Daily Archives: 2019-04-01

Article note: Holy shit there is a lot of good stuff in here. I don't usually pay a lot of attention to the LISPers, but, from a 1993 paper: 1. Correctly predicting that microcoding was coming back to deal with the CPU-Memory speed difference. 2. Fuckin' cycle-counting performance instrumentation feedback IN THE TEXT EDITOR. I STILL WANT THAT SHIT.

Article note: Yup Yup Yup. I become more and more convinced that bureaucratization is the limiting factor of societies. Goodhart's law ("When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure") guarantees that we can't effectively measure, and thus Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy ("In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.") takes over, and now you have a giant overhead machine that occupies all available resources. It's the "mythical man month" problem at maximum generality and scale.