Inside the Globus INK: a mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight
The positively steampunk piece of hardware used for tracking Alexei Leonov’s Apollo-Soyuz mission.
Link archive: January 24th, 2023
Efficiency over performance
I quite like this change of terminology when it comes to making fast websites. After all, performance can sound like a process of addition, whereas efficiency can be a process of subtraction.
The term ‘performance’ brings to mind exotic super-cars suitable only for impractical demonstrations (or ‘performances’). ‘Efficiency’ brings to mind an electric car (or even better, a bicycle), making effective use of limited resources.
Software and its Discontents, Part 2: An Explosion of Complexity | Kellan Elliott-McCrea: Blog
Talking primarily to engineering leaders, but also CEOs, VCs, ICs, and other practitioners, the most common response to the question of “has something substantially changed?” is that software, counter intuitively, has gotten harder to build. This is counter intuitive because the tools are orders of magnitude better, the amount of work you can cheaply outsource is nearly miraculous, computers are so damn fast and cheap these days, the quality of resources, much of it free, is off the charts, and the talent pool has exploded, and shows every sign of being smarter and better educated than ever. But software has gotten harder to build in one very particular and important way: it’s gotten more complex.
Kellan nails it:
We’ve developed an aesthetics of complexity: the sense that a good system is a complex one, that you should prefer a SPA over a web page, a distributed system over a simple one, a service over a config file, the idea if you aren’t on the latest technology you’re wasting your time, and potentially damaging your career.