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Re:Prioritise the Highest Order Bit by greatgoat420 on Friday May 14, 2021 @09:49PM (#27161552)
I have tried prioritizing the highest-order bit, but regrettably I never know the endian-ness of my bits. Maybe I am flipping a high order bit, maybe a low order bit.
Re:Prioritise the Highest Order Bit by nocman on Saturday May 15, 2021 @02:03AM (#27162831)
Seems to me it would be much more straightforward just to say "concentrate your efforts on the most important things".

But I guess it doesn't sound as good to some people without an analogy. Meh.

Re:Prioritise the Highest Order Bit by dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp on Friday May 14, 2021 @09:08PM (#27161327)
This is gobbledygook.

The title, in a software sense, implies a binary/Byte interpretation of the word ‘bit’. I clicked through and there’s an accompanying picture of drill bits.

That’s illustrative of the overall level of coherence and clarity of argument this article provides.

Re:Prioritise the Highest Order Bit by Nevermark on Friday May 14, 2021 @09:21PM (#27161417)
And scroll down an inch to see illustrations using actual binary bits.

I think the drill bits are just a humorous pic.

And I think the article makes sense. It discusses prioritizing coherently which often means de-prioritizing many important things.

Re:Prioritise the Highest Order Bit by shoo on Friday May 14, 2021 @09:28PM (#27161448)
i disagree, it isn't gobbledygook. it's not necessarily a great analogy but the underlying idea that the analogy is trying to help you remember and communicate is a reasonable and useful one:

> When evaluating past decisions or thinking about making new ones, a useful analogy to use is the flipping of the highest-order bit.

> aim to identify and flip the highest order bit because if you don't, you're not going to be able to make up for it by flipping everything else.

Other ways of trying to remember and communicate a similar idea could the "80 / 20 rule" -- e.g. small subset of effort/population/whatever often contributes disproportionately to some output.

Theory of Constraints / Eli Goldratt's book "The Goal" is another bunch of related concepts. Decide on what your big picture objective is, investigate and analyse the system to discover what the main bottleneck is. Focus on removing that bottleneck.

Re:Prioritise the Highest Order Bit by drewcoo on Friday May 14, 2021 @11:42PM (#27162130)
> In the real world, it gets more complicated since bits are intimately linked to one another.

Thus the analogy is completely invalid. I couldn't read further.

Re:Prioritise the Highest Order Bit by patrick451 on Saturday May 15, 2021 @12:12AM (#27162296)
This really just seems like another way to state the Pareto principle.