Anti-Fragility

Anti-Fragility is an amazing idea. How can this be used in software and other computer systems?

Taleb on Anti-Fragility

Not intended to provide medical advice

US Scientists Significantly More Likely to Publish Fake Research, Study Finds:

This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

Really?

Shipping something, anything

I just read this piece by Marc Hedlund, in which he says Shipping Solves Everything. He says:

I've always found that shipping something, anything, is the biggest help. Even just shipping a blog post.

I think this is right. It works great with the thing, I would like to call Small Victories. A Small Victory helps you get some feedback and some new ideas and energy for working on your things.

Aptitude why

Sometimes you find packages on your Ubuntu box and you don't know how they got there. This happens often with automatically installed programs. To find the packages that require (or recommend) another package, you can use the aptitude why command.

Below you see (an edited) example session where I needed to find the program that used a package.

$ aptitude search timidity
i A timidity        - Software sound renderer...
i A timidity-daemon - runs TiMidity++ as a sy...

In this example I first search for the package that I didn't know and wanted to remove. You can see from the uppercase A that this package is installed automatically. First I need to know if the program is system critical. So I use the why command to find the packages that use this package.

$ aptitude why timidity
i   prboom Recommends timidity

The prboom package isn't automatically installed. It's a game that I haven't played for a few years, so I remove it.

$ aptitude remove prboom

And we're done.

Google's problem

What if the bottleneck of your software isn't in your CPU, memory, network or I/O throughput, but in that of every website on the internet?

When you encounter a bottleneck you can do a few things. I will list two.

1. Optimize your software or processes.
2. Increase the resources that limit the system.

The question is what can you do when your software and processes are optimized and your resources are increased to the point where they don't limit your system. In other words optimizing software and adding more resources have a negligible effect.

This would create the situation where the speed of every website on the internet is your problem, too.

I don't know if Google has this problem at the moment, but it would be amazing if they did.

Dear readers, who are you?

With thanks to Startup Lessons Learned for the idea.

Small four question survey