Re:Zebras Hate You for No Reason: Why Amdahl's Law Is Mislea...
by hinkley on Sunday December 04, 2022 @03:05PM
(#33857280)
The other issue he didn’t talk about was how bad we are at fractions, or what I usually call budget based tuning.
What I’ve seen over and over is people who won’t look at single digit percentage improvements because those aren’t “enough”. But the thing is that if you are trying to cut time in half, the 6% for that one method is 12% of your target. So they’re optimizing the way some people do personal finances.
Some of them get “there” in the end, but the road they take is longer and ineffective. When you are looking at four slow methods in a particular flow, you have the perspective of seeing them as parts of a whole. Maybe there’s a way you can rewrite these 4 methods into three that do less, or five where we avoid work in the common case.
If you do them one at a time, and prioritize new ones as they cross your artificial and inaccurate threshold. you won’t see these options, and if you do you’ll talk yourself out of it because you already spent a bunch of effort on what you have now (sunk cost).
What I’ve seen over and over is people who won’t look at single digit percentage improvements because those aren’t “enough”. But the thing is that if you are trying to cut time in half, the 6% for that one method is 12% of your target. So they’re optimizing the way some people do personal finances.
Some of them get “there” in the end, but the road they take is longer and ineffective. When you are looking at four slow methods in a particular flow, you have the perspective of seeing them as parts of a whole. Maybe there’s a way you can rewrite these 4 methods into three that do less, or five where we avoid work in the common case.
If you do them one at a time, and prioritize new ones as they cross your artificial and inaccurate threshold. you won’t see these options, and if you do you’ll talk yourself out of it because you already spent a bunch of effort on what you have now (sunk cost).