The Stripy Strudel's Journal

In an imaginary, ideal and pitch abstract world live people who don't give a damn about being trapped in our thought experiment: they're people, too, and try to get their human fun from life. Just like us, they meet, make friends, mix and give each other simple pleasures. And just like in our world, they have social obstacles, having grown up in somewhat different cultures and then gotten mixed together. That's why what's natural for some is unthinkable for others.

For example, some people love massage of the head so much that they're willing to spend hours scratching, stroking and massaging each other's heads — if they find someone like them. But here's the catch: for some others touching the scalp is a taboo that can't even be mentioned. Because nobody knows whether it's disgusting or delightful for someone, you can't really offer this to a person: what if they get offended? So two head massage lovers don't dare to offer it to each other because each one of them is afraid that it's unacceptable for the other. Same thing with nose-rubbing, round dances, riding horses together, pat-a-cake and numerous other ways in which our speculative poor things bring enjoyment to each other.

Here is the problem the society is facing: invent a way for fans of various pleasure to recognize each other. It seems trivial: why not introduce conventional signs? For example, a red T-shirt could mean a round dance devotee. But it's not that easy: a round dance lover wouldn't like those for whom round dances are a taboo to know about their devotion. Hey, there are places where they won't let you in if you wear that! Therefore, a signaling system has to be more selective.

Let us call the whole range of ways to please each other acceptable for a person their easiness, as in “he's an easy (uncomplicated) person”, “she's easy to be with”. An easiness is a mathematical set. Let us designate the easiness of a person X as E_X. Then the requirement to a signaling system should be stated as follows: for every person Y, conventional signs worn by Y should suffice for X to derive E_X ∩ E_Y. Consequently, for each of his devotions X will only find out whether it's shared by Y, but he won't find out about those of Y's passions that X himself dislikes. He'll find out what he can what he shouldn't try with Y, but won't know anything shocking or destructive to their friendship.

A solution to this problem can be a variety of signs with limited knowledge of them. For every questionable pastime A enthusiasts establish a club, society or some other kind of community for A-doers. To become a member, one needs to do A with any current member. For lovers of A it's not a problem but rather a pleasure, but those for whom A is unacceptable won't even think about joining the community. Of course, the lists of community members are kept in secret. Because the world is ideal, everyone knows about every such community, and can and will join all the relevant ones. In a closed meeting, members of the A-doers society decide on a sign by which fans of A will recognize each other. It can be anything: an item of clothing, an accessory, a feature of speech or gait, a code word or gesture. Different communities pick essentially different signs, so that it's impossible to tell by the look of how many communities a person is a member. This way, everybody only knows the signs of belonging to those communities one is oneself a member of, and when X and Y meet, they instantly see what their common easiness, the intersection of E_X and E_Y, is, and within that intersection they feel at ease with each other.

The problem and the solution have been found in brainstorming together with Wheezle, for which I'm thankful to her. This way, we have determined by experiment that joint brainstorming is included in our common easiness. And if you, my dear readers, also love head massage — welcome to the club!

По-русски: Общество любителей фантазировать с умным видом

Under one of the possible interpretations of existence, every fiction is somebody's reality. Each time a thought crosses your mind that it would be good if that nice girl looked your way, you create a reality where exactly that happens. That reality has both past and future, and it's inhabited by people with real consciousness who have no idea that their existence is caused by someone from another world.

But if a reality spawned by someone's imagination is as existentially complete as the “real” one, how can you tell in what kind of universe you live? For those reading my blog in alternative worlds, here are some tips; though they won't give a definite answer, in many cases they help rule out improbable options. So what isn't your reality?

• If your speech doesn't rhyme, you're not a hero of a poem.
• If you have no horse, you're not in a western.
• If you say something funny and don't hear any laughter, it's not a sitcom.
• If there is crime, poverty, corruption in your country, you're not in pre-election promises.
• If you have genitals, you're not in a children's book.
• If you can see anybody who isn't sexually attractive, you're not in someone's erotic fantasy.
• If you have at least one pimple, you're not in a commercial.
• If your mouth takes intermediate positions between completely open and completely closed when you speak, you're not an anime character.
• If neither you nor your relatives are famous, you're most likely not in a newspaper hoax.
• If you work at least sometimes, you're hardly a character in a Latin American TV series.
• If your or your friends' names don't begin with the first three or four letters of the alphabet, you're not in a cryptography book.
• If there are people with the same first name around you, it's quite unlikely that you are a character in fiction or cinema at all.

По-русски: Краткий определитель реальностей

The development of information technologies sometimes looks like the eternal fight between Good and Reason. Whatever great technical solutions people invent, others always come up with creative ways to abuse them. I tried to compile a list of ten things surrounding today's regular computer user that are often misused, often to the harm of the user. The criterion was that the misuse should be so widespread that the very usefulness of the particular technology is questioned, and software authors develop technical means to restrict or disable its use. As it's a hit parade, I'll start from the end.

10. <meta name="keywords">. This HTML element was intended to list the keywords for the web page to help search engines find pages relevant to given keywords. Of course, some webmasters were so eager to advertise their sites, “helped” so much that a search for a popular keyword would bring you anything but what you were looking for. Since 1998, search engines started ignoring <meta name="keywords">. The last search engine still honoring the keywords finally gave up on them in 2002.

9. Quoting in e-mail. Quoting fragments of an e-mail when replying to it helps the reader match particular statements in the original message with replies to them. Because an e-mail application doesn't know which parts of the message the user is going to reply, it has no other choice but to begin with quoting the entire message and let the user remove unwanted parts. Those users who don't adhere to selective quoting as means of providing context, as well as those who don't know how to use it, leave the entire quotation intact. As a result, correspondence between two such users is an ever-growing chain containing all the messages they've previously sent each other. Some modern e-mail applications implement automatic hiding of quotations.

8. Windows desktop. The desktop was conceived as a place where the user can temporarily store documents and other files being worked on, shortcuts to often-used applications and other frequently used items. And that's what happens, but every other application somehow thinks it will (or should) be used often, and therefore it deserves a shortcut on the user's desktop. This kind of rubbish gets mixed with the really useful items, turning the desktop into a mess. One version of Windows introduced a new feature: Desktop cleanup wizard that tries to guess what on the desktop the user needs and what is actually rubbish.

7. Notification area of Windows taskbar. This area, often incorrectly referred to as system tray, is a good place for running programs to display their realtime status because it's always visible. Today's typical Windows user has about ten icons there and doesn't know what most of them are for. Those small applets do anything (their author wants): preload “their” application for quick launch, notify about updates, show ads — except for actually showing any kind of realtime status. In Windows XP, Microsoft implemented a solution as brilliant as treating appendicitis with painkillers: they hide the icons the user doesn't want to see instead of providing an easy way to identify and remove the offending rubbishware.

6. Automatic startup on Windows logon. Some programs, such as a keyboard layout switcher, really make sense to start automatically, but the possibility for a program to put itself into the automatic startup list is really appreciated by authors of adware, spyware and other evil programs. To make it worse, there are several such lists, and a typical user doesn't even know about most of them. Plenty of programs exist for cleaning those up. Surprising is the inaction of Microsoft who, despite their increased attention to security in Windows Vista, still allow programs to get comfortable in a startup list without the user knowing.

5. Word processing software. These applications were invented to make preparation of documents with prevailing text and no special requirements for typography easier than it is with desktop publishing programs. For many modern users, “word processor” has become synonymous with “text editor”, and the complex, heavy formats of word processors are now widely used to store, and, even worse, transfer any text at all. An extreme case is an empty e-mail message with a Microsoft Word file attached. Many mailing list servers automatically delete such messages or strip these attachments to avoid annoying the subscribers and wasting bandwidth. Here one can also mention using spreadsheets to keep and transfer simple lists without any calculations.

4. HTML e-mail. Emphasizing important parts of a message, marking up headers and creating hyperlinks are really useful features. I'd love to have them if only they didn't come bundled with the usability disaster of HTML in e-mail. Authors of e-mail software who implement HTML message composition seem to think that the point of HTML is that the user can specify the color, font and background for his e-mail. Instead of logical markup describing the structure of a message we got means of decoration so much loved by teenagers and advertisers but so much annoying for everyone else. To make it worse, images loaded by HTML messages from remove servers are often used by spammers to track who actually opens their e-mails. Though the idea was that the plaintext alternative would only be used by old e-mail clients that don't support HTML, all those clients which do still have an option to use the plaintext version instead of HTML.

3. Browser detection. All web browsers introduce themselves to servers, so that those can detect what browser the user has and serve an appropriately “optimized” version. I don't know where webmasters got that idea, but many of them decided that, since they “support” a particular set of browsers, everybody else should simply be denied access: apparently, no web page at all is better than a web page that possibly doesn't work. There is a number of ways to detect the browser, some of which are based on particular distinctive features to check for. All modern browsers can spoof themselves for more popular ones to avoid being denied service. Even the current market leader isn't an exception: during the first episode of the browser wars, they had to make Internet Explorer identify as “Mozilla 4.0 (compatible; MSIE …)”, and that's what it still does after ten years.

2. Pop-up web pages. Opening a web page in a pop-up browser window can be useful when viewing enlarged images in a photo gallery, online help on using a web service or a shopping cart. Yet the most popular use of pop-up windows is to display in-your-face advertisement. Most modern browsers either come with a built-in pop-up blocker or have an add-on for that purpose. These pop-up blockers have to be smart enough to guess which pop-ups are legitimate and which are advertising rubbish.

1. E-mail. E-mail, one of the most important today's communication means, is plagued by the most severe technology abuse problem. The volume of spam is estimated to be 85–90% of all e-mail transferred in the world. The total losses from spam, including lost productivity, wasted technical resources and measures for dealing with spam is an order of hundreds of billions of dollars per year, while the costs for spammers are laughable. Technical means for dealing with spam are diverse, but none of them is able to solve the problem completely. Spam makes the practice of publishing your e-mail address as a means of communication questionable. In fear of robots harvesting e-mail addresses from public web pages, many users avoid publishing their addresses on open message boards or mangle them, for example by replacing @ with “at”.

По-русски: Забивание шурупов гаечными ключами

The web is full of tips for job candidates on how to write a decent resumé, how to behave in an interview and so on. On the other hand, there's a clear lack of advice for employers looking for good candidates. Here I'm making up for this lack basing on my recent experience from dealing with HR departments of various companies.

• Healthy competition never harms business. It's only better if two of your HR managers make a go at the same candidate independently of each other.
• Big companies often hire a staffing agency, and the biggest ones might want to hire several to help each other.
• A conveyor is the best form of labor management. The better you manage to divide the hiring process into elementary operations and assign them to different people, the more candidates you'll be able to put through the production line in a unit of time.
• There's no point in storing of the information you can always get from the candidate. Ask them for their full name, address and telephone number every time you need these.
• Everybody wants to work for you, though not everyone realizes it yet. If you look for prospective candidates and approach them, always ask them to send you a copy of the CV you've found on their personal website, and inquire about why they want to work for your company.
• Never miss a chance to approach an employee of your competitor. In the end, it's them, not you, who are bound with those non-compete clauses.
• If you're in USA and arranging a phone interview with a European, write something like 03/04 12pm PST. Everyone knows that the day comes after the month, and that PST stands for Pacific Standard Time.
• Engineers' work time is too valuable to have them conduct phone interviews. It's enough if an engineer prepares a list of questions with correct answers for the HR employees.
• Always include a “tricky question” in your phone interviews. Collections of such questions you can easily find on the web.
• If your teams have fixed interview schedules, assign candidates to teams basing on which interview comes next.
• If possible, invite a European candidate to your American office, and the other way round.
• Write an ultimate, ideal letter to a candidate and use it in all cases. Provide for all possibilities ranging from accepting a student for summer practice to enticing a superstar from a competitor. Start with “Dear Sir (Madam)”.
• Ultimately, replace all your human HR managers with robots. Machines never eat, sleep or make mistakes, and some are even able to reproduce without going on maternity leave.

По-русски: Хозяйке предприятия на заметку

What can you do when a vaguely familiar melody has taken over your head and threatens to not leave you alone until you recall where you heard it? You can try your friends and colleagues — it works sometimes. Doesn't help me, though: few of my current colleagues have heard, for example, the “Yeralash” TV show theme which I happened to remember today. But wouldn't it be cool if, say, Google indexed all the music published on the web and implemented searching among it! The user sings a fragment of a tune into the microphone, and the search engine finds melodies containing similar parts.

Theoretically, it's quite possible, though I doubt it would be commercially justified today. However, human is an ingenious creature, though this ingenuity doesn't always work for the mankind. There isn't a single technological achievement which man wouldn't find a way to abuse! Developers of the e-mail protocols didn't foresee spam, developers of HTTP didn't think of phishing (fraud using fake pages looking like banking websites). Some time ago, using meta keywords to find relevant web pages looked like a reasonable idea. With our present experience in the modern web, it's not that hard to imagine how the new type of search would be abused.

The simplest and mildest abuse would be recording and publishing advertisement songs to popular melodies. Such ads can easily be targeted, for example, Britney Spears' music could be used to target teenagers. A more aggressive approach: a commercial medley matching several different queries. An extreme case would be search spam, nonsensical sound files without a general musical structure, containing sequences of notes similar to those found in hundreds of popular songs; the only purpose of search spam is to redirect the user to the advertised website, often a fraudulent one, regardless of what they were searching for.

Of course, it's possible to devise technical measures against abuse, new ways to abuse against those technical measures, and so on. Given the modern pace of IT development, this scenario looks likely and usual. Typical sci-fi literature often misses out this important aspect of future technologies. It's hard to imagine holographic TV without annoying commercials, a “global data bank” (Internet, that is) without “search engine optimization” (it's a modern politically correct term for purposeful distortion of search results in favor of your web resources), and a future e-mail without spam. But I'm also sure that future will bring us conceptually new methods of abuse, impossible with the current technologies. We'll see.

По-русски: <meta name="keywords" content="технологии, будущее, злоупотребление">

You can mend a broken cup, straighten a car body and even rebuild a demolished building, but you cannot change the past. Cannot remove an awkward moment so that nobody remembers it, cannot make it as if a mistake you've made has never happened, cannot take back what you said carelessly. But it's the impossible that is the most desired! Along with eternal life, telepathy and teleportation, the topic of time travel is a fertile field for sci-fi writers for more than a century. The modern science doesn't rule out the possibility of one-way travel to the future, but is it that interesting? The most fruitful are those models of time travel that allow going to the past (or returning from the future) and thus spawn causality paradoxes. Some authors fondly ignore the arising contradictions, others build mystical and humorous effects upon them, and yet others construct complex models of the world to resolve the paradoxes.

One such model that allows for travel into the past has recently come to my mind. I haven't found any implementations of it in literature and am so far pretending to authorship. However, it's likely that someone had this idea before me; if it reminds you of some literary work, please comment.

On some planet there happened to arise life. In absence of competition, primitive organisms multiplied, adapted to various environment conditions, evolved into better developed species and finally gave rise to an intelligent being, for unambiguity let's say to human. Little by little, intelligent organisms built a civilization; empires grew, matured and collapsed; ages passed of stone, iron, gunpowder, electricity and atom. Sadly, the technological progress hadn't changed the man's essence, and the science was a slave of warfare in the stone age as well as in the time of atom. After a hundred generations of people who held the nuclear buttons, the hundred and first gave in to the primitive cruel chieftain sitting inside and unleashed the ultimate fatal war that destroys everything living on the planet, from human to amoeba.

The planet became unsuitable for life for billions of years, but numerous times the half-lives of the radioactive nuclei had passed, and the conditions on the surface became favorable for conception of life. Once again from a primitive organism to a humanoid, once again from a savage to a nuclear physicist, once again a fatal button, a world war and death of everything living. This happened several times, with inconceivable gaps of many billions of years between. Every evidence of a former civilization vanished in the abyss of time, and each time the mankind was unaware that there had been intelligent life on the planet before.

Of course, not only nuclear weapons could human minds produce. In its prosperity, each civilization gave many different fruits: developed medicine, computers, great works of art. Among many scientists, there always were those who invented something similar to the achievements of the former civilization because great minds think alike. Each time, by trial and error humans found electricity, radio, aircraft, microprocessor and… time machine. This machine worked according to the Novikov self-consistency principle: it was physically impossible to use it for such a travel that would generate a causality paradox. Because a travel into the past would allow an individual to affect oneself or one's ancestors and thus contradict the present, the machine couldn't perform such a travel. You couldn't go back a year, a hundred years, or a hundred centuries because of the physical limitations of the Universe, not on the designer's whim.

However, those who experimented with the time machine could easily find that it was quite possible to go into the very remote past, billions of years ago. This way, every civilization discovered the others that lived before. In a similar manner, it was possible to travel into the age of a future civilization and come back (but not before the time of departure) without generating a paradox. The possiblity of travel between the ages was determined by the fact that each civilization was doomed to collapse, and by changing something in a previous age, the traveller wouldn't change anything in one's own. Time travel gradually became usual, just like normal travel, and governments even had to pass laws to limit immigration from the past and the future. Cultural exchange between the former and later ages only further increased the similarity of historical processes and secured the same inevitable end.

The stability of this model is based on the postulate of inevitable convergence of macroscopic history to a predetermined outcome. If you like, the gloomy plot can be given a romantic development: in some age, a man is born whom the time machine cannot send into the past, and the reader realizes that this man is “the One”. He is predestined to bring ideas that will finally avert the imminent death. This is why the time machine cannot send him into a former age: otherwise the previous civilization would have survived until the present and generate a paradox. After numerous reincarnations, the new mankind finally finds a spark of hope for a better future.

По-русски: Культурный обмен между обречёнными цивилизациями

Primitive people who couldn't count beyond two or three, called any greater number “many”. Even though modern first-grade pupils operate numbers up to a hundred, and an adult understands what a billion is, human's ability for direct perception of quantities hasn't improved in a qualitative sense. We have ten fingers on our hands, fifty matches in a box, a hundred centimeters in a meter (both units are comparable to the sizes of body parts and therefore are available for direct perception). Starting with about a thousand, it becomes problematic to compare a number to something familiar. Your screen probably has several millions of pixels, each of which an acute-visioned person can discern. This seems like the biggest order for a number that can be directly matched against the environment. Because even secondary school education allows one to operate on numbers of greater orders, our perception lags behind the abilities of abstract thinking. Values that are orders of magnitude greater than the perception threshold feel immense.

Even though 1 000 000 000 < 1 000 000 001, the increase of one doesn't “make a difference”, and both numbers feel equally immense. However, both of them are more immense than a million. Basing on these intuitive assessments, one can say that the immensity of a number is a measure of psychological perception of its magnitude. In a similar manner to the other sensations (brightness, volume, smell or taste intensity), immensity is measured on a non-linear scale where every next equal interval corresponds to a bigger difference in input. The scale should also have a saturation threshold after which no increase of input can increase the psychological evaluation.

It would be naïve to assume that the sensation of immensity, just like vision or hearing, follows the logarithmic Weber–Fechner law. However, 10¹⁰³ is hardly as much more immense than 10¹⁰⁰ as a million is more immense than a thousand. To make as significant a leap from 10¹⁰⁰ as the leap between a thousand and a million, one would need a value like 10²⁰⁰. After that, the leaps become even more drastic: to give a “worthy increase” to 10¹⁰¹⁰⁰, it takes something like 10^1010100. It seems that, with even increase of immensity, the numbers have to grow faster than any arithmetic function comprehensible to the subject.

I suppose that the feeling of immensity is related to description of a method to obtain a given value from numbers below the perception threshold. For example, a billion is a thousand of thousands of thousands, 2⁶⁴ is 2 doubled 64 times. The more qualitatively different steps it takes to reach the goal, the more immense is the number. For example, squaring a a number is a step, and squaring a number an immense number of times is two steps (“square a number” and “repeat the last step many times”). In this regard, the Graham's number is particularly interesting: it is so big that it requires a special notation to transcribe. To reach from non-immense numbers to the Graham's number g₆₄, it takes five qualitative transitions. The immensity of this number seems to approach the saturation threshold, and even though one could continue along the lines of g_g64, it's practically impossible to increase the sense of immensity compared to the Graham's number. However, the range of perceived immensities probably depends on the subject's mathematical grounding. A fourth grade pupil's saturation threshold is hardly above two or three steps, while Ronald Graham can probably appreciate numbers even more immense than g₆₄.

See also:

• S. Kozlovsky. The Biggest Number in the World (in Russian).
• E. Yudkovsky. Systematic Mistakes in Reasoning Potentially Affecting the Evaluation of Global Risks (in Russian), see “8. Scope neglect”.

The original entry in Russian features a poll: How immense are these numbers? It is possible to vote in the poll after logging in to LiveJournal; registration of LiveJournal accounts is free.

Please assess how immense these numbers are. It's your psychological sensation that is important, not the encyclopedic knowledge of the magnitudes. The left end of the immensity scale corresponds to “modest” numbers like a million, while the right end is for numbers so inconceivably big that you cannot imagine numbers that feel significantly bigger.

The number of atoms in the Universe (1…6)

The number of possible chess games without repeating positions (1…6)

The number of cells in all living organisms on Earth (1…6)

The number of people ever born (1…6)

The number of possible texts the length of “War and Peace” (1…6)

The number of seconds having elapsed since the Big Bang (1…6)

Please don't vote if you haven't read all of the above.

По-русски: Теория громадности

Some work just for money, others achieve immediate satisfaction from doing the job, and for others still it's important that their work is of use to someone. Isn't it nice to know that a person becomes a little more happy, content and healthy from what you do for them? It's easy to feel something like this when you work as a hairdresser: a man comes shaggy-haired and leaves with a trendy haircut, saying thank you to you as he looks in the mirror. It gets harder if you repair hairdressing equipment. A man wouldn't have his haircut without this work as well, but he doesn't experience it directly.

There seem to be different kinds of services: some of them are rendered to a person directly, and some are only indirect. For a more detailed classification of services by this principle let's consider the following set of rules.

1. Services rendered to a person directly are first order services.
2. Services rendered to subjects rendering nth order services are services of order n+1.
3. Production of goods is comparable to rendering of services. For example, baking bread is rendering a first order services.
4. Performing work as an employee is considered rendering a service to the employer if the nature of the service is substantially different from what the employer (the enterprise) renders to its consumers. For example, an employed hairdresser renders a first order service, but a packer at a confectionery renders a second order service to the enterprise because this service (packing) is different from the service rendered by the enterprise to its consumers (supply of finished confectionery articles).
5. Reselling of goods or services without introducing a qualitative change in their nature doesn't increase the order of service.

I work for SWsoft, Inc, a company that makes web hosting automation software. Here is how I analyze the order of my service:

1. When browsing a website, an internet user consumes first order services from the content author. (Of course, there are specialized websites for those who render specific services of various orders, but our web hosting automation software are not specifically tailored for hosting of such websites, so this fact doesn't increase the order of the service.)
2. The author uses a web hoster's service to host the website. This is a second order service. The end user mentioned above doesn't experience this service directly.
3. The web hoster routinely uses the automation software made by our company. Even though sometimes content authors use it as well, it's targeted at those who sell web hosting services, and contains specialized tools for this. Therefore, the web hoster consumes a third order service by purchasing our software.
4. Finally, I personally render a fourth order service to the company by working as a software architect. My output is not finished software, it's substantially different from what the company offers to the consumers, so my services are of the fourth order.

This concludes the chain because there aren't any special goods or services targeted at software architects for web hosting automation products. Even though there are products targeted at software architects in general (such as Rational software), they aren't specific to architects in this particular branch and therefore have a lower order.

The higher the order of services, the narrower the specialization of labor. Higher orders become possible only with overall advancement of the industry characterized by increased branching of trades. I'm not sure if it's for good or bad, but I'm sure that there wasn't anything like fourth order services a couple hundred years ago. High order services make the service circulation chain longer. For example, in a small 19th century town the shoemaker would fix the barber's shoes, and the barber would shave the shoemaker's beard. The chain was two persons long. The distance could be bigger between some other professions, but not a lot. It's much harder now to trace the circulation of services between a web hosting automation software architect and a lawyer in an auditing company.

Back to the original topic: the opportunity for satisfaction from realizing that your work is useful quickly diminishes with the growth of the order of services. Starting with something like the third order, it's nearly impossible, so those who render such services have to look out for other ways of getting satisfaction. For example, to me the work itself is interesting as an abstract task that I'm constantly solving.

The original entry in Russian features a poll: Your work. It is possible to vote in the poll after logging in to LiveJournal; registration of LiveJournal accounts is free.

What kind of work do you do? Examples: fixing televisions, writing articles for a financial magazine, driving a subway train.

What order are the services you render? (1…6)

What is the primary source of the satisfaction the work brings you?

• Knowing that I'm doing a useful job.
• The very process of working.
• Knowledge, experience, or physical form I gain.
• Communication with colleagues, partners, clients.
• Money.
• My work doesn't bring me satisfaction.

Please don't vote if you haven't read all of the above. It's also interesting if you trace your service chain in a comment like I traced mine.

UPDATE: The average service order according to the poll participants is suspiciously close to π.

По-русски: Трудиться на благо тех, кто трудится на благо народа

You have most probably read someone's recommendations on interviewing job candidates, or, conversely, on attending interviews as a candidate. Starting from year 2000, when Joel Spolsky published “The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing”, these recommendations often include the advise to to ask an impossible question. The numerous advisers reprinting this recommendation from each other's articles offer various ways to pose such a question, but Spolsky has several examples in his article, including this: “How many piano tuners are there in New York?” (I think if I hear this in an interview, I'll reply “Just as many as there are cliche users in Novosibirsk”.)

It turns out that the author of this question is Enrico Fermi. Here is the original version of the problem as well as the solution: Fermi's Piano Tuner Problem. The solution is similar to what Spolsky describes, and the answer comes out to be 150. I'll quote the last paragraph from Fermi's solution.

This method does not guarantee correct results; but it does establish a first estimate which might be off by no more than a factor of 2 or 3 — certainly well within a factor of, say, 10. We know, for example, that we should not expect 15 piano tuners, or 1,500 piano tuners. (A factor of 10 error, by the way, is referred to as being ‘to within cosmological accuracy.’ Cosmologists are a somewhat different breed from physicists, evidently!!!)

In my opinion, this last paragraph about interpretation of results is the most important. Without realizing what such a solution is and what it is not, the solution turns into guesswork, and the problem becomes something like a test for quick wit. Joel says that a candidate who starts solving such a problem is a good candidate; I'd rather say that one who immediately starts estimating how many gas stations there are in Moscow and cheerfully answers, say, 2500, is either self-assertive (you can't verify if the result is correct anyway) or reads too much Joel Spolsky.

Quotation out of context is a powerful tool indeed. If only for the well-known Lenin's pronouncement: “The most important of all arts for us is cinema”, the full context of which is: “While the nation is illiterate, the most important of all arts for us are cinema and circus.” Seems like Joel isn't a stranger to it as well.

Thanks to rimpocha for the food for thought.

See also:

• Wikipedia: Fermi problem
• A collection of Fermi problems

UPDATE: Mr. Spolsky has left the advise to ask an impossible question out of the third revision of his article.

По-русски: Об интерпретации результатов и о выдёргивании из контекста

“Human's physiological and psychological abilities are up to date poorly researched,” the lecturer's monotonous voice pontificated. “To believe in your own strength, to realize the depth of your hidden reserves is the way to discover the concealed abilities that each of us has.” The man who was telling this didn't look anything like a Tibetan monk who long ago had found the key to the secrets of his body and soul. He looked about twenty-five, and most of all resembled a programmer who had been working enthusiastically for the last fourty-eight hours.

Mark was sitting in the third row of a lecture hall and fiddling with a leaflet inviting to the “Unique seminar on the original method of discovering your own potential”. He was scolding himself for coming to this stupid lecture in the first place, and also for feeling so inconvenient to just stand up and leave that he was listening to this plod for one solid hour already. He had failed to follow almost in the very beginning and was by now altogether sure that there was nothing to follow, and that the lecturer whom the leaflet styled “Certified professor” was making no headway from the very start. Mark had dropped in on the unique seminar after work, and now the fatigue, lack of sleep and the lecturer's monotonous voice did their bit. Mark sank into a muddled, absurd dream where he was analyzing his, or maybe someone else's undocumented abilities with a disassembler, but finding nothing but useless features canceling out other useless features.

He woke up because someone touched his shoulder. “Hey, sir! I have to lock the hall.” It was the certified professor. Mark sprang up and guiltily rushed to the door. “It's OK, it's OK”, assured the professor. “What do you think, did you like it?” His vivid voice was now nothing like the colorless recitative of the lecture. Mark stopped halfway to the door. “Well…” he mumbled and immediately cursed himself for doing it. “Honestly, I didn't exactly understand…” He cursed himself in the choicest language for saying this just because he had to say something, and prepared for at least half an hour of boring explanations. But the certified professor was already looking at Mark with understanding and interest, and there was no way back. “I didn't exactly understand what those abilities are that you can discover in yourself if you believe in your strength.” To believe and to discover were the only things Mark remembered from the entire lecture, but the professor seemed to enjoy this question as if he never had heard anything more interesting. “This is the most important thing! If you really believe in yourself, you'll realize that there's nothing impossible for you, and that you can do anything.” “Like what? Will I be able to move objects with my eyes?” “No, why? That's a stereotype. You don't have to move objects with your eyes. In fact, you wan't even need it because someone for whom nothing is impossible gains the firmest self-confidence and doesn't need to move objects with his sight to confirm it — it becomes simply unnecessary!”

“Hey, hey, wait a minute. Are you saying that I have to believe in myself in order to have a reason to be self-confident? What's the point of it?” Mark was really interested now. “The point is simple. For example, are you self-confident?” “Well… yes. Yes, I'm self-confident.” “But why? On what grounds?” the professor kept asking. “Well, I'm a good specialist, I'm valued at work, I've achieved everything I have myself…” Mark never thought about this before, but it was unexpectedly easy to find the answer. “See? You're self-confident because you have this and that. But what if you don't have it tomorrow — will you still be self-confident? But if someone is self-confident because he believed in himself and discovered his unlimited abilities, this won't go anywhere, anywhere at all!” Mark considered this. The professor was talking obvious nonsense, but Mark couldn't spot where the error was. “What about you, did you believe in yourself and discover your concealed abilities?” he asked. “Mind you, I'm still far from mastering my full potential. But I've made significant advancement.”

Mark walked home and couldn't get the blatant rubbish that the certified professor talked out of his head. During the dinner and later in bed, falling asleep, he was still chewing the already tasteless logical cud. Only deep in the night he fell into a dreamless sleep. In the morning he woke up as a firmly self-confident man.

По-русски: Безграничные возможности

According to a story of unknown credibility, on the border of the 19th and 20th centuries investors considered automobile to be economically hopeless. Nevertheless, Henry Ford had managed to obtain a credit of $1400 to build automobile construction under very tight conditions. It seemed that the revenue from car sales wouldn't be able to cover the investment within the term for which Ford could get the credit. Henry Ford might never have become the man who made automobile available for millions of people — if not for the idea, brilliant in its economical efficiency, that came to his mind. The idea was to produce cars deliberately less reliable than it was possible, and to make money by selling spare parts. A quote attributed to Ford: “I make cars to sell parts for them”. The new business model let Ford build a profitable enterprise, return the credit in time, and become the world's first mass producer of cars.

Ford brought much to both industry and society. For example, the modern 40-hours week and the very notion of “weekend” became de-facto standard after having been implemented at Ford Motor Company. However, one of his innovations, namely “to make a worse product than you can when it's economically justified”, gave the world a dubious gain. Of course, if not for Ford, someone else would have come up with this idea, great in its simplicity; or maybe someone already had implemented it before him. Today you can see live examples of this wherever you look, and it's time to think about the reasons and consequences of this phenomenon.

It's important to note the difference between production of goods or services of simply low quality and production with quality deliberately lower than the producer is capable of ensuring. For example, a software producer who releases software with bugs doesn't necessarily fall into this category because it's impossible to get rid of all bugs (moreover, it's possible than the capabilities of this producer are so limited that they can't make less than one bug per ten lines of code, or that the programmer does a bad job because he's underpaid). We are more interested in a producer who releases software without sufficient debugging in order to make money on paid support or upgrades. So what are the reasons that can make it economically justified to make deliberately worse products than it's possible?

• Releasing unreliable products stimulates demand for add-on goods or services (spare parts, repairs, tech support).
• Short life of the product stimulates demand for more units in replacement of broken or worn out ones.
• Low prime cost of a low-quality product allows to bring the consumer prices down and obtain greater revenue by entering the mass market.
• Low-quality goods are possible to produce faster or in larger quantities, which leads to competitive advantage over those who make quality goods.
• In the modern market, quality is no more the primary tool of competition, inferior to, for example, efficient advertising.
• The market has come to a situation where, for the above reasons, all the competitors release low-quality products; under such conditions it doesn't make sense to try to achieve better quality in this branch because the consumer will have to choose among the available offers anyway.

It's hard to say whether it's good or bad that Henry Ford's approach is widely implemented in modern industry. Of course, many consumer products, such as cars, we'd never have seen without it, or they would be elite goods available to just a few. On the other hand, the lowering of quality directly affects the consumer. It's especially prominent due to the last reason in the list: as a chain reaction, it impels the makers to skimp on quality more and more in order to gain competitive advantage by other means (low prices, high volumes, advertising). Competition based on “who makes better” seems to have been left out of the modern economy and survived only in particular branches with very specific markets.

Each one of us is both a producer and a consumer. At work, we take part in production of goods or services, the rest of the time we consume what others produce. As a consumer, everyone is, of course, interested in having quality goods, however, as a producer, one might find it profitable to skimp on quality. Obviously, a single person's attitude towards quality can be contrastingly different when they routinely switch between the two roles. This means that there must be a conflict point somewhere where two approaches meet. In my opinion, there are three possible models for a person's attitude towards quality:

1. One can accept that most of what one consumes is of low quality, just like what one produces.
2. One can have double standards and expect high quality goods from the market while making low-quality production.
3. Finally, one can demand quality of the goods offered and have the same attitude towards one's own output.

It's worth noting that an employee who follows the third model is inevitably in explicit or, more commonly, implicit conflict with the employer who strives to save on quality.

I must say I'm of the third kind. The second model I can't fit in my head at all, and for the first one I'm probably too old-fashioned. Having done some creative work well brings me direct æsthetic satisfaction, and it's for this satisfaction that I'm working in this particular branch and at this particular enterprise. Recently I've turned down an offer of a significantly higher salary elsewhere for a job that I could do but which was completely uninteresting to me. Having taken this decision, I've realized that I don't only work for money; an important part of what I get from my work is the very æsthetic satisfaction that I wouldn't have if I did a worse job than I can in favor of, say, production rate. This means that my and my employer's goals are unfortunately different: I squeeze the maximum æsthetic pleasure from my job by doing it as well as I can, while the employer strives for tighter timeframes, higher volume and everything else but quality. This conflict of interest is currently implicit. If it becomes explicit, I'll have to change my job.

The original entry in Russian features a poll: How do you combine the two attitudes towards quality?. It is possible to vote in the poll after logging in to LiveJournal; registration of LiveJournal accounts is free.

How do you combine the two attitudes towards quality?

• Model 1.
• Model 2.
• Model 3.
• A totally different model (please comment).
• I don't face this problem (please comment).

Please don't vote if you haven't read all of the above.

По-русски: XXI век: прощай, качество?

When a programmer has nothing better to do, or he just needs an exercise for the brain, he starts having these weird ideas. Like Esoteric programming languages.

All our boring programs are grossly one-dimensional. The memory is linear, the stack is sequential, the program is transcribed in a serialized form. Even things that are naturally two-dimensional, such as the on-screen picture, are reduced to linear for computer processing. The idea of taking programming beyond the one-dimensional space isn't new and has already generated a whole family of esoteric programming languages called fungeoids after the first of the kind, Befunge. The common feature of these languages is transcription of the program as a two-dimensional matrix containing the operation codes. The interpreter moves proceeds from one cell to another in one of the several possible directions. This way, a loop in Befunge can indeed have a loopy look. Some of these languages use memory registers isolated from the program storage space and are addressed by one-dimensional indices; others use the Von Neumann architecture and store data in the same two-dimensional memory as the code, which also creates interesting possibilities for writing self-modifying programs.

The reader might ask why anyone would need any of it, whether someone indeed has nothing better to do, and what kind of mild drugs the author uses, so I'll have to answer. No particular reason. Simply put, it's for fun. Hey, ask some solid scientists specializing in pure mathematics why they have to study objects like… well, not just an algebra, and not even en algebra of algebræ, but an nth order algebra, an algebra of algebræ of algrebræ… n times. I suppose their elaborate answers can be effectively reduced to something like: “Hey, it's fun!” So is an esoteric programming language fun. It's an original joke, and a complicated mathematical abstraction to study, and a puzzle. Taking something to the point of absurdity is fun in itself, so today I've taken it to my hand to carry the idea of multidimensional programming to absurdity. Let's do it in three nonsensical steps. I'll be writing about the two-dimensional case, but it's trivial (?) to generalize for the case of n dimensions.

First level. Here lie the “arrow programming” languages of the fungeoid family. The memory is two-dimensional. In a more interesting variation, the memory is shared between code and data. On this level, each memory cell stores an ordinary number, such as one byte. Let's call the data unit stored in one cell a word, as in traditional computing. Two-dimensional memory uses two-dimensional addresses, such as (i, j). The current instruction pointer (IP) also looks like this. Most fungeoids allow to change the direction in which IP is incremented to one of the four ways, but it's not necessary for Turing completeness: a single direction and a conditional jump to a two-dimensional address is enough. However, the changeable direction of execution flow is the fungeoids' zest which makes programming in them especially unlike the traditional and allows transcribing of loops as rings and linear programs as spirals. Two-dimensional memory organization inspires thoughts of measurement units such as square kilobytes (Kb²), makes you think about what the operating system should do when it gets a request to allocate a wide memory block while only tall and narrow areas are available, and gives rise to an interesting problem of defragmentation of rectangular files in two-dimensional mass storage. The compiler could optimize code not only for speed but also for the area taken, and storage of raster images would be natural as never before. Finally, programming languages can be described by two-dimensional grammars specified in BNF².

Second level. Unlike the first level represented by numerous fungeoids, I've never encountered anything that would fit my second or third level. In the second level, something strange happens to the very numbers: they are not simple bytes anymore but rather complex values. Addressing a cell of the two-dimensional memory becomes natural. Addition and subtraction are straightforward, multiplication and division are slightly more complicated, and there is a new operation: complex conjugation. One could even go further and say that the cells contain two-dimensional matrices of bits. For example, a word can be comprised of 16 square bits (4×4), which, of course, spawns a new set of arithmetical operations. With regular addition, the overflow bits are carried in one direction — to the left; with two-dimensional addition, bits can be carried both to the left and up. This makes at least two types of addition and subtraction. Shifts and rotations can be done in four instead of two directions, and new operations are possible, such as turns and transposition. When multiplying, shifts are made in both directions. It's not obvious, though, how a two-dimensional word should be interpreted as a regular number for purposes of addressing and counting. Speaking of data exchange in networks, instead of two possible bit orders (little-endian or big-endian) we get eight equally reasonable ways to serialize a word.

Third level. At the third level of absurdity, time becomes two-dimensional. Who cares that it doesn't apply to our Universe? The model is interesting anyway. A moment of time is described with two variables (t, u) rather than one. With regard to a single moment, there isn't just something that happens before or after; there are some moments to the right from this moment in time, some below, and some both to the right and below. The causality spreads in both directions, and what happens in a moment of time is a consequence of both what happened to the left and above in time. Clock frequency is measured in square Hertz, and the state of the machine at clock (t, u) is derived from its states at clocks (t – 1, u) and (t, u – 1). The program stored in the two-dimensional memory runs both horizontally and vertically. In the next clock by t the CPU proceeds to the command to the right of the current, and in the next clock by u it moves to the command below. A bicyclic algorithm can have toroidal topology. In a square second, a communication channel can be used to transfer a number of square bits, therefore the throughput is measured traditionally, in bits per second. The task of optimizing the speed of an algorithm can be defined more accurately: which of the time dimensions is more important to optimize.

Fourth level. If someone comes up with a fourth level to complement the three above, I'd like to discuss it with you before they come to take both of us away.

По-русски: Три уровня многомерного безумия

Japan aims to create 3D TV that would allow people to view high-definition images in 3D from any angle, in addition to being able to touch and smell the objects

While you're waiting, just think of all the bug reports the developers of this technology are getting right now from their QA. Such as:

Bug #8654534: Roses in test scene 21 smell onion
Bug #8654535: Cannot feel window glass with fingertips
Bug #8654536: After sneezing, sound disappears
Bug #8654537: Toilet paper perceived as too heavy
Bug #8654538: When trying to drink from the faucet, water does not flow
Bug #8654539: [feature] Smell intensity adjustment needed
Bug #8654540: [security] Test scene 50 has holes in the floor
Bug #8654541: After switching scenes, smells from old scene persist
Bug #8654542: [release notes] Fragments of broken glass cause pain in fingers
Bug #8654543: Cannot tear paper by hand when there is writing on it
Bug #8654544: [feature] Vaporizing liquids must increase perceived humidity
Bug #8654545: Very low performance in scenes with multiple PVC layers
Bug #8654546: Can't feel electrcity by touching battery terminals with tongue
Bug #8654547: Stack overflow error in front of the mirror in test scene 44
Bug #8654548: Adding salt to water does not change its taste
Bug #8654549: Books on shelves in test scene 75 have wrong Cyrillic encoding
Bug #8654550: Debug warnings when clapping hands
Bug #8654551: [security] Non-admin can walk through brick walls
Bug #8654552: Segfault when trying to bite barbed wire
Bug #8654553: Snow in test scene 12 feels hot
Bug #8654554: [release notes] Jumping off a moving car causes a crash
Bug #8654555: Cannot eat more than one sandwich in test scene 64
Bug #8654556: All strings on the guitar in test scene 57 make the same sound
Bug #8654557: [top-bayan] Cannabis plant in test scene 18 is not real

По-русски: Bug Reports of the New Millennium

Note: This entry has been originally written about the Russian society. It may or may not be relevant to European or North-American societies which I know next to nothing about.

It has occurred to me that, be it for the better or worse, our modern society has ceased to honor many traditions of the past. Of course, there are many religious rituals practiced by one or another group of the society, but there is hardly another kind of traditions that are still as mandatory for everyone as those related to death: funeral, burial, mourning. These rituals have managed to stay general while all the others became internal to specific social layers or groups. This is why the expression “ritual services” nowadays is unambiguously understood as pertaining to this particular category of rituals.

However, it's not that straightforward. When most members of the society do something similar, it doesn't mean they all have the same reasons to do it. For example, the original idea behind clothes was protection from cold and rain, and that's how it's still used up to date, but it's hard to believe that a girl going to a beach wears bikini to keep herself warm. A possible reason of the special treatment of burial rituals in the modern atheistic society is that death is one of the few transcendent phenomena that people encounter in their everyday life. Death, cessation of conscience, transition between living and lifeless — this is probably the only phenomenon surrounding our lives that can't be explained with the laws of materialistic science. Other such phenomena, such as existence of the Universe, irreversibility of time, are just as well incognizable, but they don't apply to our daily life directly, don't intrude into it and make changes that can't go unnoticed. Death literally “makes” us respect it, and this might be why the modern society, having lost the universal respect for the Sun, Earth, Life, Creator, still retains the universal respect for the death.

After thinking about it for a while, I've come up with a list of four dominant reasons that make people respect the burial traditions. These four reasons could be called kind of stages because each next one originates from the previous, reinterpreting and enhancing it. I'm not judging these reasons here and not claiming that one of them is somehow better than another; I'm also not trying to study the direction of historical development that transforms the previous reason to the next. This is just an attempt of unbiased analysis. Here follow the four dominant motives for honoring the burial rituals.

1. Pragmatical.

This is the most ancient motive, and it's hardly ever found in modern societies (though it might still dominate in some remaining tribes). The transcendent and the ordinary were so tightly intertwined in the life of ancient societies that death could hardly pretend to any special place among the other, not yet cognized phenomena. The burial rituals were regarded as commonplace actions with immanent tight causality. When placing a sword and a shield into a dead warrior's tomb, the ancient hardly felt themselves executing a ritual; it was rather a common action necessary to prepare the dead for future fights in the afterlife. The need for it was as obvious as a living warrior's need for ammunition.

2. Symbolical.

Compared to the previous motive, the perception of ritual actions has changed from direct to indirect via symbols. It seems like the point of transition was the use of magical symbols (such as pentagrams) guarding the dead from demons. It's important that a pentagram, unlike a sword, is not a direct bearer of some force, but it rather signifies such a force. This transition is caused by delimitation between the transcendent and the ordinary: phenomena such as death are no more common components of everyday life, and it's only through symbols that interaction with them is now possible. Most modern rituals dealing with death seem to have originated under domination of this motive. The tombstone, coffin, burial and mourning in cultures based on Christianity or Judaism are symbols signifying the respect of the living for the dead and helping the souls to find peace. It is important that an individual realizes the meaning of the symbols. The causality is still strong because the nominal meaning of the symbols is regarded as their actual role (a pentagram is a real defense weapon).

3. Formal.

The nominal value of the symbols is retained but their causal role is lost. Burial is still perceived as something done for the dead, but there is no clear understanding of how it helps the dead and what would happen if the ritual is neglected. I suspect that this motive is dominant for most of the modern population of Russia. It's worth noting that as an incentive, this motive can be no weaker or even stronger than the previous one: the loss of causal reward is compensated by the obsession to do everything properly.

4. Social.

Like a fourth derivative, this motive is a product of further regression of the third one. Not only the alleged factual role of the symbols, but also their nominal value is lost. An individual no more thinks that the dead really need burying. The grief from the death of a close relative changes its central object, shifting from sympathizing the dead (“poor Yorick!”) to dealing with the loss by the living (“how can I live without Yorick?”); condolence becomes important. The living perform the burial not for the dead but rather for each other, projecting onto each other the retained from the previous stage and now self-sustaining need for proper execution of the ritual. A variation of this motive is when someone conducts the ritual not for another person, but in order to follow the ethical or formal laws of the society; I'd still call it the social motive because it's the incentive originates from the individual's socialization.

Undoubtedly, any classification of imprecisely expressed phenomena is doomed to be imperfect, and it's possible to point out a multitude of transitional types between any two; also, the same individual can behave under influence of different motives at different times in life.

The original entry in Russian features a poll: A small statistic survey not pretending to be representative. It is possible to vote in the poll after logging in to LiveJournal; registration of LiveJournal accounts is free.

Which of the motives best describes your personal reasons for conducting burial rituals?

• Pragmatical.
• Symbolical.
• Formal.
• Social.
• I have no reasons to conduct burial rituals.
• The described classification of motives is fundamentally flawed (please comment).

Please don't vote if you haven't read all of the above. Also don't vote and accept my apologies if you regard asking the question inappropriate.

Ready to be bashed by specialists in cultural studies and sociology as well as other interested parties.

PS: Did you think it's going to be all screwdrivers?

По-русски: Почему мы хороним своих мертвецов

At my job I take part in development of certain kind of tools. I love my job, and most of all I like to invent new, universal tools solving whole new classes of problems.

Recently, my boss has assigned me the task to design a new screwdriver. The task didn't contain any clarifications as to what the screwdriver should be like, and, in fact, it couldn't contain any because, at that time, my boss didn't have any clearer vision of the problem than I had. So I decided to design a screwdriver that would be universal in its class of tools (that is, among handheld battery-operated tools — we wouldn't try to compete with specialized stationery machines).

I started by studying all kinds of screws, bolts, nuts, washers, studs, brads and split pins, learned about the specifics of their use. While studying everything relevant to threaded coupling, I figured out for myself something like a common denominator for all the tasks that my universal screwdriver might face: a screwdriver is used for coupling and decoupling of parts by setting one of them in rotary motion. To encompass the entire range of fixing parts, one or two exchangeable bits were obviously not enough. Instead of following the straightforward way of increasing the number of bits (you can't provide for every eventuality anyway), I designed one universal workhead. It could fit parts of different shapes and sizes: from sunken three-millimeter philips screwheads to five-centimeter square nuts. The electric drive allowed to adjust the speed and torque as well as to set the stopping condition (linear distance passed by the part, number of revolutions or strain to reach). It was also assumed that the user should be able to choose from presets for typical tasks instead of setting the parameters manually.

After I was done with the analysis, I started implementing the design. It's not really interesting to describe this because it basically went smoothly. Some features had to be left out until the next version, but it was easy to add them later without breaking anything. The most interesting is what happened a month later, in the final stages of the development. The first to have a suspicion was the UI designer whose task was to refine the look of the prototype. It seemed to him that the handle of the “screwdriver” had too many buttons. I explained to him why this buttons were necessary, and showed how to use the tool in different modes. Then he asked why didn't I just make a bunch of exchangeable bits like everyone does. I explained that a fixed set of bits would never match the abilities of the universal workhead, and, after a long debate, I've been understood, but after that I had to answer a similar set of questions to the head of technical documentation department, and then to a QA engineer. We had to gather a meeting with the manager, the head analyst of the project and other official persons.

In the meeting, another important “little” thing came to light. It turned out that the potential customer doesn't really need to work with the whole range of screwheads and nicks of the fixing parts. They need to screw and unscrew just two or three kinds of screws, but they also want to hammer in nails. With the same tool. To make things worse, the marketing research indicated that the average customer doesn't realize the difference between a screw and a nail, or gets it wrong. As to buttons on the handle, the specifics of the target group imply that there can't be more than two.

Then was the time when one would do a new round of analysis, find a new “common denominator” and design another prototype. But the problem was that there was basically no time left until the scheduled release date which has been already declared in the marketing campaign. There wasn't enough time for all of that, even if you stop eating, sleeping, and going to bathroom. The only possibility left was to adapt the existing prototype to the problem that has changed. This means extension in directions in which there was no extensibility. This means implementation of admittedly suboptimal and short-sighted solutions. This means ending up with something not extensible in any direction anymore, something hard to debug and support, and, of course, with no traces of the initial beauty of approach.

After considering this gloomy perspective, I gave a sigh and took the prototype along with all the blueprints far away. Instead of crippling the existing mega-screwdriver with an axe, I chose to make another one. Not universal at all. Completely inflexible. Able to drive the exactly three types of screws (listed in the new problem statement) in the traditional way — by means of exchangeable bits — and to hammer in nails. Because this new device was nothing but a cliché and didn't have a single non-trivial part, I did it in three days and three nights, or something like that. Only one non-critical part I was able to reuse from the original design: it was the accumulator which didn't need to change at all. The result was quite acceptable — until you want to expand the capabilities somehow.

Why did I choose this way? It's obvious that the simple tool I could make in three days doesn't have any flexibility, scalability or extensibility. True, but the old prototype adjusted to the new problem wouldn't have it either. It's flexible but not to those angles, it's scalable but not by those parameters, it's extensible but not in those directions. It's natural — because it's impossible to design an Ultimately Universal system. If you need something universal, you have to answer the question first: what do you have to encompass by this universality? An incorrect answer, or one that later turns out to be incorrect, leads to waste of time and effort. An attempt to apply a system which is universal in one area to encompass problems from another leads to loss of all advantages of the universality, but does increase the overall complexity of the solution. If you can't do it the right way, it's better to do it the wrong and simple way than the wrong and complex. What can be done in three days, can be even redone from scratch, if necessary.

The first prototype still rests in my desk drawer. Maybe I'll still have a chance to dust it off someday?

По-русски: IT-аллегория

There is a text-based adventure game Dunnet packaged with GNU Emacs — you must remember those games where you read descriptions of the rooms where you are, and type commands like put key in door. If you have Emacs, I recommend you this one. This is, I tell you, cyberpunk.

For example, there is a room with a computer. It runs some flavor of UNIX with a crippled but working shell. The /rooms directory contains a subdirectory for each already visited room with files representing objects currently located in those rooms. Your current inventory is in the home directory. What you have to do there is to transfer all your stuff to a remote server over FTP and then use rlogin to get there yourself. After doing this, you find yourself in a room called “Receiving room” (without any computer), and all the objects transferred here are lying on the floor nearby. It's funny that if you forget to enable the binary mode for FTP, you'll find a worthless pile of protoplasm instead.

There are a lot more places like that in the game, though. Highly recommended.

PS: Check this commit in the game's CVS.

По-русски: You are in a Maze of Twenty Little Passages