26 chunks · 23 episodes
When does it make sense to add more lines of code to handle an edge case? If you need to add 1000 lines for a very rare edge case, then it's not justified. If you keep on doing this, you'll end up with 1000x more code tha...
...ike our own but also fundamentally different. Perhaps human intelligence was an edge case for a more general form of fundamental thing. We're ready for a unified, fundamental theory of intelligence to emerge. There are a lot of people stu...
... necessary to prop up the desired end state. That means it often has surprising edge cases that are totally unexpected.
...ith his data." In the past, that was mostly OK, and only didn't work in limited edge cases. For example, your child knowing your computer's password. But now with agents, that edge case has become a common case.
Make the edge case possible and the common case easy.
.... You're inheriting broken workflows, fragmented data, regulatory overhead, and edge cases no model has ever seen. The clean demo you showed? That was the easy part."
... state of even the best algorithms as a corrupted data state. There are trivial edge case examples that are obviously, straightforwardly, "wrong" from the end user perspective. This is as much a UX problem as an algorithmic one.
Your personal use case is likely an edge case for the aggregator.
...ason computer systems get more complex: handling the exponential blow up of all edge cases for all users. But in a world of infinite software, every bit of software could be perfectly tailored to its use.
WYSIWYG systems almost always have some weird edge cases that are hard for users to reason about. The fundamental reason is because the view is a reduced-dimension visual projection of the underlying sema...
It is not possible to fully enumerate in human language all of the edge cases of a real world phenomena. You get the logarithmic return for exponential cost curve. This curve collapses under its own weight. Each incremental t...
...ch run to be predictable, and as we evolve the software to handle more and more edge cases, to run reliably and increasingly without need for human intervention. Software, when it's finely tuned to its domain, gets increasingly tightly al...
...h a little deeper, work a little harder, be a little smarter, we can banish the edge cases to ever smaller impacts." But complexity is non linear. You don't chase down details and fix the whole. If you tighten here it squishes out there (...
...d a generic example of any given class. Because everything in the details is an edge case. Everything in reality, as you get closer, is fractally complicated. The closer you look, the more variance and wrinkles you find. The average of th...
...xity of software goes up super linearly as it needs to be generalized. Handling edge cases is the hard part of software and the more you generalize a bit of software the more edge cases that have to be handled. Before we had compilers fro...
...ly be able to reason about. When adding a feature, the number of conditions and edge cases to reason about explodes. The explosion of complexity makes the product hard to understand for any single use case, and also extremely expensive to...
...osoft did with browsers back in the day. Apple has done the "simply cut out the edge cases" opinionated cut, which creates a radically simpler thing than alternatives that still delivers maybe 80% of the value. But if AI has the potential...
...dle the extremes the middle takes care of itself. Think of extreme cases not as edge cases, but stress cases.
...y core, which means you don't have the ballooning complexity from accommodating edge cases, you simply cut them out of the possibility space. You get less possibility space, but in a trade for them being significantly more likely to be vi...
Solving all of the edge cases causes exponential blowup of scope. 20% of the cases cause 80% of the work. Subtraction cannot be done by consensus. When people on a team hear an ...