<story><title>Ephemeralization</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeralization</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sfink</author><text>This is the sneaky, flawed premise behind many instances of what we call optimization. I have a Law of Optimization: the closer you get to optimal on your chosen metrics, the more cost is shifted to unmeasured externalities. (I imagine someone has named this.) A stronger version would be to say that the distance to optimal is inversely proportional to the externalized cost, so that the total externalized cost goes to infinity as you squeeze out ever-smaller increments of gain with respect to your chosen metrics.&lt;p&gt;The important corollary is that you can get 80% of the way there with very little externalized cost, and that going too far will eventually reveal the oversimplification in your cost model.&lt;p&gt;You can move an object with near-zero energy, but it&amp;#x27;ll take 1000 years. You can get to net zero carbon emission by shifting it to someone else or dumping it somewhere it isn&amp;#x27;t measured or is a temporary sink that will eventually re-release. In my own area, you can reduce garbage collection overhead to zero by either never freeing anything (so the externalized cost is memory) or shifting the GCs to happen in between the timed portions of a benchmark (and this often happens accidentally, especially with a &amp;quot;no regressions&amp;quot; policy!)</text></comment>
<story><title>Ephemeralization</title><url>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeralization</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gamegoblin</author><text>This article is about technological progress enabling doing more with less. I’ve been having a tangentially related thought about general project planning as it pertains to technological progress.&lt;p&gt;The thesis is: Unless you can create an optimistic project plan that results in the project’s completion within 5 years, the money would be better spent on doing basic research.&lt;p&gt;The thesis is informed by the ITER fusion reactor project, which was started in 2007 and whose current target date is 2025 (but will likely slip, as it has before), but that date is for first plasma formation and not actual deuterium-tritium fusion, which won’t happen until 2035.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, during this timeline, advances in materials science, namely higher temperature superconductors, have opened the possibility of significantly smaller and simpler designs, some of which are being plausibly pursued by startups (eg SPARC).&lt;p&gt;So I wonder if a general heuristic to guide science funding would be something like “if the optimistic timeline is &amp;gt; 10 years, invest instead in basic research that could potentially develop technologies that would shorten that timeline”.&lt;p&gt;This thesis is also generally informed by the relative success of New Space (eg SpaceX) companies compared to Old Space (eg Boeing) companies. Elon has famously said “if the plan is long, the plan is wrong”, and I think that philosophy has demonstrably worked out well for SpaceX.</text></comment>