We're stuck on a local maxima of software.
We're stuck on a local maxima of software. The software isn't very good, it's not aligned with our interests, and the amount of the software is a tiny fraction of what it could be...
Topic: local maxima
16 chunks · 13 episodes
2.3x burst in 2024 Q4
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Peak quarter intensity across the topic's active span. Higher values mean attention was concentrated into a shorter stretch rather than spread evenly over time.
Topic summary
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A short read on the topic's time range, peak episode, and strongest associations. Use it as the quick orientation before drilling into examples.
- local maxima appears in 16 chunks across 13 episodes, from 2023-10-16 to 2026-08-03.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 11/11/24 (2024-11-11), with 2 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with stuck, hill climbing, and pocket universe, while by chunk count it sits between let alone and party trick; its yearly rank moved from #48 in 2023 to #68 in 2026.
Over time
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Raw mentions over time. Use this to see absolute attention, not relative rank among all topics.
Observations
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The primary evidence view for this topic. Sort it chronologically when you want concrete examples behind the larger pattern.
A way to get stuck in a product local maxima: fill potholes.
A way to get stuck in a product local maxima: fill potholes. You want to add value, so you go where people are today and solve problems they actually have. But now you have structurally locked y...
The smoother the iteration, the more effective evolution is.
...You want incremental variation to be able to remix and tweak things to find the local maxima. If the system doesn't allow remixing, then each thing is separate, binary. Variation has to jump to a viable alternative. BlueSky has an amazing lex...
You can't hill-climb your way to a good architecture.
You can't hill-climb your way to a good architecture. If you only do fast 1-ply thinking, you'll get stuck in local-maxima with no good exits. The two major labs have inherited a culture that puts extreme focus on short-term execution over medium-term clarity.
There's an optimal amount of information sharing in an org.
...reates a monoculture. Overfit, fragile. Too little information sharing leads to local maxima and lack of alignment.
With LLM UX it feels like we have all the ingredients but we don't have the cake yet.
...e have all the ingredients but we don't have the cake yet. Chatbots seem like a local maxima to me. Chatbots are not the ideal UX. I think the ideal UX will include the ability to chat, but that will not be the primary interaction that everyt...
Specialists sometimes get to their local maxima and assume it's a global maxima.
Specialists sometimes get to their local maxima and assume it's a global maxima.[py][pz] Generalists don't ever think they're at the global maxima.
Going for more scale incrementally makes sense, but gets you stuck in local maxima.
Going for more scale incrementally makes sense, but gets you stuck in local maxima. Going for less scale than today almost never does. Companies walk up the scale ladder until they're trapped with a local maxima. The good enough pro...
Mentors can ask you a pointed question and you feel compelled to answer it.
...lion years. Questions that are uncomfortable but help you see your way out of a local maxima.
A/B testing can get you stuck in fractal niches upon niches.
A/B testing can get you stuck in fractal niches upon niches. That is, weird local maxima within local maxima. When you look up you are like "wait where are we? This obviously doesn't make sense." A/B testing doesn't have a vision, it's ju...
In a disruptive environment, throw out the mature playbook and shoot for the moon.
...t won't become obvious for some time. Following the rules will get you stuck in local maxima or even worse, if the rules no longer work the way you thought they did in the old world. After disruptive events, reality reconfigures, and massive ...
The correct tuning of a given knob is dependent on the tuning of the other knobs, too.
...he tuning of the other knobs, too. A complex, irreducible problem. You can find local maxima but never global ones; the global one is too hard with even a tiny number of dimensions because it is a combinatorial explosion of space. The curse o...
If you peek into how multi-modal models work, they're a ball of cheap, random hacks that turn out to be terrifically, unreasonably effective.
... experiment with. But they're hacks on top of hacks; almost certainly hitting a local maxima.
Follow your highest and best use, fractally.
...rage. By optimizing at the layer above, you'll be less likely to get stuck in a local maxima in the layer below
Safely coordinating between different applications is a problem that filesystems have tried to tackle for decades.
...'re at the top of the hill. Maybe there's a new hill that doesn't have the same local maxima of basic file systems, but also doesn't require a whole new universe of new large scale applications like Fuschia does? Perhaps a pocket universe emb...
Last week I learned about the "never scar on first cut" principle.
...if you try to do an outside-in first-principles rethink of a machine stuck in a local maxima the default organizational force you will meet is "well have you talked to these 1,375 pieces of the machine who all have notes about why the part of...