If you're stressed out, hungry, got the low-blood sugar, tired, distracted, etc. your attention is much less valuable (to you) than if you're relaxed, well-fed and -rested, focused, etc.
One of the greatest forms of "leverage" we have in the world is the capability of developing and focusing the quality of our attention, "concentration" or "one-point mind". That's why meditation is worthwhile (one of the reasons anyway) because, paradoxically, sitting and doing "nothing" for an hour makes the other 10~12 hours way more productive, due to the improvement in Q-of-A[ttention].
No it is not. Put idiots in a Stanford class they won't be able to do much of the time given to them by Ivy League professor since they won't be able to pay attention
I don't think this is a sound argument. How does it demonstrate attention being not equivalent to time? At best it shows the professor's attention / time / money can be wasted by dull students. Was this ever under dispute?
What was under dispute is whether time is the only real currency. I say it is not and I say it's attention that is the real currency because that's what you really allocate.
I think this is a very good point, and I find the reasons for which it is getting downvoted wholly unconvincing. Time is only good insofar as I have the mental/physical energy to take advantage of it. Lots of tasks double-dip in the time they take require from you - firstly when you perform them, and secondly, when you're too tired to be creative in the free time that is left over.
It is downvoted because many people who lack philosophical and historical culture believe in the myth of productivism. Largely debunked during the 20th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement
The movie "in time" (2011) kind of explores this. At the time, I wrote:
> it gets you thinking. What prevents time from being used as currency? Or are we really doing the same by paying people an hourly rate instead of based on their accomplishments? Not to mention how many lives that million years capsule must have cost.
This explores it in a rather poor way. Once you and all your friends have a hundred year on your accounts, why not just stop working in this society and just go build a new civilization using bottle caps as means of exchange? Why being slaves to people who fix prices for everything all the time?
Also. Economy there had no sense. Every person is passively using 24h worth of 'money' every day by simply existing. That means, to make ends meet they must earn 24h + some surpus to make a living, but the dude earned something like 5 hours in a shift (he had ~23:55 before shift, and 1:04:50 after. If shift lasted 8 hours, he was making just 13 hours per day - totally unsustainable.
The idea was nice, but I feel it was a somewhat wasted potential.
Yes sure, it's a mainstream movie and meant as entertainment rather than educatively. But for being a mainstream movie, I liked that it made me think about this.
Titanic was a mainstream movie, but the attention to detail is on another level entirely.
They just didnt develop the concept enough and think though the consequences. There is a great plot in there somewhere
I hated that movie, it showed only the very poor and the very rich, while showing that they don't make up the whole world. I couldn't empathize with anyone.
I’ve often wondered what society would look like if optimized for saving people time. Just some quick thoughts:
- Crosswalks and traffic lights would become non-existent and replaced with more pedestrian overpasses, turning/merging lanes, and other designs. Waiting for the light to change is a huge waste of time for both pedestrians and drivers. It seems like we might get this eventually with self-driving cars.
- Minimization of waiting rooms. If your appointment will be delayed, you’ll be informed of it ahead of time via SMS. Time slots are strictly enforced to avoid overlap.
- Purchase and checkout items while you shop, rather than waiting in line at a cash register. Or just skip shopping in person and order everything via delivery.
- Adoption of remote work and minimization of unnecessary commutes. Plus faster public transit in general. Japan is pretty good with this (the Shinkansen is impressive.)
there are many pedestrian overpasses in some big cities (like the one I live in)
but it's not so simple, because then you have to climb up stairs, which takes more time... you walk more steps
add some heavy duty sun and people rather wait in the shade down below rather than climb up.
Also pedestrian overpasses tend to be really narrow (read: uncomfortable)
Also, why should we be so stingy with time? it's better (IMHO) to lived relaxed, otherwise we will end up under conditions similar (they say) to amazon warehouse workers which have their bathroom breaks measured in seconds.
I think an interesting question is whether we are respectively good judges on the "real" value of those ten saved seconds vs more abstract quality of life issues such as mental health or reductions in stress.
The idea that time is fungible is misleading. I can only drink coffee using my before noon time, or else I take away from the utility of my night time. I’m less productive in the time immediately after a big meal. I can only smell the roses for 30 or so consecutive seconds, and then need a break.
As human beings, time isn't really fungible. I can't wake up at 3am, choose to be productive for 45 minutes, go back to sleep, and then take a 45 minute nap later on in the day. If I stop myself from watching an hour of TV, it doesn't mean that I'll gain an extra hour of productive time tomorrow.
Ideally, the road would be at a lower level than the sidewalk. Then you wouldn’t need to spend time climbing up the bridge, and it wouldn’t be a big deal to have multiple wide bridges. Think Venice, except roads instead of canals.
Presumably engineering tech will also get better and cheaper and some sort of rapid outdoor escalator or elevator could also solve the problem.
Regarding stinginess: I understand where you’re coming from, but I also feel like there are time-intensive aspects of modern life which have little-or-no value, like waiting in traffic.
The problem to solve is not how to make traffic faster, but how to reduce the need for traffic. Many books on the subject but the basic gist is we've designed our cities incorrectly and suburbs are inefficient for many reasons - time, energy, land use and even self reported happiness and satisfaction.
> Purchase and checkout items while you shop, rather than waiting in line at a cash register. Or just skip shopping in person and order everything via delivery.
I believe this is starting to happen in some places, example (and an interesting video on RFID tags in general)
This is pretty much my life to the extent of how much I can control it in society.
I never do any singular thing with the exception of work.
I won’t leave the house unless I can divide and group that time into multiple objectives thus spreading the overhead of time lost against many achievements.
If not in a meeting I have my pleasureable conversations via car phone when I commute some where. If I’m not in a meeting when commuting or talking to friend / family I’m streaming a new pluralsight tutorial over Bluetooth.
I work through any meeting that doesn’t maximize my output to 100%. (I’m remote most of the time)
I listen to self growth audio books when I shower.
When I head to the bar if I’m not killing two birds with one stone networking or meeting a client I’ll bring my laptop to get work done.
Tasks that I cannot streamline and time intensive I pay for.
Blah blah I can go on and on.
Ironically the one thing I haven’t mastered is how to delegate to achieve bigger goals leveraging employees.
Make sure to stop and smell the roses. Research shows people on their death bed always regret working too much and not enough time with loved ones (if you’re a data driven sort of person).
Thanks for the comment.
I do have a large family I take care of them as single source of income. I found I have to make a conscious effort to ensure I spend time with them. Since I have done that my quality of life improved greatly while still maintaining a hefty work schedule. A couple years back I audited how much time I was spending with my family/kids. It was embarrassing.
Besides our normal routines I made the effort to take them to each of their extra curricular activities. 6 days a week 3 kids. I spend individual time with them each week and we go on vacation 3-5 times a year. I’m learning to have my cake and eat it too. But the family life is a conscious effort I have to make to avoid the (I wish I slowed down). Not a day that goes by I don’t love what I do and my life. Given the above I hope I don’t regret it. Time will tell.
Being able to stop and just do nothing once in a while is important. And I do mean "nothing". Not play on one's phone or be idle in front of the TV. Nothing, as in sit down and just be left alone with your thoughts.
I think I came off wrong. I group together things and hyper-organize them to maximize my output and minimize the time I spend on doing things for growth/maintenance.
I meditate daily, find room for some reading, picked up gardening recently. Anything I can streamline I do that to maximize my return as time is a valuable commodity.
Great question - if I feel like taking leisure time I take it. Easy as that. I justify it by kicking ass and optimizing everything else as best as I can. That is what brings me peace. Knowing I do my best. It's a good balance for me, I naturally found a circle of successful people that do the same(birds of a feather). I don't think one should try to be this way if you are not and I do realize its a bit different. But for me its worked great and truly feel like I'm living a better life every day.
I don’t use them because I just assume it’s going to be a personal information harvest fest, and it won’t work as advertised anyway. Like most other software-driven things these days.
Personal information is a fair point, though that goes for any loyalty program (which I presume you also don't use), but what do you mean by "won't work as advertised"? The function that's advertised is that you can scan items as you walk through the store and once you get to the checkout the only thing you do is pay, which is exactly the function that's provided.
It's basically the same technology that's used at the register. You pick up a barcode scanner, you scan your items, and the scanner produces a hash of your items that can be scanned at checkout to reproduce the list. Super simple technology.
The store could gather how much time it took you to scan between items and in which order, but you can pay with cash if you're worried about personal privacy.
Unless you pay with cash at the grocery store, they are already harvesting it. I’m surprised they are not selling it to the health insurance companies to monitor your habits.
Believe it or not; that type of behavior was not always deemed acceptable, and has largely been an artifact of the tech boom making mass information processing and transfer easy to do. Besides which, if they did, it isn't that big a leap to realize a second coming of HIPAA would soon follow, as people are quite understandably very sensitive to the nature of what inputs are allowed in terms of actuarial processes. Remember, your insurance provider having more information is almost always strictly worse for you in the long run. They are out to maximize float. Even of they can't try to dissuade individuals to drop out of the risk pool anymore through individual medical underwriting, they just bumped the actual filtering up a level of abstraction.
At least some of the Ahold Delhaize subsidiaries (Food Lion, Hannaford, Giant, Stop&Shop) have handheld scanner kiosks you can checkout when you enter. I know Giant and Stop&Shop also offer a smartphone app that operates the same way as the kiosk units using your smartphone camera to scan.
I've seen the kiosk system at Kroger in the midwest.
Sam's Club offers a mobile app scanner.
Perhaps it's just the places I frequent, but I've gotten to the point where I take them for granted. Keep an eye out for a kiosk that seems to be a kind of fnord. Check if your nearby groceries have a smartphone app that offers scanning via your phone if you're comfortable with that. The ones I've used worked fine, but I tend not to use the phone apps because I have a chronically low smartphone battery and storage space.
The Kroger stores I go to always have that, but they always seem to shut it down around 6pm, and I get off work at 7pm, so it's kinda useless to me haha.
The barrier is the mental cost of context switching. You find your item, scan it, and then have to go check your list to remember which item it was you needed. You also need to find the barcode while the regular checkout has both a bottom and side scanner, so you just pass the item over and most of the time it will catch the item.
They introduced these at the grocery store my wife and I frequent. We used them just once. As long as the lines aren't long, it seems just as quick to have the 2 checkout people (1 cashier, 1 bagger) do the work in a batch at the end, as opposed to fiddling around with bagging as you go.
That's generally not that person's only job in the market though. These same people generally have mild janitorial duties, keeping the front-end stocked with supplies, and act as general go-fers (helping people find things, putting things back on shelves, price checks, etc.) This sort of role can make things way more efficient.
In my area of the US most stores don’t have baggers. But in those that do I’ve found they are often either very young (likely a first paid job) or have some form of mild mental disability. It kinda seems like stores having baggers is kind of a jobs program/public benefit, making the inefficiency less of a problem.
Interesting thought. The GDP would be replaced by GDTS, gross domestic time saved and the country with the highest GDTS would have the most flourishing economy. An ounce of gold would be worthless.
- Most of the regulation of prior permission paperwork submit is abolished. Whether somebody meets the regulation standard will be evaluated after it was done.
- Customer service is not free of charge after used the up free quota.
- Telephone, video/voice chat are deprecated because these communication require people to use time at specific point rather than in the convenient time they choose.
> Most of the regulation of prior permission paperwork submit is abolished. Whether somebody meets the regulation standard will be evaluated after it was done.
I’m not convinced this one would optimize for time unless it’s also optimizing for items falling through the cracks. If non-conformity is actually being caught it means the work has to be done twice to bring it in line with regulation after the fact.
Recent example: Boeing Starliner was not meeting requirements but oversight seemed inadequate ultimately requiring a multi-million dollar re-do once the gaps were caught after it was supposedly finished
Edit: down votes are fine but please extend the courtesy of explaining so as to add to the conversation
Why these things don’t (always) happen is more related to the top sibling comment: there is a trade off in space or energy with each of the things you described, and the value in time saved must be less than the space and energy cost of the alternatives, or else they would happen.
vegas has pedestrian overpasses and they are a tremendous waste of time - much worse than crosswalks. A better approach would be to keep the pedestrians at grade-level and have car under-passes
Several large cities in China that I've been to tend to use pedestrian tunnels at many large intersections. It works pretty well - subway-like staircases at each corner, and nice wide hallway/tunnels going around the whole intersection. Occasionally with some shops.
It has the advantage of being easy on the eyes above-ground. I can imagine in places with serious homelessness issues there could be problems, but the ones I experienced were fairly nice - some more plain than others, but generally graffiti free, well lit, and well used.
Harvard Square has this, by happenstance. There are entrances to the T on both sides of Mass Ave. and you don't have to go through the turnstile to cross from one to the other.
If you are disabled (permanently or temporarily), old, have strollers or luggage, then level-changes add quite some time in the best case or are completely unusable in the worst case.
In my experiences traveling with Asia, usually these systems were not outfitted with elevators.
Vegas has built them to waste time rather then be efficient. The overpassed there make you loop around casinos and stores, purposely causing you to walk further and take longer
If you're talking about overpasses in general, I can see how car underpasses are more time efficient. I assume pedestrian over/under passes are cheaper to build.
Regarding Vegas, it doesnt seem like crosswalks are more efficient, especially from the perspective of the driver. 1) Large intersections with crosswalks tends to have people linger in the middle of the street. This delays the flow of traffic. 2) Right turns are much slower. 3) People who jaywalk. This can be easily observed in Vegas at major hotels. Cars are always struggling to turn into the hotel with large crowds of people trying to cross regardless of the color of the light.
That said, I agree with another poster that crosswalks are optimized to force you into hotels/shops and are subpar.
- Crosswalks don't do well in overly large intersections
- Vegas over-concentrates traffic into large arterials that require large intersections in the first place.
A traditional American street grid, while requiring more stopping time, in general allows traffic to diffuse across many different routes, making large intersections with two ten lane roads unnecessary.
I wonder if it would be more fruitful to optimize not for saving time but for patience capacity. Somehow I was more accepting of having to wait 20 years ago than I am now.
> I’ve often wondered what society would look like if optimized for saving people time.
It would look like what it is today. Sure, there are still inefficiencies, but we have a high standard of living because it is optimized for time. For example, it used to be that 95% of people worked on the farm to raise enough food. Now it's like 2%. Nobody spends time anymore making cloth, which used to be the bulk of "women's work".
> Or just skip shopping in person and order everything via delivery
Isn't that what we do now? I've been doing nearly all my shopping online since long before this quarantine, exactly because it's a huge time saver. I think I visited the mall once in the last year, and that was for a social reason, not shopping.
> Waiting for the light to change is a huge waste of time for both pedestrians and drivers
That's because it's designed and run by the government, which has no interest in saving time.
How many hours do we all waste waiting for a light to change when there's no cross traffic? having a "platoon" of cars come to a halt to let one car cross? having a light turn yellow at the last moment to slam on the brakes? How much gas has this cost, too?
By mounting cameras on the lights and a little AI programming, and an optimization algorithm, I bet the lights could be a major factor in reducing gas consumption, smoothing traffic flow, reducing accidents, and saving time.
In fact, the AI could be self-learning, like the fuel injection systems on cars.
I used to think so, then I married a gal who gets car-sick anytime we go through more than one round-about in a row. I suppose it could have to do with the design of the roundabouts in our area. They are quite small.
This. Instead of obsessing on level 5 autonomous car that we probably will never achieve in our lifetime, why not optimized the AI for level 5 equivalent of traffic lights and control. Imagine having Waze like system integrated with city wide dynamic and intelligent traffic lights for seamless urban travel.
broadly speaking, you could argue waiting (in lines or other queues) in many instances is an externalized cost placed on consumers to the benefit of commerce/bureacracy. it allows the business/agency to optimize its operations at the expense of the customer. this isn't generally considered when making productivity and efficient allocation arugments in politics/economics.
Thanks for the feedback. It does have a short write up on things to do. I have a lot more opinions on that, but was trying to balance out the overall length of the post.
Will try having one out just on the dev environment :)
Looking at it again I didn’t realize the following sections were actually part of that header because the headers were the same size and style. I thought it was only that one paragraph about Jedi. That was my fault.
it seems to me, that this has to do with a fundamental difference between selling products and selling services (I don't mean not software services)
when you are making products (material widgets of any kind) it is possible to achieve marginal costs with parallel and serial manufacture, and with technology and specialized machines.
but if you're selling service (e.g. a waiter) then it's not really possible to "industrialize" production the same way
and don't get me started on software (becuase I wouldn't know how to start)
If you're serious about typing ditch the QWERTY layout and learn something that's actually optimized for the language of your choice it's so naive to attempt mastery of a broken paradigm without ever questioning that paradigm as in the case of the broken and arbitrary key layout from 1873
As a recommendation I'd suggest the typing of the dead hands down the funnest way to learn touch typing as well I recommend the DVORAK key layout because it's much more suited to touch typing as one's hands require far less travel and therefore less propensity for error
Unfortunately, in essentially all big corporations, the incentives encourage developers to waste as much time as possible - Mostly by focusing their attention on creating elaborate and ever-changing development processes and constantly adding unnecessary software complexity at the same time. This doesn't work well at all when you also allow individuals to detach themselves from any responsibility over the code that they produce.
The culture of wasting time is so pervasive that the vast majority of developers who practice it don't even realize that they're doing it - Ironically, they're often the same people who write long articles about how to be productive and who brag about how organized and full their schedule is and how they're using all the latest productivity tools and how high their test coverage % is and how good their workflow and CI pipeline is... I call BS on all this.
People who spend most of their time explicitly thinking about processes are bureaucrats. Truly productive people don't need to think about processes, they evolve naturally through sweat and tears; good processes are the byproduct (emphasis on the word 'byproduct') of a focused mindset of desperately wanting to achieve specific goals, not the mindset of ticking-off boxes from a static checklist where you don't even understand the underlying purpose of the work.
You cannot be productive without a clear sense of purpose and goals. Unfortunately most software jobs today lack purpose - In this case it makes no sense to even talk about productivity. How can you know how productive (how fast you're moving towards your goal) you are if you don't even know what the end goal is. Finishing something is not a goal, it's a task. A goal is about a deeper purpose.
Also if your goal is to help your company earn more money, this is only a worthy goal if you have a way to check your personal progress towards that goal. Usually this is not possible to do in a big company because there are too many people working towards different goals within the same company (sometimes even conflicting goals); the reality is that your work probably doesn't matter so there is no such thing as productivity in a corporate environment because it's not possible to measure the impact of your work in relation to achieving a real company goal... However, if your goal is to maximize your personal ranking or salary within the company, this is a goal against which it is easy to measure progress; that's why personal goals trump company goals every time.
KPIs are a ridiculous, completely futile attempt to fix this problem.
This. I've been thinking about this for last few sleepless nights. I am at a start-up which has grown to 61 person. The tight connection of everybody's everyday contributions to company survival has declined. A rigourous accountability and incentives framework is still missing and there's no time and resources to build it now. Most of employees don't know what is more or less important and by how exactly much.
I found interesting the concept of Internal Market. This book appears to be describing exactly what I got in my mind: "Internal Markets: Bringing the Power of Free Enterprise Inside Your Organization
".
True. Having worked at many startups as well as big corporations, I definitely think that the environment inside big companies feels more like some twisted form of socialism than capitalism. The idea of internal markets sounds good. Having small teams which have a strong sense of ownership over different projects is a good strategy in my experience as a developer.
While I understand and agree that a lot of time is wasted on purpose in large organisations, I don't think that argument can serve as a basis for what is effectively "it's difficult/impossible to measure, therefore its value doesn't exist".
Organizations (I mean the power structures made of people called managers) are machines that sit between (a) people selling their time and (b) people who buy stuff/service.
If you are either kind of people and the big organization sucks for you, use a smaller one maybe? Or find another big one that works acceptably? Talk about one differs slightly from another?
You can rant about the deficiencies of big organizations or you can observe a well known fact that it is a very hard civilization-wide problem. Fortunes are made even from minuscule optimizations in this area and there is no shortage of execs experimenting with these. And here enter you with "the reality is that [employee's] work probably doesn't matter".
"Usually ... it's not possible to measure the impact of your work in relation to achieving a real company goal"
You say a few things here:
1. Earning money is a worthy goal if you can measure your personal contribution towards it
2. It's not possible to measure that way in a big company
3. Too many people working towards different and even conflicting goals at big companies to do so
4. Because you cannot practically do so, your work's use value is not objectively measurable or provably useful
I don't think this is wrong in a statistically significant number of cases. But I also don't think it's helpful for thinking about the bottlenecks, release hatches and self regulation systems that tend to dominate a corporation's behavior. Your day to day experience being an engineer at a company has everything to do with:
1) how customers buy what makes the company money
2) how the company's continuing operation is funded
3) how executives and founders have structured leadership and management
In some companies, the customers are other businesses. In others, they're directly consumers. In still others, they're imaginary, or planned to exist in the future. In some companies, the continuing operation of a company is funded by present and future sales. In others, the continuing operation is funded by successive rounds of seed and growth stage dilutive fundraising. In some companies, leadership and management is structured around loose confederations of business units, lines of revenue, and product subdivisions. In others, it's structured around research domains, manufacturing pipeline stages, geographical market regions, or intellectual property holdings.
In any case, that's a far cry from "it's not possible to measure the impact of your work in relation to achieving a real company goal" -- just because it's not possible for _you_ to measure or argue the impact of your work doesn't mean that it's generally not possible. In fact, I would argue that learning how to credibly and objectively plan, measure and articulate the impact of your work is a huge part of what makes for a senior individual contributor. You will obviously come across challenges and inaccuracies in the exercise, but it doesn't invalidate the use value of it for both you and the firm. If personal goals are trumping company goals every time, then you work at a company with weak executive leadership and vision and should find one stronger at those areas if you can.
Somehow the idea that time is our only currency is conflated with efficiency. Yes, time is the most limited resources we have, and therefore the most precious, but does this mean we have to squeeze every last bit of productivity from our time? Do we really have to keep running all the time, always optimising for more efficiency?
I would say the exact opposite. If time is our most precious asset, let's rather spend it on what's really important: family, friends, community, environment, happiness, harmony. Let's pass our time doing things we love just the pleasure of doing it, rather than chasing after money, success of whatever. Let's live in the moment, for the moment.
I don’t think these are separate things at all. Being efficient with your work time is great because it lets you spend more time with family, friends, and so on.
Long commutes are really the killer here: it’s super difficult to cook a family dinner if you get off work at 6:00, spend 30-60 minutes commuting home, 30 minutes buying groceries, another 30 minutes cooking, etc. Working from home and then cooking dinner with delivered groceries gives you an extra hour+ with your family.
I meant in general, for society. Personally I have a 10 minute bike commute to a private office because I prefer to have a little bit of space between work and home.
I think many people have that issue; they cannot actually stay at home doing what they want. It is a restricting factor actually creating the commuting issue you mention. Many people need to go to the office. I think it would be better to educate the kids to not have that mental hangup. Personally I never had that feeling (and never worked in an office for 25+ years; I am at my kitchen table and so is my wife); I was expecting to hear either of a) I have no other choice, because job/money b) I need space between work & home. Over the years I had business partners trying the same thing and getting divorced (like now with the virus; people simply cannot sit at home or endure their spouse and kids); maybe it wasn't too solid to begin with?
> people simply cannot sit at home or endure their spouse and kids); maybe it wasn't too solid to begin with?
Eh, I think this is a symptom of what I’ll call “Modern Excess Syndrome”: the idea that if unlimited amounts of something aren’t beneficial, then the thing itself is broken. I.e., if ‘more = better’ isn’t true for X, then X is undesirable or broken. It just illustrates the lack of nuance we have in contemporary western society.
You see this play out in lots of ways. Helicopter parenting is a good example: the prevailing assumption is that a good parent is one who spends as much time and resources as humanly possibly with their kids. Yet as a consequence the children have worse outcomes, are less independent, etc. And people are less likely to become parents as they perceive parenthood as an end to their own life as individuals.
The truth is: it is in the nature of some things to be focused, or sporadic, or limited in some way. Chocolate cake is a delicious treat, but eating it for every meal is both unhealthy and destroys much of its uniqueness.
That could indeed be the case. I have, however, another explanation; most people just do stuff without thinking, planning or any forethought whatsoever just because 'it is normal'. You get married, you have kids, you buy a house, you get a job, you go to an office 9-5, you mingle with your colleagues (and you like it!) etc and everything else is weird or not for them. When confronted with major change, like this virus and as a result, working from home (getting laid off, health issues etc), they are forced from the path and realise that they do not like it. I 'zoom' with friends in my home country who have kids because 'it is something you do'; they love them when they see them 1-2 hours/day, but now they hate (big word, probably not true, but that's what they use, and not jokingly; they are getting burnt out) them, quite openly. They didn't think it through and that works because normally the kids are in school, sportclub, piano lessons, sleeping etc so you don't have to think too much.
A big issue is that people are not taught and don't teach their kids to enjoy things without outside stimulants. If I have a computer that works (it can be, and actually I prefer, one from the 70s or 80s) and a manual, I can be alone for years. Now with internet it is even easier. But I was taught by my parents to enjoy myself with minimal 'stuff'; books, pen & paper and just my own thoughts. Many people seem to lack that resulting in decisions that are unwise and don't work long term.
I agree in priciple but it's only by having money through success that we're able to enjoy those more meaningful aspects of life.
The only group of people that have the luxury of prioritizing those more meaningful things are those with enough assets that they can do whatever they want. Everyone else has to try to keep up.
Parameters of the universe are currency. Time is one of them, space (or area on earth’s surface) is another, and energy is a third. How these three things are used is what generates value to human beings. Each of the fundamental items can be traded individually, but money is used as a proxy for value. The most common trade is when a person can trade their time and their body’s energy. They produce some level of value using those two inputs, and receive money (a proxy for that value) in exchange. A person who can generate more value with the same amount of time and energy should be receiving more money than someone who generates less value, as money is only a proxy for value.
People can also secure space. We’re used to thinking in terms of real estate, which always prices in the value of a structure or natural resources or potential on top of the raw spatial resource. But the raw three dimensional space can be traded as well, just like time or energy, as it is finite for humans.
Money is just a tangible abstraction later on top of these fundamental parameters of the universe we trade. Providing lots of energy in a small space in a short period of time is incredibly valuable to humans, and so money reflects that. Using energy and time and space in a more efficient way to produce something in a factory is valuable, so money reflects that.
It’s not that money isn’t real currency, it’s just an abstraction layer for tradable natural commodities like time, and energy, and space.
Really though? During that time, you occupy a space, and the spaces afforded you by the society you are born into define the constraints within which you can apply your time. That is, all of your "currency you are born with" is really "futures".
Even the time on Earth you are allotted at birth is constrained by the environment you are born into.
It’s certainly the most valuable natural resource a person is born with, by far, but I’d argue there’s also technically space and energy there, too. The space a baby consumes is almost
valueless, and the energy output is also (though thoughts of babies being harvested in The Matrix come to mind).
You haven’t seen a baby consume space in your significant others life? Guessing not a woman? That actually sacrifices personal space (breasts) for baby? They consume and change boobies, and mommies time! Man mommy rant </>
Energy - or rather, the ability to convert it between various forms, like food > kinetic energy - is also a currency that we are born with. If you have grown very old, even having a week on hand will not help you lift a sledge hammer.
Spacetime is a better description, and it’s full of real estate. Mammals at least are born with a deed or a need for a boobie, or in big trouble. It’s all linked!
You're using "energy" as a pseudoscientific gloss. A human being provides an extremely meager amount of energy in the physics sense of the word. That energy could be purchased much more cheaply. The economic value of human labor is more closely tied to human intelligence/dexterity.
More reasons to think your comment is more about making the reader feel the insight is deep: there are other important conserved quantities in physics like charge; shouldn't that play a foundational role in economics if your analysis was correct? Will you next say that business leadership is really about "taking charge"?
You're relying your intuitive concept of entropy ("disorder"....of things people care about) rather than the actual definition of the thermodynamic concept. Entropy can not be reduced, only produced, and the work people do does not look anything like what you'd do if you were trying to minimize entropy production.
> You're using "energy" as a pseudoscientific gloss. A human being provides an extremely meager amount of energy in the physics sense of the word. That energy could be purchased much more cheaply. The economic value of human labor is more closely tied to human intelligence/dexterity.
Indeed humans provide very little energy. I've always used this to understand the value of oil to our society. Value, not the current price! :)
A barrel of oil fed into a machine can replace the work of hundreds of laborers. In this perspective, oil is ridiculously cheap, alternatively viewed, it provides us with a lifestyle that is luxiurious and some feats that are otherwise impossible (transoceanic flight).
No I’m not. I’m talking about energy quite literally. The chemical energy in food is converted into work output. Of course there are more efficient ways to harness energy, but not to power a human body. We use those more efficient method where we can, hence automation and machinery and tools. This is all reflected in the abstraction layer of money.
> The most common trade is when a person can trade their time and their body’s energy.
They are not "trading their body's energy". They a performing a task which requires innumerable inputs, among them energy, vitamins, oxygen, correct ambient temperatures, training, tools, etc. Energy has a preferred fundamental status in physics but it does not have such a status in this economic transaction. There is no reason to emphasize over any of the other inputs. You are bringing it up because of the aura attached to it in in physics.
> You are bringing it up because of the aura attached to it in in physics.
I didn't get that out of the original comment, and wouldn't presume to apply intent. I think most learned professionals here understand what is meant when they hear or say (for example) "that task took a lot of energy" or "I spent a lot of energy doing xyz..." without having to spell it out in academic terms.
Huh? First, look at the context. He's starts with "time", "space", and "energy", and discusses them in the context of the "parameters of the universe". Second, he specifically says in his reply to me he intended to mean the physics concept of ”energy", not the everyday notion as you suggest.
I can't edit my comment any longer, and I appreciate the rope of moderators in maintaining civil discourse, but for the record I stand behind my use of the term "pseudoscientific". The comment I critiqued uses the trappings of science but not the content.
I also purposefully did not insult the commenter's character, but restricted my reply to the comment itself.
Time goes as 1/(1-V^2)^0.5 in this market. Everything is pretty good until you really want time to stop, then, blammo! The Energy goes to infinity and the Space pretty much looses a dimension. It's especially bad, because it the dimension you're walking along!
Trust me, fella, stick with dollars, at least you can print new ones.
that’s kind of (not as eloquently) how i came to land on the labor theory of value needing to be more prominent in economic policy.
our application of energy (both physical and mental) transforms matter and collects/redirects ambient energy to productive use. that’s what generates value—gold in the ground is essentially worthless until we use labor to extract it. that it’s rare and has other interesting properties that make people trade more for it should be reflected in the labor value rather than some coercive capital value.
Time is easily wasted, though. The labor theory of value ignores this, and ignores the value of cleverness as a result.
If I need to grind wheat for bread every day, I could spend hours a day working hard to grind it by hand, or I could spend a month or so to build a very basic water wheel/grindstone and free up all that time.
The resultant bread is still bread either way. If someone chooses to spend all their time doing the old/inefficient type of grinding, by the labor theory of value, they should be able to demand more money for the result. But why pay more money for something that took more time to make than an equivalent product made with automation? We value bread for being tasty and filling, not by how much time went into making it that way.
Some level of labor is almost always required to get raw material into a valuable state, but the amount of labor does not determine the value. Labor just regulates supply; if something takes a lot of work to make, the supply will be lower than if it were easy to make, which affects value.
That’s the paradox of productivity. You create a machine to make bread and all that happens is that bread gets cheaper in time terms once you strip away the money abstraction.
You can see this by comparing production relative to something that can’t be automated away but is still valued over time - like a violin player.
The machine forces people in the same business down to your level, but people in a less automated arena go up in value relative to your bread.
It's not that. I can easily believe a good DNN could today generate better (by any kind of objective standard) music than one created by top composers.
But here is where we discover another component of value that exists in arts: the connection to human mind. Given a piece of music you like that you don't know the provenance of, you'll probably value it different after learning it was composed by a human vs. generated by an algorithm on the spot. It's irrational, but that's how things are with people.
A similar case would be of story generation in games. I don't know about you, but for me, learning that a story or a quest line was procedurally generated essentially destroys my suspension of disbelief on the spot.
It's like a defense mechanism. You value the work less because it was computer made rather than to admit to your flawed value assignment and vanity or human supremacism.
It's the difference between a friend giving you a note with words written on it, and finding a bunch of sticks arranged to the words by chance while strolling through the woods. There is nothing "flawed" about that valuing those things differently, how I judge things as valuable is entirely arbitrary, and entirely up to me.
And with AI it's not even by chance, even mediocre results are produced only after processing the input of countless humans. It's infinitely less cool of a coincidence than something that is actually random, like sticks forming a sentence where the wind blew them, and a complete NOP when it comes to human self-expression.
you're presuming the value and price are static in that example.
once the capital investment has been made, the price of the bread will go down because less labor will be used to make it, as the marginal cost of the bread goes down. the labor in the capital investment will be amortized over time in the price. the capital investment itself should only capture the riskiness portion of the project, not the majority of the resultant productivity gains.
and in many cases, people do pay more for a product made using more labor--i pay more for my manually-roasted beans than i would for mass-roasted ones. the higher price reflects the added labor in the value chain.
that's what i mean by the labor theory of value being more prominent, not to the exclusion of other theories of value.
I’m not making any statements about current practices or what value is typically assigned to labor vs initial capital investments, just to be clear.
And I know prices go down due to less labor being needed, meaning more supply results from less investment, but my point is that it’s wrong to assume labor is the underlying source of value. Labor has no intrinsic value. It’s only valuable in relation to output.
For some people, the “image” of a product and the amount of time and care put into it is an important part of that output. So they value products that have high labor costs even when comparable but less labor intensive products exist.
But to take an extreme example, if I banged two rocks together from 9-5 every day for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t expect a paycheck because there isn’t any useful output there, despite the labor.
The proof was in the counter example I provided, which is one of many. There are clearly instances where labor is present, but there isn't any value being generated. If labor had intrinsic value, that would not be the case.
I'm not discounting the value of labor relative to output, and it's clearly related to how we assign value to that output, but I think the labor theory of value is too simplistic and places too much value on labor and not enough value on utility.
Although a bit of a tangent, The British Museum created this well-crafted 4:36 video about the short-lived concept of a time-based currency from the early 1800s. This is currency based on the notion that wages and prices are measured in hours instead of units of precious metal.
> Time is one of them, space (or area on earth’s surface) is another, and energy is a third
I would combine the last two and call them "mass" and that currency is just an abstraction for how much mass you "own".
> The most common trade is when a person can trade their time and their body’s energy.
With this example I would say they are trading time and sometimes mass. They are trading time by the duration they work for and in certain jobs taking time off the years of their life. They may also move somewhere for a job even though they don't like the place and they spend their time in an non-ideal location.
They mass comes into effect when they are using their own car and gas to get to work, if they have to pay for their own work clothes, etc.
It seems appropriate to mention The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi, a whirlwind sf novel where a large part of the story involves a city where the currency literally is Time. (When a person runs out of Time, they are transformed into a Quiet, mutely doing the necessary work to keep the city running, until they have earned enough Time to be restored to themselves.)
Yeah, that’s why I can’t really understand fellows not willing to pay a tenner or two for any service, content or product that will make them spare hours and even days of their uniquely precious time!
In re: time is money, it's even worse than that: attention is money.
The quality of time varies with the "self-remembrance" if you will.
- - - -
Take time to "pop the 'why?' stack. In practice many of us are "yak
shaving" and wasting a lot of time and effort on "low-leverage" actions.
> yak shaving
> [MIT AI Lab, after 2000: orig. probably from a Ren & Stimpy episode.]
Any seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve
a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion
later, solves the real problem you're working on.
The most metal programmers I know type hella fast. One guy in our
office, we would play hangman and the only way to beat him was to figure
out the word before he did, because the millisecond his brain "got it"
you would hear a small explosion as he typed the word on his clicky
keyboard in a single motion. If you figured out the word at the same
time as he did he won. SOB could also write bug-free C++ by the page. At speed.
Another guy I knew had a tiling WM and only used terminals. A vim man,
he could type slightly faster then the system could respond, emitting a
single stream of characters that flowed smoothly from vim to wm to
shell and back again, his locus of attention flying around too
fast to follow even if you knew what he was doing (editing and
recompiling or whatever.)
- - - -
(Ooooo... Major points off for deep linking to XKCD without attribution.
Bad pool. It's probably one of the most important and useful
XKCD comicS. "Here’s an old comic..." ah, that's cold blooded.)
Other than that, this is the best general advice for programmers that
I've seen for a while. Yay!
("Does xkcd even need attribution?" Sir? https://xkcd.com/1053/ would you forego the delight of being the one who introduced somebody to XKCD? (^_^) <3 )
You mentioned "if one person on a team of 10 engineers spends 3 whole days shaving off even 30 seconds on a task done by everyone only 5 times a day, we would have gotten a complete return on investment over a period of just 6 months".
How did you get 6 months? can you shed some light on the calculation? Thanks!
I've often wondered what the world would look like if languages were actually theoretically different not just practically.
I.e. what if you actually needed Fortran to write a program designed for scientific computation, or Prolog for GOFAI etc. Maybe some cases would fit into several languages ("I showed that SimCity is a special kind of database so you can write it in SQL") but you would have proven gaps in capabilities.
Language disputes would be way more fun.
P.S. After you finished thinking about this, think about what model theory would look like if Lindström's theorems were false.
I have a hard time empathizing with people’s desire for saving time or being efficient. I feel like all I have is time and I don’t mind helping others out when they need help, filling out useless forms, or waiting in line. Everything sort of have its own beauty. I’m not sure how I got here, but to me time just feels infinite.
I really would love to believe that this mindset is possible, but I run into the following problem:
If time really seems infinite to you, and you see the beauty in every "overly time-consuming" procedure, you must draw the line somewhere.
If you wait in line, and every minute, the next in line is served, and you are standing in 5th place, you might think "ok, we've got to wait..give or take 5mins"
Now imagine that every 50 seconds, someone cuts into the line ahead of you, with some plausible excuse (health-related, or "in a rush" or whatever else you'd accept).
How many people do you allow to push you back before you decide to no longer allow people to cut ahead of you? I think that's where you draw the value of your time.
Not the one you asked, but I have a similar attitude, and some sense of trust and fairness is necessary to maintain this attitude.
If I'm in urgent care for a relatively non-serious problem, and people who much more urgently need care keep getting served ahead of me, that just seems like the right way to do things, and I'll be happy to wait my turn, or eventually give up and go home.
On the other hand, in line to pay for purchases I would not like for someone to cut in front of me. It's rude, and there is an established norm that they would be selfishly breaking.
>My Language is the best (Or, your language sucks)
>No, it is not. Both Church and Turing proved that.
This is not true, a simple check - are you writing in assembler/C? Why not? They are the fastest languages and both are perfectly complete from Church and Turing standpoint. But of course, there are thousands of other criteria that make the difference.
When comparing careers, I'm amazed how little people mention free time. You see people saying things like "I did blah to move from $X thousand a year to $Y thousand a year" but it's rare anyone mentions how much free time they have like "I earn $X thousand a year and have Y days off".
I understand more money now could mean you'll have more free time later, but earning a lot with no time for your own personal growth doesn't sound great to me. I'd rather take a pay cut for substantially more time off.
Over a forty year career, I only worked full time for perhaps 30% of that time. Sure, I left a lot of money on the table but my wife and I are still financially secure and working 25 to 32 hours a week on average gave me more time with friends and family, and time to write (which I enjoy doing).
Spend effort on career and job skill development, but treat jobs as transactions of time for money, and I suggest devaluing the value of money once basic needs and saving for future needs are met.
> Over a forty year career, I only worked full time for perhaps 30% of that time. Sure, I left a lot of money on the table but my wife and I are still financially secure and working 25 to 32 hours a week on average gave me more time with friends and family, and time to write (which I enjoy doing).
Exactly, that sounds amazing! I'd love to hear more people talk this way when they mention their earnings.
I do disagree with a lot of it since I believe more in maximizing human potential through mindfulness and tuning ourselves instead of our tools.
re: “ You don’t want to be the person who thinks their problem through on a piece of paper,...” For difficult problems I think you do want to be this kind of person. Walking away from your laptop, sitting outside or anywhere relaxing with a pad of paper and a pen, and really thinking is a super power.
The author’s good advice on spending a few minutes a day learning about your IDE/tools can also be applied to the idea of sitting quietly a few times a day with paper and pen and just thinking. If you don’t have this habit, how about trying it for just ten minutes a day to see if it pays off for your work style?
This sounds like a good idea, and I’m planning to try it out. Thanks for sharing!
I find that a lot of the time when I’m figuring out how to solve a problem, I need to read a lot of code. Is that something you do before you sit down with pen and paper?
I used to have the habit of printing out other people's code to read, and read it like I would a book. I stopped doing that a long time ago, but I used to get real value from doing that. I still like to read other people's code, but I am more likely to do it by browsing github on my iPad.
I think you can apply this by journaling or keeping a personal diary as well. Just sit before bed and recount the thoughts of the day and put them on paper, maybe intending to read over them later to find out when some event happened or in 20 years to see what you were doing during the quarantine.
The act of reflection and organization itself is meditative.
> You don’t want to be the person who thinks their problem through on a piece of paper, has all the ‘structure ready in the head’ but gets bored halfway through implementing it since it’s a lot to type out and it’s taking a lot of time.
Wow. I hope there aren't many people that think this way, as it sounds like a great recipe for crappy software.
Thinking things through is definitely a super power. And "typing really fast" is usually an anti-pattern.
Isn’t it ironic that in the “young dev” section he tells stories of how he “set them straight” on their design choices, and then the next section is about the naivety of “your way is wrong”...
The conversation on queues especially; I can absolutely side with the new dev there. Queues have guarantees, database writes have guarantees, you just pick the ones you care about, not decide based on irrational fear of losing data.
As time does not exist and is just a perception of the spirit, it cannot be a currency. Its apparence is too relative to oneself to have a scaling process...
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 274 ms ] threadIf you're stressed out, hungry, got the low-blood sugar, tired, distracted, etc. your attention is much less valuable (to you) than if you're relaxed, well-fed and -rested, focused, etc.
One of the greatest forms of "leverage" we have in the world is the capability of developing and focusing the quality of our attention, "concentration" or "one-point mind". That's why meditation is worthwhile (one of the reasons anyway) because, paradoxically, sitting and doing "nothing" for an hour makes the other 10~12 hours way more productive, due to the improvement in Q-of-A[ttention].
This implies that tomorrow is a bank.
> it gets you thinking. What prevents time from being used as currency? Or are we really doing the same by paying people an hourly rate instead of based on their accomplishments? Not to mention how many lives that million years capsule must have cost.
Also. Economy there had no sense. Every person is passively using 24h worth of 'money' every day by simply existing. That means, to make ends meet they must earn 24h + some surpus to make a living, but the dude earned something like 5 hours in a shift (he had ~23:55 before shift, and 1:04:50 after. If shift lasted 8 hours, he was making just 13 hours per day - totally unsustainable.
The idea was nice, but I feel it was a somewhat wasted potential.
You work and convert your time into currency which can be traded for other goods or services.
When currency is manipulated, it allows the manipulator to make your currency worth more or less. effectively theft.
- Crosswalks and traffic lights would become non-existent and replaced with more pedestrian overpasses, turning/merging lanes, and other designs. Waiting for the light to change is a huge waste of time for both pedestrians and drivers. It seems like we might get this eventually with self-driving cars.
- Minimization of waiting rooms. If your appointment will be delayed, you’ll be informed of it ahead of time via SMS. Time slots are strictly enforced to avoid overlap.
- Purchase and checkout items while you shop, rather than waiting in line at a cash register. Or just skip shopping in person and order everything via delivery.
- Adoption of remote work and minimization of unnecessary commutes. Plus faster public transit in general. Japan is pretty good with this (the Shinkansen is impressive.)
but it's not so simple, because then you have to climb up stairs, which takes more time... you walk more steps
add some heavy duty sun and people rather wait in the shade down below rather than climb up.
Also pedestrian overpasses tend to be really narrow (read: uncomfortable)
Also, why should we be so stingy with time? it's better (IMHO) to lived relaxed, otherwise we will end up under conditions similar (they say) to amazon warehouse workers which have their bathroom breaks measured in seconds.
Because it's fungible. If I save 10 seconds, maybe I get to keep those for myself.
I am just (strangely) reminded of Charles Dickens' classic a christmas story: "bah! humbug!".
Presumably engineering tech will also get better and cheaper and some sort of rapid outdoor escalator or elevator could also solve the problem.
Regarding stinginess: I understand where you’re coming from, but I also feel like there are time-intensive aspects of modern life which have little-or-no value, like waiting in traffic.
I believe this is starting to happen in some places, example (and an interesting video on RFID tags in general)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QKrHi-G9WQ
And of course Amazon Go - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPZdWuOPaHY
Also I believe our brain is very very much tailored to enjoy rapid resolutions.
Yet I still worry about overuse of the idea leading to more stress (faster faster faster).
No TV, entertainment etc, which basically exist only because we have more time than we know what to do with, so we pay people to kill time.
I never do any singular thing with the exception of work.
I won’t leave the house unless I can divide and group that time into multiple objectives thus spreading the overhead of time lost against many achievements.
If not in a meeting I have my pleasureable conversations via car phone when I commute some where. If I’m not in a meeting when commuting or talking to friend / family I’m streaming a new pluralsight tutorial over Bluetooth.
I work through any meeting that doesn’t maximize my output to 100%. (I’m remote most of the time)
I listen to self growth audio books when I shower.
When I head to the bar if I’m not killing two birds with one stone networking or meeting a client I’ll bring my laptop to get work done.
Tasks that I cannot streamline and time intensive I pay for.
Blah blah I can go on and on.
Ironically the one thing I haven’t mastered is how to delegate to achieve bigger goals leveraging employees.
--
What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass, Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight, Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance, And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.
- W.H.Davies (1871-1940)
Being able to stop and just do nothing once in a while is important. And I do mean "nothing". Not play on one's phone or be idle in front of the TV. Nothing, as in sit down and just be left alone with your thoughts.
This is the part that misled me. It sounds like that blanket statement doesn’t include deliberate leisure time.
In Sweden, this has been a thing in most larger grocery stores for more than 10 years, e.g. https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
The store could gather how much time it took you to scan between items and in which order, but you can pay with cash if you're worried about personal privacy.
I've seen the kiosk system at Kroger in the midwest.
Sam's Club offers a mobile app scanner.
Perhaps it's just the places I frequent, but I've gotten to the point where I take them for granted. Keep an eye out for a kiosk that seems to be a kind of fnord. Check if your nearby groceries have a smartphone app that offers scanning via your phone if you're comfortable with that. The ones I've used worked fine, but I tend not to use the phone apps because I have a chronically low smartphone battery and storage space.
Jobs (unfulfilled value) don't exist to provide a living wage.
A living wage is earned by doing something of value (a job).
I'm struggling to fathom another reason for a job existing (perhaps I'm closed-minded about it).
Jobs are gaps, unfulfilled value -- why would jobs exist otherwise?
I've really like to hear your perspective on this.
But then, we will still waste 20 times more looking at stupid things on internet.
- Customer service is not free of charge after used the up free quota.
- Telephone, video/voice chat are deprecated because these communication require people to use time at specific point rather than in the convenient time they choose.
Oh yeah, that definitely won't make companies just wait until you're in the paid period before giving you service.
I’m not convinced this one would optimize for time unless it’s also optimizing for items falling through the cracks. If non-conformity is actually being caught it means the work has to be done twice to bring it in line with regulation after the fact.
Recent example: Boeing Starliner was not meeting requirements but oversight seemed inadequate ultimately requiring a multi-million dollar re-do once the gaps were caught after it was supposedly finished
Edit: down votes are fine but please extend the courtesy of explaining so as to add to the conversation
vegas has pedestrian overpasses and they are a tremendous waste of time - much worse than crosswalks. A better approach would be to keep the pedestrians at grade-level and have car under-passes
In downtown SF, you could put lower diagonal street bridges which would save an infinite amount of time for people driving.
It has the advantage of being easy on the eyes above-ground. I can imagine in places with serious homelessness issues there could be problems, but the ones I experienced were fairly nice - some more plain than others, but generally graffiti free, well lit, and well used.
If you are disabled (permanently or temporarily), old, have strollers or luggage, then level-changes add quite some time in the best case or are completely unusable in the worst case.
In my experiences traveling with Asia, usually these systems were not outfitted with elevators.
Regarding Vegas, it doesnt seem like crosswalks are more efficient, especially from the perspective of the driver. 1) Large intersections with crosswalks tends to have people linger in the middle of the street. This delays the flow of traffic. 2) Right turns are much slower. 3) People who jaywalk. This can be easily observed in Vegas at major hotels. Cars are always struggling to turn into the hotel with large crowds of people trying to cross regardless of the color of the light.
That said, I agree with another poster that crosswalks are optimized to force you into hotels/shops and are subpar.
- Crosswalks don't do well in overly large intersections
- Vegas over-concentrates traffic into large arterials that require large intersections in the first place.
A traditional American street grid, while requiring more stopping time, in general allows traffic to diffuse across many different routes, making large intersections with two ten lane roads unnecessary.
I'm sure more of it will come.
That would be great! Then I can keep working until the last minute and, if no SMS was received, teleport myself directly into the doctor’s office.
> Time slots are strictly enforced to avoid overlap.
Then everyone will be scheduled, and charged, much more time than the expected duration of a consultation.
It would look like what it is today. Sure, there are still inefficiencies, but we have a high standard of living because it is optimized for time. For example, it used to be that 95% of people worked on the farm to raise enough food. Now it's like 2%. Nobody spends time anymore making cloth, which used to be the bulk of "women's work".
> Or just skip shopping in person and order everything via delivery
Isn't that what we do now? I've been doing nearly all my shopping online since long before this quarantine, exactly because it's a huge time saver. I think I visited the mall once in the last year, and that was for a social reason, not shopping.
That's because it's designed and run by the government, which has no interest in saving time.
How many hours do we all waste waiting for a light to change when there's no cross traffic? having a "platoon" of cars come to a halt to let one car cross? having a light turn yellow at the last moment to slam on the brakes? How much gas has this cost, too?
By mounting cameras on the lights and a little AI programming, and an optimization algorithm, I bet the lights could be a major factor in reducing gas consumption, smoothing traffic flow, reducing accidents, and saving time.
In fact, the AI could be self-learning, like the fuel injection systems on cars.
This section feels like a stub where the author forgot to finish it. Was really hoping for some good ideas.
- automate stuff
- avoid time sinks
- be pragmatic about technology choices
This isn't article isn't about currency, btw.
when you are making products (material widgets of any kind) it is possible to achieve marginal costs with parallel and serial manufacture, and with technology and specialized machines.
but if you're selling service (e.g. a waiter) then it's not really possible to "industrialize" production the same way
and don't get me started on software (becuase I wouldn't know how to start)
https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q="gregg...
https://archive.org/search.php?query=Gregg+College+Keyboardi...
Self-taught before secondary school in about six weeks, among my best investments ever.
So long as it's a QWERTY layout, publication year really doesn'y matter.
The culture of wasting time is so pervasive that the vast majority of developers who practice it don't even realize that they're doing it - Ironically, they're often the same people who write long articles about how to be productive and who brag about how organized and full their schedule is and how they're using all the latest productivity tools and how high their test coverage % is and how good their workflow and CI pipeline is... I call BS on all this.
People who spend most of their time explicitly thinking about processes are bureaucrats. Truly productive people don't need to think about processes, they evolve naturally through sweat and tears; good processes are the byproduct (emphasis on the word 'byproduct') of a focused mindset of desperately wanting to achieve specific goals, not the mindset of ticking-off boxes from a static checklist where you don't even understand the underlying purpose of the work.
You cannot be productive without a clear sense of purpose and goals. Unfortunately most software jobs today lack purpose - In this case it makes no sense to even talk about productivity. How can you know how productive (how fast you're moving towards your goal) you are if you don't even know what the end goal is. Finishing something is not a goal, it's a task. A goal is about a deeper purpose.
Also if your goal is to help your company earn more money, this is only a worthy goal if you have a way to check your personal progress towards that goal. Usually this is not possible to do in a big company because there are too many people working towards different goals within the same company (sometimes even conflicting goals); the reality is that your work probably doesn't matter so there is no such thing as productivity in a corporate environment because it's not possible to measure the impact of your work in relation to achieving a real company goal... However, if your goal is to maximize your personal ranking or salary within the company, this is a goal against which it is easy to measure progress; that's why personal goals trump company goals every time.
KPIs are a ridiculous, completely futile attempt to fix this problem.
I found interesting the concept of Internal Market. This book appears to be describing exactly what I got in my mind: "Internal Markets: Bringing the Power of Free Enterprise Inside Your Organization ".
If you are either kind of people and the big organization sucks for you, use a smaller one maybe? Or find another big one that works acceptably? Talk about one differs slightly from another?
You can rant about the deficiencies of big organizations or you can observe a well known fact that it is a very hard civilization-wide problem. Fortunes are made even from minuscule optimizations in this area and there is no shortage of execs experimenting with these. And here enter you with "the reality is that [employee's] work probably doesn't matter".
"Usually ... it's not possible to measure the impact of your work in relation to achieving a real company goal"
You say a few things here: 1. Earning money is a worthy goal if you can measure your personal contribution towards it
2. It's not possible to measure that way in a big company
3. Too many people working towards different and even conflicting goals at big companies to do so
4. Because you cannot practically do so, your work's use value is not objectively measurable or provably useful
I don't think this is wrong in a statistically significant number of cases. But I also don't think it's helpful for thinking about the bottlenecks, release hatches and self regulation systems that tend to dominate a corporation's behavior. Your day to day experience being an engineer at a company has everything to do with:
1) how customers buy what makes the company money
2) how the company's continuing operation is funded
3) how executives and founders have structured leadership and management
In some companies, the customers are other businesses. In others, they're directly consumers. In still others, they're imaginary, or planned to exist in the future. In some companies, the continuing operation of a company is funded by present and future sales. In others, the continuing operation is funded by successive rounds of seed and growth stage dilutive fundraising. In some companies, leadership and management is structured around loose confederations of business units, lines of revenue, and product subdivisions. In others, it's structured around research domains, manufacturing pipeline stages, geographical market regions, or intellectual property holdings.
In any case, that's a far cry from "it's not possible to measure the impact of your work in relation to achieving a real company goal" -- just because it's not possible for _you_ to measure or argue the impact of your work doesn't mean that it's generally not possible. In fact, I would argue that learning how to credibly and objectively plan, measure and articulate the impact of your work is a huge part of what makes for a senior individual contributor. You will obviously come across challenges and inaccuracies in the exercise, but it doesn't invalidate the use value of it for both you and the firm. If personal goals are trumping company goals every time, then you work at a company with weak executive leadership and vision and should find one stronger at those areas if you can.
I would say the exact opposite. If time is our most precious asset, let's rather spend it on what's really important: family, friends, community, environment, happiness, harmony. Let's pass our time doing things we love just the pleasure of doing it, rather than chasing after money, success of whatever. Let's live in the moment, for the moment.
Long commutes are really the killer here: it’s super difficult to cook a family dinner if you get off work at 6:00, spend 30-60 minutes commuting home, 30 minutes buying groceries, another 30 minutes cooking, etc. Working from home and then cooking dinner with delivered groceries gives you an extra hour+ with your family.
They are, but you are on HN so it's safe to assume you have other options, so why do you commute?
Eh, I think this is a symptom of what I’ll call “Modern Excess Syndrome”: the idea that if unlimited amounts of something aren’t beneficial, then the thing itself is broken. I.e., if ‘more = better’ isn’t true for X, then X is undesirable or broken. It just illustrates the lack of nuance we have in contemporary western society.
You see this play out in lots of ways. Helicopter parenting is a good example: the prevailing assumption is that a good parent is one who spends as much time and resources as humanly possibly with their kids. Yet as a consequence the children have worse outcomes, are less independent, etc. And people are less likely to become parents as they perceive parenthood as an end to their own life as individuals.
The truth is: it is in the nature of some things to be focused, or sporadic, or limited in some way. Chocolate cake is a delicious treat, but eating it for every meal is both unhealthy and destroys much of its uniqueness.
A big issue is that people are not taught and don't teach their kids to enjoy things without outside stimulants. If I have a computer that works (it can be, and actually I prefer, one from the 70s or 80s) and a manual, I can be alone for years. Now with internet it is even easier. But I was taught by my parents to enjoy myself with minimal 'stuff'; books, pen & paper and just my own thoughts. Many people seem to lack that resulting in decisions that are unwise and don't work long term.
The only group of people that have the luxury of prioritizing those more meaningful things are those with enough assets that they can do whatever they want. Everyone else has to try to keep up.
People can also secure space. We’re used to thinking in terms of real estate, which always prices in the value of a structure or natural resources or potential on top of the raw spatial resource. But the raw three dimensional space can be traded as well, just like time or energy, as it is finite for humans.
Money is just a tangible abstraction later on top of these fundamental parameters of the universe we trade. Providing lots of energy in a small space in a short period of time is incredibly valuable to humans, and so money reflects that. Using energy and time and space in a more efficient way to produce something in a factory is valuable, so money reflects that.
It’s not that money isn’t real currency, it’s just an abstraction layer for tradable natural commodities like time, and energy, and space.
Even the time on Earth you are allotted at birth is constrained by the environment you are born into.
We're born with a relative lack of entropy, which is the only thing that allows us to do anything. Eventually we inevitably return to equilibrium.
More reasons to think your comment is more about making the reader feel the insight is deep: there are other important conserved quantities in physics like charge; shouldn't that play a foundational role in economics if your analysis was correct? Will you next say that business leadership is really about "taking charge"?
Indeed humans provide very little energy. I've always used this to understand the value of oil to our society. Value, not the current price! :)
A barrel of oil fed into a machine can replace the work of hundreds of laborers. In this perspective, oil is ridiculously cheap, alternatively viewed, it provides us with a lifestyle that is luxiurious and some feats that are otherwise impossible (transoceanic flight).
> The most common trade is when a person can trade their time and their body’s energy.
They are not "trading their body's energy". They a performing a task which requires innumerable inputs, among them energy, vitamins, oxygen, correct ambient temperatures, training, tools, etc. Energy has a preferred fundamental status in physics but it does not have such a status in this economic transaction. There is no reason to emphasize over any of the other inputs. You are bringing it up because of the aura attached to it in in physics.
I didn't get that out of the original comment, and wouldn't presume to apply intent. I think most learned professionals here understand what is meant when they hear or say (for example) "that task took a lot of energy" or "I spent a lot of energy doing xyz..." without having to spell it out in academic terms.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I also purposefully did not insult the commenter's character, but restricted my reply to the comment itself.
Time goes as 1/(1-V^2)^0.5 in this market. Everything is pretty good until you really want time to stop, then, blammo! The Energy goes to infinity and the Space pretty much looses a dimension. It's especially bad, because it the dimension you're walking along!
Trust me, fella, stick with dollars, at least you can print new ones.
What a racket!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_factor
our application of energy (both physical and mental) transforms matter and collects/redirects ambient energy to productive use. that’s what generates value—gold in the ground is essentially worthless until we use labor to extract it. that it’s rare and has other interesting properties that make people trade more for it should be reflected in the labor value rather than some coercive capital value.
If I need to grind wheat for bread every day, I could spend hours a day working hard to grind it by hand, or I could spend a month or so to build a very basic water wheel/grindstone and free up all that time.
The resultant bread is still bread either way. If someone chooses to spend all their time doing the old/inefficient type of grinding, by the labor theory of value, they should be able to demand more money for the result. But why pay more money for something that took more time to make than an equivalent product made with automation? We value bread for being tasty and filling, not by how much time went into making it that way.
Some level of labor is almost always required to get raw material into a valuable state, but the amount of labor does not determine the value. Labor just regulates supply; if something takes a lot of work to make, the supply will be lower than if it were easy to make, which affects value.
You can see this by comparing production relative to something that can’t be automated away but is still valued over time - like a violin player.
The machine forces people in the same business down to your level, but people in a less automated arena go up in value relative to your bread.
https://youtu.be/gA03iyI3yEA
> can't be automated away
But here is where we discover another component of value that exists in arts: the connection to human mind. Given a piece of music you like that you don't know the provenance of, you'll probably value it different after learning it was composed by a human vs. generated by an algorithm on the spot. It's irrational, but that's how things are with people.
A similar case would be of story generation in games. I don't know about you, but for me, learning that a story or a quest line was procedurally generated essentially destroys my suspension of disbelief on the spot.
And with AI it's not even by chance, even mediocre results are produced only after processing the input of countless humans. It's infinitely less cool of a coincidence than something that is actually random, like sticks forming a sentence where the wind blew them, and a complete NOP when it comes to human self-expression.
once the capital investment has been made, the price of the bread will go down because less labor will be used to make it, as the marginal cost of the bread goes down. the labor in the capital investment will be amortized over time in the price. the capital investment itself should only capture the riskiness portion of the project, not the majority of the resultant productivity gains.
and in many cases, people do pay more for a product made using more labor--i pay more for my manually-roasted beans than i would for mass-roasted ones. the higher price reflects the added labor in the value chain.
that's what i mean by the labor theory of value being more prominent, not to the exclusion of other theories of value.
And I know prices go down due to less labor being needed, meaning more supply results from less investment, but my point is that it’s wrong to assume labor is the underlying source of value. Labor has no intrinsic value. It’s only valuable in relation to output.
For some people, the “image” of a product and the amount of time and care put into it is an important part of that output. So they value products that have high labor costs even when comparable but less labor intensive products exist.
But to take an extreme example, if I banged two rocks together from 9-5 every day for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t expect a paycheck because there isn’t any useful output there, despite the labor.
primarily a value judgment stated axiomatically, rather than proof.
you could also argue that labor is the only intrinsic value, with all other value being projected onto the output as fashion.
I'm not discounting the value of labor relative to output, and it's clearly related to how we assign value to that output, but I think the labor theory of value is too simplistic and places too much value on labor and not enough value on utility.
https://youtu.be/0Q3qcutiIwo
I would combine the last two and call them "mass" and that currency is just an abstraction for how much mass you "own".
> The most common trade is when a person can trade their time and their body’s energy.
With this example I would say they are trading time and sometimes mass. They are trading time by the duration they work for and in certain jobs taking time off the years of their life. They may also move somewhere for a job even though they don't like the place and they spend their time in an non-ideal location.
They mass comes into effect when they are using their own car and gas to get to work, if they have to pay for their own work clothes, etc.
In re: time is money, it's even worse than that: attention is money.
The quality of time varies with the "self-remembrance" if you will.
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Take time to "pop the 'why?' stack. In practice many of us are "yak shaving" and wasting a lot of time and effort on "low-leverage" actions.
> yak shaving
> [MIT AI Lab, after 2000: orig. probably from a Ren & Stimpy episode.] Any seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later, solves the real problem you're working on.
~http://catb.org/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html
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The most metal programmers I know type hella fast. One guy in our office, we would play hangman and the only way to beat him was to figure out the word before he did, because the millisecond his brain "got it" you would hear a small explosion as he typed the word on his clicky keyboard in a single motion. If you figured out the word at the same time as he did he won. SOB could also write bug-free C++ by the page. At speed.
Another guy I knew had a tiling WM and only used terminals. A vim man, he could type slightly faster then the system could respond, emitting a single stream of characters that flowed smoothly from vim to wm to shell and back again, his locus of attention flying around too fast to follow even if you knew what he was doing (editing and recompiling or whatever.)
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(Ooooo... Major points off for deep linking to XKCD without attribution. Bad pool. It's probably one of the most important and useful XKCD comicS. "Here’s an old comic..." ah, that's cold blooded.)
Other than that, this is the best general advice for programmers that I've seen for a while. Yay!
Point taken and corrected (noob blogger mistakes!)
Thanks!
("Does xkcd even need attribution?" Sir? https://xkcd.com/1053/ would you forego the delight of being the one who introduced somebody to XKCD? (^_^) <3 )
Thank you sensei ! Well met indeed :)
How did you get 6 months? can you shed some light on the calculation? Thanks!
I.e. what if you actually needed Fortran to write a program designed for scientific computation, or Prolog for GOFAI etc. Maybe some cases would fit into several languages ("I showed that SimCity is a special kind of database so you can write it in SQL") but you would have proven gaps in capabilities.
Language disputes would be way more fun.
P.S. After you finished thinking about this, think about what model theory would look like if Lindström's theorems were false.
If time really seems infinite to you, and you see the beauty in every "overly time-consuming" procedure, you must draw the line somewhere.
If you wait in line, and every minute, the next in line is served, and you are standing in 5th place, you might think "ok, we've got to wait..give or take 5mins"
Now imagine that every 50 seconds, someone cuts into the line ahead of you, with some plausible excuse (health-related, or "in a rush" or whatever else you'd accept).
How many people do you allow to push you back before you decide to no longer allow people to cut ahead of you? I think that's where you draw the value of your time.
If I'm in urgent care for a relatively non-serious problem, and people who much more urgently need care keep getting served ahead of me, that just seems like the right way to do things, and I'll be happy to wait my turn, or eventually give up and go home.
On the other hand, in line to pay for purchases I would not like for someone to cut in front of me. It's rude, and there is an established norm that they would be selfishly breaking.
>No, it is not. Both Church and Turing proved that.
This is not true, a simple check - are you writing in assembler/C? Why not? They are the fastest languages and both are perfectly complete from Church and Turing standpoint. But of course, there are thousands of other criteria that make the difference.
You can always insist you were arguing for theoretical expressivity when people start throwing counter-examples at you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressive_power_(computer_sci... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit
I understand more money now could mean you'll have more free time later, but earning a lot with no time for your own personal growth doesn't sound great to me. I'd rather take a pay cut for substantially more time off.
Spend effort on career and job skill development, but treat jobs as transactions of time for money, and I suggest devaluing the value of money once basic needs and saving for future needs are met.
Exactly, that sounds amazing! I'd love to hear more people talk this way when they mention their earnings.
I do disagree with a lot of it since I believe more in maximizing human potential through mindfulness and tuning ourselves instead of our tools.
re: “ You don’t want to be the person who thinks their problem through on a piece of paper,...” For difficult problems I think you do want to be this kind of person. Walking away from your laptop, sitting outside or anywhere relaxing with a pad of paper and a pen, and really thinking is a super power.
The author’s good advice on spending a few minutes a day learning about your IDE/tools can also be applied to the idea of sitting quietly a few times a day with paper and pen and just thinking. If you don’t have this habit, how about trying it for just ten minutes a day to see if it pays off for your work style?
I find that a lot of the time when I’m figuring out how to solve a problem, I need to read a lot of code. Is that something you do before you sit down with pen and paper?
Cannot one do both?
The act of reflection and organization itself is meditative.
Wow. I hope there aren't many people that think this way, as it sounds like a great recipe for crappy software.
Thinking things through is definitely a super power. And "typing really fast" is usually an anti-pattern.
The conversation on queues especially; I can absolutely side with the new dev there. Queues have guarantees, database writes have guarantees, you just pick the ones you care about, not decide based on irrational fear of losing data.