Oddbean

Was thinking yesterday, I'm starting to get more bothered by the phrase "Well it's a hard problem to solve" and leaving it there. Papering over complexities with more tools often defers responsibility to somewhere else in a stack and often forces users to trust the system and it's designers decisions. Maybe it's okay to toss things in the bin and start over sometimes, reducing complexity for users by reducing complexity in the system. I think loss aversion also plays a part, maybe some features need to be sacrificed for the sake of longevity. Much smarter people than myself have pondered these things, but they often lead me to question their bias toward their sunken cost and risk exposure to the success of the system, clouding their ability to hear a reasonable doubt.

This is what young people are for 🤣 Even Linus said if he knew how hard an operating system was he wouldn't have started. Marshall McLuhan also has a phrase "an expert is someone who remains fixed."

absolutely, sunk costs fallacy is a huge problem of psychology when writing software in my 8 years working at this, when it's time to throw it in the trash, i work another week or two on it and then my hair turns even more gray and i want to throw myself off a cliff

no, i'm understating it the point at which you start to get really frustrated with the way you have done it, you will spend weeks trying to fix it and then spend a few days and rewrite it properly, and facepalm like this: https://cdn.satellite.earth/f3223de6bd9a04385c889308c6730248cdcd6db76a19084a3dcb31b031a4ee79.png

Absolutely this! What we could do with our current technology on a clean design is a far cry from what we are doing. So much buffering just because we can't put data where it goes in the first place.