sized doors because they introduce gameplay issues, almost all doors in video games are at least 30% bigger than in real life and you see an overabundance of sliding doors vs swinging doors because of the complexity swinging doors bring to video game physics.
Also in their VR titles Valve made all doors swing in both directions because that feels more natural to players when there is no haptic feedback from not being able to push open a door.
The scale difference mentioned in gp isn't just doors though but any structure you can pass through. Many games houses with larger interiors than exteriors and video game ventilation ducts are comically large.
That's an impressive bug hunt. Same code, different behavior.
I can't imagine how much time the guy spent on finding this one. And how much satisfaction once he finally nailed it.
At the end of the week, if you suffered a hard drive crash and all of your recent code got erased, how quickly could you recreate it? That's how much of your week was spent coding. The rest of the week was spent transforming you into the person who could code the thing you coded.
Contrast this with a chair maker. If at the end of the week, their chair got thrown in a woodchipper, some significant fraction of the next week would be in unavoidable labor making the exact same chair.
This is the fundamental difference between these two activities that gets abstracted away when we both think of them as "labor".
I see where you're coming at. But don't underestimate the amount of design work that goes into making a good chair. It probably took more time than your think, which transforms them into the person who can craft the chair
Yes, but that is part of the point: a chair being built is mostly distinct from a chair being designed (there is of course a small amount of design that is done while building). Software is designed at a much higher percentage while being created (or if you prefer, there is a cycle between the two states).
You also don’t often learn why you don’t need a chair while building one.
> or if you prefer, there is a cycle between the two states
Yes, what I mostly emphasize with this mode of thinking is that the act of building software is primarily there to transform people (you try a thing, it doesn't work like you think it would, that inspires you to try another thing) and the software at the end of it is largely a byproduct.
If you have the right people-state, producing the software is trivial, it's how do you port the right knowledge into their brains in the first place and and software should be just another tool in your toolbox towards that aim.
Chair makers do not make one chair - they make one for the whole family. Then they make more in a very similar style for the next family. There is very little new design in a chair - it has all been done.
We don’t order bespoke-design chairs because construction is expensive, so we adapt to available chairs. In a world without construction-related scarcities and mostly design expenses (think sci-fi with that so far unachievable ability to manipulate the reality on molecular level), a chair can be feasibly created for specific personalities of yourself and others in given circumances, possible context in which you might use it, the interior it would fit in, etc.
In software, this kind of construction scarcity does not exist. Once you design a chair, you can instantiate it to your heart’s content.
Having been in this situation more than once, recreating a concept from scratch when you've already coded it once takes ~20% of the time. This also tracks with my long term empirical observation that roughly 80% of a software project is maintenance, testing, debugging, monitoring, fixing bugs, planning, refactoring, etc.
Sitting down to an editor and typing out ascii charachters is the smallest and least consequential part of software development. And that was _before_ LLMs enter the equation - now it's not even strictly necessary. The software industry needs to get over its obsession with coding as an activity, and with code as an asset. Code is at best a necessary liability. Software systems are what we should be focused on.
Early on in Uber's life, I went to a presentation they held where they showed there was a U shaped curve by income of who used Uber. Upper middle class people used them as discretionary entertainment vehicles but Uber had a substantial lower class population using them as necessary transport when working graveyard shifts in locations public transit didn't go.
So yes, there's a surprising contingent of people who commute to work every single working day using hire cars.
> Upper middle class people used them as discretionary entertainment vehicles but Uber had a substantial lower class population using them as necessary transport when working graveyard shifts in locations public transit didn't go.
This is information that suggests that Uber does not compete with public transit
When I was a child visiting my grandma in a large city in England, we would often take the bus to the supermarket, but use a taxi to come back with the shopping. In the 1990s some local taxi company even had a special phone by the supermarket entrance with a single button to dial to request one.
I think my grandma could easily afford this, but there would have been others considering dragging the shopping onto the bus.
Just a guess but she probably would have taken the buss back if you weren't there? Like, she wouldn't want to bore you waiting for the buss or try to time it shopping with a kid.
I think it was the weight of the shopping. My food would have increased what needed to be carried, but I was too young to be much use carrying it.
The point is taxis supplement and can replace public transport for low-income or unable-to-drive people in some situations — not necessarily every day.
Unless you're truly car sharing with a bunch of other people going the same way, I don't see how that makes sense. You have to wait for the car to arrive and you're paying a premium for it.
> Common sense product could be something smaller than Model 3 for Europe and this car would eat Chinese for lunch.
Yeah, that would be the Model 2, which Musk cancelled, then denied he cancelled, then has made no effort to review whatsoever so it exists in a limbo state of zero people working on it but it not being officially cancelled. Either way, it didn't come out in 2025 as planned.
For a normal company, this would be disastrous. For a meme stock, this makes total sense since anyone claiming the Model 2 is dead can be shouted at by fans saying Musk himself disputed it was dead.
“For another, the term has been overused to the point of meaninglessness, especially by left-leaning types who call you a fascist if you oppose abortion or affirmative action.”
The left was right too early. Whereas I, the enlightened centrist was right and just the right time.
There is content you write for acquisition and content you write for retention and my #1 tip for writers who want to engineer growing an audience is be clear before you sit down to write a piece which it’s going to be.
Content for acquisition, the reader’s relationship is to the topic, they have to be convinced the topic is relevant to their life goals but it’s valuable despite who the topic.
Content for retention, the readers relationship is to you as the writer and the topic is merely there as a MacGuffin to help illuminate some aspect of you that is unique.
Business Insider had this down to a science over a decade ago. They started a series called “So Expensive”, detailing why various things were expensive, the first 4 videos in the series were: Caviar, Saffron, Rolexes and Horseshoe Crab Blood. Statistically, some tens of millions of people have organically had the thought of why the first 3 were expensive but zero people have even wondered why horseshoe crab blood was expensive. The 4th video was a way to test, of all the people who were willing to click on the first three, how many were willing to follow along to the 4th because of a trust in BI? The next 4 in the series was Vanilla, Silk, Louboutins & Scorpion Venom.
Creating all content for acquisition is both too exhausting and also sub optimal for the reader because they want deeper stuff to follow as well. I suggest up to 1 in 3 acquisition articles if you can manage when starting out but then ramping down to no more than 1 in 10 fairly quickly or you burn out.
This mirrors reflections I've had recently as well. I have been, for the most part, focusing on what you would call "content for acquisition", i.e. easily relatable, somewhat shallow, extensively researched articles that show off what I can write at my best.
But in trying to aim for a regular cadence in the past year, I've realised I cannot maintain that level across the board. So I've started to write things that aren't as "good", in my flawed subjective judgment. Yet surprisingly often those are the things I get positive emails about, from readers who are glad I took the time to put things into words.
I am trying to come to terms with the idea that some of my more enthusiastic readers might really be happy to read even things that aren't up to what I consider to be my standards. But it's deeply uncomfortable. Triggers my impostor syndrome like little else.
Another common mistake I see "thoughtfluencer" bloggers make is they think they need a brand new idea per post. This not only isn't sustainable, it's bad for the audience.
Instead, I think a successful blog is really about finding your, at most, 3 - 5 big ideas and instead showing the audience how they apply in many different context. For example, Matt Levine returns to a few commmon catchphrases across years of his writing: "People are worried about bond market liquidity", “Everything Is Securities Fraud” etc. that crop up in odd and wonderful ways in totally new contexts across years of writing. Forming a relationship with his writing is deepening your appreciation of these concepts.
Even if that is the instinct, this is a mistaken way to deal with narcissistic bullying.
It’s writing the piece in the first place rather than what you put in it that raises the ire. There’s no way to compromise or mollify the wording in a way that makes them give you like, half the punishment.
What’s more, the attempt to mollify signals weakness that just invites them to feel even more vindictive. Being more forthright and decisive is what earns their grudging respect. China understood this, Zohran Mandani understood this. Meanwhile, Europe and Democratic leadership, universities and large law firms refuse to understand this.
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