Category: Food for thought

This comment by kqr on the news that Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with just six minutes of fuel left.

In safety-critical systems, we distinguish between accidents (actual loss, e.g. lives, equipment, etc.) and hazardous states. The equation is

hazardous state + environmental conditions = accident

Since we can only control the system, and not its environment, we focus on preventing hazardous states, rather than accidents. If we can keep the system out of all hazardous states, we also avoid accidents. (Trying to prevent accidents while not paying attention to hazardous states amounts to relying on the environment always being on our side, and is bound to fail eventually.)

One such hazardous state we have defined in aviation is “less than N minutes of fuel remaining when landing”. If an aircraft lands with less than N minutes of fuel on board, it would only have taken bad environmental conditions to make it crash, rather than land. Thus we design commercial aviation so that planes always have N minutes of fuel remaining when landing. If they don’t, that’s a big deal: they’ve entered a hazardous state, and we never want to see that. (I don’t remember if N is 30 or 45 or 60 but somewhere in that region.)

For another example, one of my children loves playing around cliffs and rocks. Initially he was very keen on promising me that he wouldn’t fall down. I explained the difference between accidents and hazardous states to him in childrens’ terms, and he realised slowly that he cannot control whether or not he has an accident, so it’s a bad idea to promise me that he won’t have an accident. What he can control is whether or not bad environmental conditions lead to an accident, and he does that by keeping out of hazardous states. In this case, the hazardous state would be standing less than a child-height within a ledge when there is nobody below ready to catch. He can promise me to avoid that, and that satisfies me a lot more than a promise to not fall.

Om Malik’s interview with Rodney Brooks.

Om: It’s much easier to fund the promise than a real business, because real businesses have limitations on how fast they can grow. Whereas if you don’t know, you can live (and fund) the dream. There’s nothing wrong with living the dream—that’s how you get to fund crazy things in this industry. But people doing more rational things do pay the price.

You’ve been in robotics for a long time. There are misconceptions about robots and robotics. The biggest fallacy is that we think of them in human form. Ten years later, that idea of a humanoid has become so pervasive. We don’t think about things that do robotic tasks, like ad systems that serve ads constantly—they are also robots.

Rodney: The robots—they’re not embodied. I always say about a physical robot, the physical appearance makes a promise about what it can do. The Roomba was this little disc on the floor. It didn’t promise much—you saw it and thought, that’s not going to clean the windows. But you can imagine it cleaning the floor. But the human form sort of promises it can do anything a human can. And that’s why it’s so attractive to people—it’s selling a promise that is amazing.

Om’s statement highlights the current state of AI. Everybody is funding the dream.

Rodney’s statement highlights the business idea which actually needs funding but isn’t getting one.

Jameel Ur Rahman shares his take on how overcoming friction leads to growth. We have seen this in nature where the struggle of butterfly to come out of its cocoon helps develop its wings. But this comment by gwd makes a distinction between friction and effort.

Can I make a distinction between “friction” and “effort”?

If you’re riding a bike up a hill, you can’t go up without effort. But not all of your effort is actually moving you up the hill — some of it is being lost in friction: inefficiencies in your muscles, friction in your gears and wheel and chain, wind resistance.

Similarly, you can’t learn anything without effort; but it’s often the case that effort you put in ends up wasted: if you’re learning a language, time spent looking for content rather than studying content is friction; effort spent forcing yourself to read something that’s too hard is effort you could have spent more profitably elsewhere.

Put that way, we should minimize friction, so that we can maximize the amount our effort goes towards actually growing.

Frank Chimero referring to the paper by George Akerlof and explaining what a market for lemons means. He then goes ahead and explains that we are in the lemon stage of the internet.

The idea is called “a market for lemons.” The phrase comes from a 1970 paper by George Akerlof that explains how information asymmetry between buyers and sellers can undermine a marketplace. Akerlof asks us to imagine ourselves buying a used car. Some cars on the lot are reliable, well-maintained gems. Others cars are lemons, the kinds of cars that can make it off the lot but are disasters waiting to happen. The sellers know which cars are which, but you, as a buyer, can’t tell the difference. That information asymmetry affects the average price in the market and eventually impacts the overall market dynamics.

The thinking goes like this: if a buyer can’t distinguish between good and bad, everything gets priced somewhere in the middle. If you’re selling junk, this is fantastic news—you’ll probably get paid more than your lemon is worth. If you’re selling a quality used car, this price is insultingly low. As a result, people with good cars leave the market to sell their stuff elsewhere, which pushes the overall quality and price down even further, until eventually all that’s left on the market are lemons.

I think we’re in the lemon stage of the internet.

There’s an interesting discussion on Hacker News about the news that Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement. My favorite comments.

Comment by scrlk.

an oil industry proverb: a healthy oil company has a geologist in charge, a mature one has an engineer in charge, a declining one has an accountant in charge, and a dying one has a lawyer in charge.

Comment by nostrademons.

It’ll be interesting to see if they still can design and build a new ground-up airplane design. The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009, and its design was fraught with problems. Before then was the 777 in the early 90s (pre-McDonnell takeover), and the 757/767 in the early 80s.

There’s a phenomena that ofter occurs with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets. The former group has no work to do, after all, so why should the company keep them around? But then if the market ecosystem shifts, and a new product is necessary, they no longer have the capacity to build ground-up new products. All those people have left, and won’t come anywhere near the company.

Steve Jobs spoke eloquently about this phenomena in an old interview:

Joshua Stevens has created a map—which I believe would have been created—if human civilisation started from Australia.

Ok, so the title is a bit clickbaity. If you are appearing for an exam you of course need to remember what you read. But not everything that you read needs to be remembered.

Mo talking about how he reads and then forgets.

I read to forget. Even when studying or working on papers for a PhD, I approach texts with the same mindset: I’m not a storage device that needs to save all bits of information. I am more of a system of Bayesian beliefs, constantly evolving and updating in small, incremental steps.

[…]

From most texts, I only want two things: First, I want it to subtly alter my thinking, an incremental update that moves me towards a refined world model. Second, I want to pull out a few key pieces of information that I might use later in my writing.

This comment on Hacker News succinctly describes what Mo is talking about.

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

From Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail by John Gall

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

If you think about it, this is also applicable for evolution. Nature never creates new species. It evolves the existing ones. Single cell organisms to multi cell organisms. Leopard to snow leopard. Apes to humans.

This Hacker News comment by Spooky23 on the news that immunotherapy drug eliminated aggressive cancers in clinical trial.

I’m both sad and incredibly happy to read this. I lost my wife recently to a recurring metastatic melanoma. She was treated at MSK by an amazing team.

It was a terrifying diagnosis and literally would have been a guaranteed death sentence in 2017. In 2023, she had a very real chance of pulling through due to immunotherapy. Unfortunately some complications led to the worst outcome and we lost an amazing woman.

I remember that my wife said once that the everything she had on that journey was on the shoulders of those before. So maybe in some small way she helped with the research and a future mother, sister, wife, husband, son, dad will have hope where there was none.

Profound.

This post from Sustainable Views reflecting on the commenting culture.

Broadly speaking, the online platforms we use are not built for connection; they are built for engagement. This is universally true for all internet spaces, from stories to newsfeeds, for the intellectual and the plebian alike. And in the relentless optimization of user engagement, our social engagement is captured and rerouted from its original purpose. Instead of making friends, we are all performing for one collective internet stranger—a being that is sometimes brilliant, sometimes cruel, but always waiting to be impressed.

It somehow feels like interactions that might have grown a friendship have instead ended up growing ad impressions. This is not strictly true, but I can’t shake the feeling that it isn’t wrong either.