From reading that the only one pattern that rises is low anxiety. People just execute and deliver without delay from fear.
When I look at things that are slow I see only two things: natural disasters and analysis paralysis. When I look at software employment I see a lots of anxiety at multiple levels. People do and say all kinds of shit to mask their anxiety.
> From reading that the only one pattern that rises is low anxiety. People just execute and deliver without delay from fear.
Some are definitely high-anxiety situations: the large-scale ambitious ones in the list were done during a war (or cold war). Many of the others are high-pressure scenarios where I am sure the construction workers had anything but low anxiety. They are typical of an economy which is growing very fast where bad working conditions and accidents are tolerated. It is not unlike condititions in current fast developing countries some with immigrant workers (Quatar) or in China.
Part of the reason we have 'not fast' is that along with some good things, we also did some bad things 'fast', like lots of paving over disproportionately minority parts of cities for freeways.
It'd be interesting to try and quantify both columns - the good and the bad.
Ideally, we would go back to being able to do some things 'fast' and hopefully do a bit better at avoiding the bad things.
Agreed.
The destruction of black-owned neighborhoods for freeways is very much worth studying. Sweet Auburn had 30,000 residents displaced, turning a once prosperous and flourishing neighborhood into a crime-ridden shell of its former self.
I am left dreaming about what Atlanta may have looked like if they prioritized public transit and … not pursuing explicitly racist policies. I believe in a world where we can rapidly build and roll out infrastructure for everyone without destroying so much.
It would be interested to see a list of American tofu dregs projects. We only see what is still standing.
The difference now I guess is that we eventually learned and (mostly) everything is built without issue, sometimes at the tradeoff of time. But some countries are going through their own growing pains right now (with the tradeoff of money/people/shortcuts)
Exactly. Most of the dot-com start-ups were built fast (faster than many other things)...
We’re good at moving fast when we do things for the first time or the externalities / consequences of speed are either underrepresented or hidden.
As soon as something is done a few times, the barrier of entry goes up. We get the ability to measure and evaluate consequences. We have regulations based on safety or environmental isues. We have additional groups of people with specific concerns that must be consulted. Other nations may participate and we coerce then into increasing or decreasing their involvement. Its a wild big dynamic system.
To me this doesnt mean we shouldnt be able to move quickly. Just that the innovation requires tools that can navigate between these other constraints - or - that we only innovate in areas that have never been done before and we do so at a blistering pace.
Relevant (in my opinion) threads in recent days:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 Fast (catherinejue.com)
1500+ points, 400+ comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44748934 Slow (michaelnotebook.com)
800+ points, 200+ comments
Somehow the one that always makes me saddest is high speed rail:
> TGV. On April 30 1976, the French government approved a plan to build a high-speed rail link between Paris and Lyon, the first high-speed rail line in Europe. This line was to use completely new electric locomotives, also to be developed in France as part of the project. The ensuing line opened on September 26 1981, 1,975 days later. On September 24 1996, the California High-Speed Rail Authority was formed. The completion of the first phase of California's high-speed rail project, a line connecting San Francisco and Anaheim, is currently estimated to happen in 2033, 37 years (i.e. around 13,000 days) after the authority was formed.
Of course, these sorts of projects are still possible and do happen —— but they happen in China.
The one about the Berlin airlift really stunned me. Every two minutes for 14 months?!? You'd think that after a few months they'd lose resolve. Crazy to imagine that it was the Soviets who gave in.
One of my favorite examples of this is the Beatles:
> On 11 February 1963, the Beatles recorded ten songs during a single studio session for their debut LP, Please Please Me.
> Martin asked the band if they had any songs that they could record quickly. According to Martin, "It was a straightforward performance of their stage repertoire – a broadcast, more or less." Initially, a morning and afternoon session only were booked; the evening session was added later. Mark Lewisohn later wrote: "There can scarcely have been 585 more productive minutes in the history of recorded music".
Interestingly,
> .... the Beatles arrived with John Lennon suffering from a bad cold, which he attempted to treat with a steady supply of throat lozenges
Popular in:
2023 (905 points, 298 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36605912
2022 (189 points, 97 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30872279
2019 (1314 points, 300 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848860
The whole of the 20th century was pretty fast. There were no vacuum tubes in 1901; by 1999, 15 million transistors on a chip. Plus spacecraft, refrigerants, airplanes, CFCs, antibiotics, nukes, plasics, radio, lasers...
It was a real "move fast and break things" time period. We'll probably never see anything close ever again.
The common theme here is liberating small, trusted, and talented teams from normal constraints to pursue a singular, urgent goal.
Not really. A lot of the projects listed involved coordinating huge numbers of people, e.g. tens of thousands of construction workers.
And Mozart's "Linz" symphony was composed in 4 (four) days!
you'll execute pretty fast if your back is up against a wall
Sent this email to Patrick 2y ago:
Hi,
re: fast: https://patrickcollison.com/fast
One day in mid-November, workers at OpenAI got an unexpected assignment: Release a chatbot, fast. The chatbot, an executive announced, would be known as "Chat with GPT-3.5," and it would be made available free to the public. In two weeks. The announcement confused some OpenAI employees.
...
OpenAI's top executives had changed their minds. Some were worried that rival companies might upstage them by releasing their own A.I. chatbots before GPT-4, according to the people with knowledge of OpenAI. And putting something out quickly using an old model, they reasoned, could help them collect feedback to improve the new one. So they decided to dust off and update an unreleased chatbot that used a souped-up version of GPT-3, the company’s previous language model, which came out in 2020.
It's interesting that if you make a one word comment it's seen as cheap and unsubstantial, but if you have a one word title, it's encouraged and reposted.
2019? It talks about the Covid vaccine in 2020...