I'm reminded of the famous story of (I think) the central beam in a building at Oxford. The story goes something like:
The central beam was beginning to fail and the Oxford administration knew they needed to replace it. When they went around for quotes, no one could replace the beam because it was 100 ft in length and sourced from an old growth tree. Such logs were simply unavailable to buy. To solve the issue, the staff begin to look at major renovations to the building's architecture.
Until the Oxford groundskeeper heard about the problem. "We have a replacement beam," he said.
The groundskeeper took the curious admins to the edge of the grounds. There stood two old growth trees, over 150 feet tall.
"But these must be over 200 years old! When were they planted?" the admins asked.
> In 1859, the JCR told the SCR that the roof in Hall needed repairing, which was true.
> In 1862, the senior fellow was visiting College estates on `progress', i.e., an annual review of College property, which goes on to this day (performed by the Warden). Visiting forests in Akeley and Great Horwood, Buckinghamshire (forests which the College had owned since 1441), he had the largest oaks cut down and used to make new beams for the ceiling.
> It is not the case that these oaks were kept for the express purpose of replacing the Hall ceiling. It is standard woodland management to grow stands of mixed broadleaf trees e.g., oaks, interplanted with hazel and ash. The hazel and ash are coppiced approximately every 20-25 years to yield poles. The oaks, however, are left to grow on and eventally, after 150 years or more, they yield large pieces for major construction work such as beams, knees etc.
> It is not the case that these oaks were kept for the express purpose of replacing the Hall ceiling.
> The oaks, however, are left to grow on and eventally, after 150 years or more, they yield large pieces for major construction work such as beams, knees etc.
Splitting hairs a bit. In fact what they did was to maintain a more general solution, maintaining a supply of wood over the long term of 400 years.
> the roof in Hall needed repairing, which was true.
> Visiting forests in Akeley and Great Horwood, Buckinghamshire (forests which the College had owned since 1441), he had the largest oaks cut down and used to make new beams for the ceiling.
So seems like the "legend" is true after all, the trees were 150+ old and let to grow, and the "takedown" is just not wanting to acknowledge that they did it purposefully, which is beside the point pedantic hair splitting...
I would only "complain" about this urban legend if there was no way someone would be so future-thinker as to plant trees that are going to be used one or two centuries later.
But since I'm sure we have done things like that in the past, for me, the urban legend is "valid" and I don't feel like that specific case being true or false is that important, just the pattern...
It is good to be able to recognize charming tales and other biases and influences in a narrative. Having them pointed out counteracts the readiness of people to take things at face value. Knowing that something is a tale does not have to take away from it.
I don't know what irked you about the other comment, but I think there's a positive side to it.
> Here's "a thing that happened" vs "here's a tall tale" means whatever message is approached very differently.
I agree. I meant to point out that tales can be entertaining and/or instructional, too, even while we're aware of what they are. ("Knowing that a story is fictional does not take away from it", maybe I should've written that.)
My point still stands, though: knowing a tale from a "thing that happened" is important, and what you said underscores why.
There's a better version of this sort of story that I first heard also set at Oxford.
The stone steps in front of one of the college buildings have been worn down by centuries of people walking up them. The college decides to replace it, but it turns out that the stone used comes from a specific quarry in Wales that in the hundreds of year that have elapsed has been finished when it comes to this sort of rock.
Nobody is sure what to do. They want matching stone but the only other source is in South Africa and it would cost a fortune to ship the stone from there.
A young architect suddenly has a brilliant idea. "We could just extract the stone, turn it over and get a brand new edge". Everyone is very excited, and contractors and tools arrive to carry out the simultaneously tricky yet simple procedure.
It was at that point they discovered this had already been done.
Which defines why American society seems to be F'ed of late. Decades of short term rewards combined with a baby boomer population looking at their last hoorah and declining relevance. Most of the old people I interact seem to be in a state of denial about soon not being here.
Or just compare the billionaires actions now - they are building tunnels in hawaii to prepare for survival just as they are knowingly destroying the future instead of spending their obscene wealth to protect it.
Elon Musk is working towards getting humanity to Mars in the low chance Earth becomes uninhabitable, and he'll never live to see the Mars dream become a reality even if everything goes as planned.
But I guess that doesn't fit the common narratives about a man that isn't a cartoon but a flawed human with strengths and weaknesses.
This is why we don't hear of great men anymore: We only hear about them when they're long dead and their transgressions forgiven and their strengths raised to a pedestal unattainable by real live human beings.
Amen. Mankind is not going to Mars as an escape route. Elon uses this as a way of generating a vision/dream.
When mankind makes serious progress to any of a) living at the poles in scale b) living underwater at scale c) living subterranean (underground) at scale, get back to me and we can talk about offworld habitation (Mars, Venus, or Luna). All of these are hard enough, and provide mitigation against various disasters, at some level. They're hard enough problems to solve as it is.
I'm surprised this kind of garbage is allowed on Wikipedia. The whole article reads like a PR statement, constantly stating what is "possible" or "planned", but never any actual progress in terms of missions.
Basically lots of forward-looking hot air like a financials press release for shareholders.
Parent didn't say _anything_ and frankly doesn't really meet HN's criteria for good discourse. All it said at time of my reply was "He is not doing that".
He is doing that. Whether you believe him, or whether he succeeds, or whether he's lying, is an entirely different conversation and something I can't _prove_. All I can prove is that there are public claims he is doing it, and he keeps saying it in interviews.
There are places on earth where life is unhabitable and on mars its absolutely nonsense really.
But maybe its a dunning kruger effect, I asked an actual aerospace engineer and he said its doable but he's a bit of an elon fan too, and I did read on HN an article on how life on mars is impossible..
Still, it would be most likely be very bad life on mars compared to earth but nope, we all are ready to burn our earth so damn quickly... and listen Elon has a band around him and you could say that he was a salesman in the sense that he had a lot of hype around him which inadvertedly helped tesla
But one shouldn't live life on rocks floating in water [hype] since that might just be a dream or you are crashing down.
And he's a little pathetic in the sense that maybe when I think of all, that could actually be done to help people and with all the influence he had, he fulfilled his agenda really but the agenda was never to better us humans but to get him more power..
No amount of money allows the gardener to plant it in the past. You can pay money now to plant tree now whose benefit will be reaped 100 years down the line. Also, tree is symbolic so no point in going in details of tree growth.
Because "caring for the future" is not a problem that's solved with money. Especially when short-term profit trumps it, and the people that should be caring wont be alive in that future and don't give a fuck.
Thinking "we'll just pay someone to do it" is exactly the mindset that fucked up everything.
(And, for starters, you need to care for X to pay someone to do X, to begin with).
> Thinking "we'll just pay someone to do it" is exactly the mindset that fucked up everything.
What do you mean? We are living in a golden age of unprecedented prosperity.
> Because "caring for the future" is not a problem that's solved with money. Especially when short-term profit trumps it, and the people that should be caring wont be alive in that future and don't give a fuck.
Have a look at the history of shareprices for eg Amazon or Tesla. The stock market loved these companies long before they ever turned a profit. Investors can and do look into the future. (And even short termist who only want to quickly flip some shares will look into the future to try and predict what other people are going to be willing to pay for the shares soon.)
Another exhibit: during the pandemic stock prices recovered long before the world emerged from Covid. They recovered as soon as traders anticipated the broader recovery.
> (And, for starters, you need to care for X to pay someone to do X, to begin with).
Well, if someone in fifty years is willing to pay for the tree (even if she's not born yet), markets will do the rest to come up with a positive price for the tree today.
>What do you mean? We are living in a golden age of unprecedented prosperity
Hahaha, that's next level cope. Compared to what, the 1910s?
Because compared to just a few decades ago we live in an era of diminishing middle class, less affordable rent and housing, worse job prospects, crap politics, worsening climate crisis, failing infrastructure, inflation, and more widespread depression...
>Well, if someone in fifty years is willing to pay for the tree (even if she's not born yet), markets will do the rest to come up with a positive price for the tree today.
Markets don't even solve today's problems anymore, they'd rather enshittify and seek short term profit
Greatness seems to come from long term vision, and with success that vision collapses to short term gains. It’s cultural. Why does that happen and how do you prevent it?
I don't know (not a philosopher or politician or whatnot), but I think great steps were taken when countries introduced a constitution; the US was one of the first modern countries 250 years ago. I think a constitution is that long-term vision, setting a country's morals and values in writing, spanning multiple generations and administrations.
Of course, it can never be set in stone because morals and values evolve; things like equal rights for PoC and women were only added later on, and they seem unsteady at best right now.
The other candidates for long-term vision (but not necessarily success) is organized religion (e.g. Holy Roman Empire) and generational authoritarianism (e.g. kingdoms/empires, North Korea). There's also an in-between with China's 5-year plans, where they make plans (or, feel like they do, I don't even know lol) instead of trying to make big changes one legislation or one budget term at a time.
Unfortunately, while they bridle at the truth, Boomers are the most selfish generation in American history. Every single political and economic action of their generation has been done explicitly at the expense of future generations to enrich themselves. They are the first and only generation in American history to leave their children worse off than themselves. Unfortunately, they are also one of the longest living generations in American history also, and still control the reins of power long after most other generations had passed along. I think we're far from reaching the pinnacle of the damage they will do to our society and to the world. Depending on how long the US lasts as an entity, they might well go down in history as the worst generational cohort ever.
China will overtake them in 10, 15 years; possibly sooner depending on the economic damage of the Trump admin's trade policies, possibly later if another US company does well abroad.
America went from a land populated by people so weak they were decimated by foreign soldiers on horses, to the strongest army in the world. It evolved, positively ?
The funny thing is that 99% of the linkedin shills will miss the second crux of the allegory: To maintain the institutional knowledge for this to happen, you need to have a culture that nurtures employees, keeps them on long term and listens to them. And gives them time to write good documentation for future-proofing.
There's a youtube channel shadiversity that I haven't watched in awhile. It is mostly about fantasy media and swords but also spends a lot of time on medieval building techniques and clothing. One of the more interesting videos I watched talked about how before and even after saw mills could process and produce different sized boards people would 'grow' them instead by trimming trees to produce long straight narrow branches. There was even a still living example in some English village that some trimmed 100 years ago before the process was completely stopped.
This also reminds me of those Japanese temples where in order to preserve the institutional knowledge of how to rebuild the temple in case of disaster the monks tear it down and rebuild it from scratch every 30-40 years assuring the next generation has experience.
Although this story was debunked, many Universities own Timberland in their portfolios. They’re a good inflation hedge for schools with long time horizon. (Real estate and paper investments were historically very correlated to university costs)
Funnily, my country has a similar story but with the opposite moral.
Scattered around my country you will see plantations of huge oak trees, all the same age. What gives?
Well, in 1801 and 1807, my countrys navy suffered terrible defeats by the Brits as part of the Napoleonic wars. The fleet was eventually rebuilt, but that took cutting down many old oaks.
Fearing that oaks are a rare resource that must be replenished, the king ordered the plantning of new ones, so that future generations could still build powerful battleships.
Those oaks matured in the 1960s.
The moral of the story is that you can't actually plan 150 years into the future.
>Rebuilding Notre-Dame’s “forest” also meant selecting 1,300 oak trees from across France that were “as close as possible to those of the 13th century”, that is, “very straight and very slender”, according to Desmonts, with “no defects”. Jean-Louis Bidet, the technical director of Ateliers Perrault, remembers the rush to harvest the trees in autumn so the carpenters could begin squaring the green wood from “dozens of truckloads” before the end of 2022.
It does not have to be. The English language has a process where phrases become hyphenated compounds which then become single words. It's permissible to be partway along that path, and for people to disagree where something is on that path.
Pick any point in the past few centuries, and there's going to be something, possibly nowadays always a single word, but not necessarily so even now, that was in a state of flux at the time. The same goes for today.
“Old growth forest” is incorrect in any formulation of English grammar that I'm familiar with. It's not about fixed phrases. It's about using an adjective+noun pair (in this case, old+growth) as an adjective modifying another noun (in this case, forest). This is a general rule that applies across the board, not an isolated phrase example.
The poster was correct in asking what a “growth forest” is, because without the hyphen, the phrase parses as an adjective (old) modifying a compound noun.
Hyphenation is useful in phrasal adjectives, like "heavy-metal shield" (to distinguish it from a shield that is of metal and is heavy, but is not or a for example Pb) or in something like "four-day trips" (the trips last four days; they are not necessarily four in number).
I like it too, and you're talking to someone who has been trying, mostly in vain, to teach his kids the difference between "I wish I was there" and "I wish I were there", or how you can get eggs from a coop or a coöp, and they're different things, but eventually the hyphenation dies out and the phrase remains.
Mandarin written in pinyin comes to mind as another example. Do you discount that because pinyin is not the primary writing system used for that language?
It means a mature tree in an old-growth forest. Trees that grow in the dense shade of other trees grow slower, and their growth rings are much closer together. The result is that a tree takes a lot longer to grow but it's stronger and harder than the same species grown in the sunlight.
The reason for the distinction is that most of the old growth forests have been clear-cut and the lumber available today is fast-growth farmed lumber. If you compare a 2x4 at Lowe's with a 2x4 out of a 150-year-old house, you'll see that the wood itself is very different even though the species might be the same. The tree the new 2x4 came from was fairly young, while the tree the 150-year-old 2x4 came from was probably centuries old.
You can compute the distance to the moon if you know the radius of the earth by looking at how long lunar eclipses take, data gathered over years of observations.
Eratosthenes computed the radius of the earth by clever trigonometry in ancient times, and Aristarchus computed that a 3.5-hour lunar eclipse indicates that the moon is ~61 earth radii away.
Once you have the distance to the moon, you can compute the size of the moon by measuring how long it takes the moon to rise. It takes about two minutes, and so the radius of the moon is about 0.0002 of the distance to the moon.
By cosmic coincidence, the sun and the moon appear to be approximately the same size in the sky, so the ratio of radius/distance is approximately the same for the sun and the moon. If you measure phases of the moon, you'll find that half moon is not exactly half the time between the full moon and new moon. Half moon occurs not when the moon and the sun make a right angle with the earth, but when the earth and the sun make a right angle with the moon.
You can use trigonometry to measure the difference between the half-time point between new/full moon, and the actual half moon, giving you an angle θ. The distance to the sun is equal to the distance to the moon divided by sin(θ).
To get θ exactly right, you need a very precise clock, which the Greeks didn't have. It turns out to be about half an hour. Aristarchus guessed 6 hours, which was off by an order of magnitude, but showed an important point: that the sun was much larger than the earth, which was the first indication that the earth revolved around the sun. (Aristarchus' peers mostly didn't believe him, not simply out of prejudice, but because the constellations don't seem to distort over the course of a year; they were, as we now know, greatly underestimating the distance to nearby stars.)
Next, you can compute the shape of the orbits of the planets, by observing which constellations the planets fall inside on which dates over the course of centuries. Kepler used this data first to show that the planetary orbits were elliptical, and to show the relative size of each orbit, but with only approximate measures of the distance to the sun (like the θ measurement above) there's not enough precision to compute exact distances between planets.
So, scientists observed the duration of the transit of Venus across the sun from near the north pole and the south pole, relied on their knowledge of the diameter of the earth, and used parallax to compute the distance to Venus, and thereby got an extremely precise measurement of the earth's distance to the sun, the "astronomical unit." It took decades to find the right dates to perform this measurement.
The cosmic distance ladder goes on, measuring the speed of light (without radar) based on our distance to the sun and the orbit of Jupiter's moon Io, using radar to measure astronomical distances based on the speed of light, measuring brightness and color of nearby stars to get their distance, measuring the expected brightness of variable stars in nearby galaxies to get their distance, which provided the data to discover redshift (Hubble's law), measuring the distance to far away galaxies (and thereby showing that the universe is expanding).
In my free time, I have taken to trying to prove the Collatz conjecture.
People much smarter and more educated than me have failed at this quest, so I will nearly certainly fail at it, but that's not really the point in my mind. Even if I'm not the one to actually prove it, I can at least try and contribute to the body of work towards proving it. Mathematics is, more than nearly anything else, the result of generations building upon previous generations work. It's never "done", always growing and refining and figuring out new things to look at.
I have a few ideas on how to prove Collatz that I have not seen done anywhere [1], and usually (at least for me) that means it's a bad idea, but it's worth a try.
One of the greatest things about humans is our willingness to have multi-generational projects. I think maybe the coolest thing humans have ever done was eliminate smallpox, and that took hundreds of years.
[1] Which I'm going to keep to myself for now because they're not very fleshed out.
A related thing occurs in academia for very niche topics on which only very few people are working. Perhaps nobody for most of the time. A paper might "reply" to another paper from years or decades ago, and receive itself a reply only years later, but from a different author.
The cool thing is that you can easily become the current world leading expert on such a niche topic, because there aren't that many papers. So it's easy to know every single one of them, and the few experts are spread out in time rather than space.
It's like a web forum thread on a very obscure question, where only every few years someone contributes a new comment, likely never to be read by most of the previous authors, but read by all that come later.
> A related thing occurs in academia for very niche topics on which only very few people are working. Perhaps nobody for most of the time. A paper might "reply" to another paper from years or decades ago, and receive itself a reply only years later, but from a different author.
I do want to say often math papers have gaps, purely explained parts and sometimes mistakes which can make it quite hard to understand a topic of literally no one else still remembers it though. However the overall advancement of math sometimes helps in this regard
And it’s not only never done, it’s always on the verge of dying off. Like Bill Thurston said, mathematical understanding basically lives in communities of mathematicians, every one of them a cell in the superorganism that is the field. You’re part of the distributed filesystem providing persistence as well as the possibility of new understanding.
The math community surely expects a proof of that, and ChatGPT surely doesn't (yet) have one. (Maybe some day it will, as Kevin Buzzard and others are experimenting with asking language models to produce formal proofs.)
You could get LLMs to opine on many unresolved math conjectures, but I doubt much credence should be given to their responses, when not accompanied by a proof.
Most LLMs I've tried come up with invalid reasoning, many confuse empirical evidence (of simulating it for a few steps and it 'most probably not halting') with definite proof that it never does, some create invalid probabilistic mathematical arguments to the same effect
Others I've tried are caught in a loop of trying to prove the same, insufficient approach over and over again, lacking explorative and "creative" behavior
Generally it seems that LLMs lack the 'motivation' to actually try to solve unsolved problems especially if they know that they are unsolved or difficult
Reminds me of Stewart Brand and the Clock of the Long Now (and other longer time horizon projects they are working on).
Reminds me of a statement he made during a Tim Ferris interview that I think is quite profound for our mental health. ".... being proud is the most reliable source of happiness that I know."
In the full quote, he is talking about fitness and being able to lift things and being proud of your abilities to do so. I'm not saying it works for everyone but it is nice to have a "thing" that you can hang your hat on. The whole interview is quite interesting and worth a read.
That's all fine and good. But nothing lasts. And then when you can no longer lift things, the humiliation you suffer is proportional to the pride you take in it.
Saying "it is nice to have a thing to hang your hat on" sounds like a very pleasant form of personal pride that is easy to let go of. But Hubris is a mortal sin for a valid spiritual reason, and pride is a slippery slope. The advice I gave--pride for your accomplishments, not for yourself--is similar to the advice to how to praise a child: for their efforts, not for their talents.
The 2nd Ave Subway in Manhattan, with
preparatory construction beginning in
1942. First phase opened in 2017.
Although the outcome should be celebrated, the slowness and the added costs that brings certainly should not be.
While every project is unique, it is not
immediately clear why digging a subway
on the Upper East Side is twenty times
more expensive than in Seoul or ten
times more expensive than in Paris.
Alon Levy being brought up on this topic always tweaks my “but somebody is wrong in the internet.” I’ve been on several of the projects he talks about. He’s right about the macro numbers and the general vibe, but often wrong when he starts talking about he details.
The main issues are, in general:
1) increased regulation, which includes internal self-regulation. Lots of rules that are preventing potential minor problems, but have a lot of overhead to follow.
2) large projects are treated like a Christmas Tree. Everybody expects their vaguely adjacent hobby horse to be addressed by the project… so scope keeps growing. There is ALWAYS something you can point to that has a good cost/benefit; and always addressing these ensures that the project never actually finishes.
3) lack of decision making. There is a general analysis paralysis and fear of making the wrong call. It’s often cheaper to just move ahead and risk rework. By not moving ahead, change orders are being incurred anyway.
As much as a hate saying it, the best thing for any large project in these orgs is being run by a semi-dictator who has enough political capital internal to the org, and who strongly objects to anything outside of scope.
I was really disappointed when David Roberts stopped writing due to persistent hand pain, but the podcast series he's turned Volts into as a result has been eye opening for me. I haven't listened to this episode yet. thanks for highlighting it!
The “it is not immediately clear” part should be taken to heart a lot more than it is. Right now I’d bet you could elect Ezra Klein president and he would be as unable to improve things as most, and he probably has a somewhat clearer picture of the factors than your average internet commentator.
Railing against optimizing for caution in a vague sense really isn’t articulating specific dynamics however well it leans into the shallow strawmanification of “regulation” that doesn’t merely dominate lay discourse but has essentially ascended into conceptual godhood without having paid real dues in sacrifice or insight.
There is no respectable theory of why that has even begun to grasp the problem.
no more turgid than the much of the boner for building boosterism, just more notes, which may not be a bad thing if some of the scope of consideration could stand to be inflated.
before I check vital city, should I anticipate that they go beyond articulating “here’s a series of public institutions that took a long time to do things“ and perhaps even into “here’s our theory of the incentives and other motivations that underlie the sociology of this behavior”? or mostly the former?
Theories are hard because the world is complex. I guess that sounds trivial but it really should be said more often. There is no silver bullet with these things, because the systems are so complicated that it is hard to reason about how one thing is the true root cause without implicating another cause. That's also why economics is so difficult I suppose.
A friend of mine once wrote a dictionary[1]. It has all the (normal) one syllable words in English, defined using only other one syllable words. He decided to work on it by focusing on one letter per year, so A was in 1991, B was 1992, and the book was finished in 2017, 26 years later.
It's not even a very long book - only a few hundred pages - but I'm sure if I tried to do the same thing all at once, I'd probably have lost interest around B or C, so I suppose it was a worthwhile strategy.
[1] It's not online anywhere as far as I know, sorry.
Hopefully their interest expands beyond single syllable words, otherwise the highest scores according to a cursory search are 'zizzed' (34) and 'jazzed' (32) which are probably slightly below the average for an elite player.
Zizzed and jazzed if spelled in scrabble would be worth less than 32, since only one of the zs would be worth 10 points, the rest being blank tiles which are worth zero.
Of course most good players will create more than 1 word per turn, and will lay down over multiplier tiles.
You can probably do fairly well with just single syllable words, although at a certain level not being able to get a lay down bonus will prevent you from winning.
I just ran some code over the CMU pronouncing dictionary and the longest words identified as single-syllable that are English-origin and not proper names or possessives were
The CMU dictionary thinks that "scrambled" is two syllables as a vowel ends up between the "b" and the "l" in pronunciation. Wiktionary thinks this is a syllabic l (/l̩/), which should probably be counted as a separate syllable even if it isn't considered a vowel.
Wikipedia says
> Many dialects of English may use syllabic consonants in words such as even [ˈiːvn̩], awful [ˈɔːfɫ̩] and rhythm [ˈɹɪðm̩], which English dictionaries' respelling systems usually treat as realizations of underlying sequences of schwa and a consonant (for example, /ˈiːvən/).
That's consistent with what the CMU dictionary is doing, perhaps treating /l̩/ as /əl/.
The SAS is a joke, putting its name on the same list as actually impressive feats like the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem insults everything else on the list. It's the most expensive subway line worldwide per mile, ever, despite the existence of technology that made tunnelling easier. Inflation adjusted, it costs more per mile than hand-digging one of the PATH tubes with 1900s technology [1]. Its cost and duration are almost entirely due to politics and not technical and logistical challenges, including the MTA political fiefdom fighting the Park Board political fiefdom, make-work-program labour spending, staff paid to have their thumbs up their asses in the tunnels [2], deep-bore tunneling instead of cut-and-cover to avoid political fighting, and MTA departments wanting their miniature fiefdom dug into the ground at each station [3]. The SAS is a project that should bring great shame to everyone in charge and everyone who stood around in the tunnels getting paid to do nothing.
I dunno. I think we should separate out the stuff that fundamentally has to take a long time, like the pitch experiment, from stuff like Notre Dame, which just took a long time because they lacked the resources to do it all at once. Like OK, it takes a long time to build a big church because you need to find all the right rocks or whatever. But the pitch, that’s the universe taking a long time to tell us something.
(I’m being flip for comedy/emphasis sake, of course Notre Dame is pretty impressive too).
I think it is part of the point for a cathedral to take several generations. If you can point to a building and say "that took 5 years to build and I was there for all of it!", then that's great, but the building is in some way "smaller" than you. If you can point to a partially constructed building and say "my grandfather worked on it, my father worked on it, I'm working on it and my children will work on it too", that's a building that is "larger" than any one person.
Taking a century or more to construct anything makes that thing larger than life. There's a certain sublime quality in such efforts, whether they're explicitly dedicated to a god/pantheon but also if they are "just" earthly like the White House (technically took 178 years to construct from start to finish).
There's certainly something interesting about taking multiple generations, but it also feels kinda wrong to attribute greater meaning to something because you dragged it out or intentionally scoped the project too big.
Maybe if the project served a greater purpose and couldn't possibly be built in a shorter time, then it would mean more. But a cathedral? What's wrong with a modest church or two?
Sure, the same amount of stone could be used to construct several smaller churches. The US congress could also just rent a conference room at a nearby hotel if they chose. The Eiffel tower could supply iron for several kilometres of rail track, or maybe a small boat.
But building something extravagantly big has a signaling value all of its own: "see the glory of <whatever it is we constructed this for> and how much resources they command". You don't build a cathedral because it's more practical than a normal church for holding services and stuff, you build a cathedral to express the power of your religion and impress it on others.
I'm imagining a spectrum between "has to be slow" and "needlessly slow", with a middle slider for that one razor where things take as much time as you give them.
Intentionality is a big theme in math research (so i've heard), where solving "useful" problems isn't the ideal goal. The goal is to solve interesting problems, which might seem useless, but along the way achieve results with much wider implications that would have been impossible to discover directly. Or, how inventions like toothpaste came from space travel research.
(rhetorically) Does an indirect result "justify" a longer, slower project? Is speed an inherent property of the problem, or is it only knowable once it's complete? Or both, in the cases of misused funds?
That PC post always irked me. Not because it showed positive examples of going fast but because it felt slightly demeaning to teams/projects that move slowly on purpose, with intent.
I disagree. The PC post never demeans projects that purposefully move slowly with intent, but rather criticizes boondoggles that move slowly due to utter incompetence. The only pejorative text in the PC post is this:
>San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. It opened in 2022, yielding a project duration of around 7,600 days. “The project has been delayed due to an increase of wet weather since the project started,” said Paul Rose, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson. The project cost $346 million, i.e. $110,000 per meter. The Alaska Highway, mentioned above, constructed across remote tundra, cost $793 per meter in 2019 dollars.
At least 30 deaths in the construction of the Alaska highway and obviously much lower eminent domain costs for remote tundra vs downtown SF after the second tech boom.
Definitely belongs on the list; notable not just because it's a slow/long project spanning 60 years and counting, but because part of it included the side trip to write TeX and METAFONT in order to be able to write and typeset the rest of TAOCP properly.
Thanks. I was going to ask about long book (or film etc) projects like that. Some dictionaries and encyclopedias took decades to finish. The "Deutsches Wörterbuch" by the Brothers Grimm was started in 1838 and it got finished only in 1961, long after their death.
Unlike most of the list items or a dictionary, Knuth’s work is an ongoing personal creative process rather than an independent mechanism or a collection of data.
Most democracies have elections every 4 or 5 years. That is good, in that we can get rid of underperforming politicians and parties. But it is bad, in that there isn't a lot of incentive for politicians and parties to plan over a longer timescale than 4 or 5 years.
China has the opposite problem. It can plan and finance long term projects. But there is little prospect of peacefully changing the leadership.
Long-term planning on a colossal scale (like nation-state-level) (or even on a not-so-colossal scale - think of how many plans YOU have made and how they turned out) is pointless because of black swans
Sure, having a general idea of where you want things to go is fine, and everyone already does that; but when a government starts thinking that they should set a concrete goal X and they should do Y to achieve it, it's just akin to trying to predict the future, and we all know how well that always works out, because theyre under the faulty premise of thinkin Y will be constant forever, or that even the goal itself (X) should remain constant in a world that is anything but constant
So, this is a terrible argument for not having elections, or bigger election cycles. I'm sure someone could potentially put forward a better argument, but this one is not it
I think the way that democratic governments can achieve these long-term plans is by establishing (or using existing) entities to complete these goals on their behalf.
An example that comes to mind is the Apollo program: JFK announced a national goal to land a man on the moon in 1961 and this was finally achieved in 1969 - two presidencies (Johnson, Nixon) and one change of party (Dem->Rep) later - with NASA being that independent responsible entity.
Yes, but this sort of thing seems increasingly unlikely in an ever more partisan world. Especially when would-be autocrats are wrecking as many institutions as they can.
>A fun question: of these projects, which required a long time, and which could have been greatly accelerated?
Pretty much everything on the list is a research study of a long-term process that is inherently impossible to accelerate.
From the list, only the Second Avenue Subway and the Sagrada Familia unambiguously qualify as projects that could be greatly accelerated. The SAS was not under active construction for the vast majority of the time between 1942 and 2017 — actual construction only happened for a couple years in the early 70s, then another couple years in the late 80s, and finally from 2011-2017. The fits and starts were due to a combination of bureaucratic red tape, economic woes, and gross incompetence. The Sagrada Familia has also seen only intermittent construction over the last century, primarily because of lack of funding.
I personally find these examples underwhelming. Most of them are processes that require time, like the pitch drop experiment.
I suspect that the things in our lives that truly have value and take a long time aren’t easy to identify as projects. No one person starts it with a clear idea of where it will end. Investment in future capabilities. Knowledge gathering without clear application or business model. Strengthening institutions and traditions of human rights to ensure that no one group can arrest history.
Depending on how you draw the line, it could be argued that science — the project of uncovering the workings of the universe — is the longest-running of all. Although the word “science” isn't that old and is generally associated with the Age of Enlightenment, the desire to understand the world goes as far back as humans can think.
I am fairly certain there will be almost as many Ford model Ts running around in 2108 than are running now, but within 30 or 40 years I doubt there will be many cybertrucks that do.
The article conflates a few different "slow" projects, rather than the premise which is efforts that required decades to come to fruition.
He mentions projects started long ago but are still ongoing, like the Sagrada Familia. Then there's innovations from long ago which are still being used, like Linux. Also, he includes ideas which took decades to finally be implemented, like LIGO.
In my opinion, none of these examples are particularly good at demonstrating, "What problems can human beings only solve over a very long period of time?", except for Fermat's Last Theorem.
All technology builds on that which came before, step by step. You can trace Unicode directly back to Morse Code, via various steps like ASCII, Telex, Baudot Code, etc. But the original goal of Morse wasn't to display emojis.
I'd say General Relativity might be a good example, starting with Newton's efforts to quantify the forces of the real world, ending with Einstein's explanation of spacetime. But again, it's not as clear of a problem as Fermat's Last Theorem which was a single problem that required centuries to solve.
AI may be a good example as well, starting with the advent of the digital computer. The very first scientists who worked with them like von Neumann immediately looked forward to the day of an electronic brain. It's taken nearly a century so far and is still underway.
Neural network was introduced in 1950s. However, the neural architecture, the compute and data required for them to be efficient has been only in last decade.
From perceptron to transformers (few hidden layers to 480B parameters), from multicore CPUs to distributed GPUs and WWW/social media has all contributed to the growth of Artificial Intelligence.
This has took almost 50+ years and so many iterations along the way.
One thing I would say -- the Sagrada Familia definitely didn't have to take the incredible time it has. Maybe not a good example of something that could only be done over the long term. Gaudi didn't prioritize it, and a civil war ruined it.
It is, however, an example of something beautiful that did take a long period of time.
Language itself is an interesting problem. We have texts that are ancient and some are unreadable and others are readable. I personally can't understand old variants of English while (American) English is the only language I speak.
There is so much assumed in our use of language that it can be largely unintelligible without detailed historical context. The first time I heard the term "in the car park" I chuckled at the thought of an amusement park for cars... "parking lot" only came a few thoughts later. We drive on parkways. We play in the park. We park in the lot. Lots are reading this sentence twice. Give this paragraph to a school-kid in just 100 years and it will seem like gibberish. Word.
There is a restaurant (or, perhaps, food purveyor is more accurate) in Japan that has lasted for several centuries. It's been owned by one family, I believe. When Covid hit and their clientele disappeared, they just continued to pay their staff and mostly closed operations until the pandemic was brought more or less under control. They had enough money socked away that they survived this period unscathed. I wish I could remember the name of the place.
Anyway, that's my dream - to own and run a small family business that can support the family even in times of extended crisis. I have no interest in unicorns or IPOs or buyouts or any of that.
As an academic, I fairly resonate with this message. Also notice that most examples he noticed are from academia/science endeavors. I see academia as probably the only place where slow projects are expected and even encouraged; think of PhD students working on basic science problems, often supported for 5-7 years at end (of course close to minimum wage).
This is not to hide that all slow undertakings are good or anything. Often because of inefficient executions or bureaucratic hurdles, academic suffers. But, I am trying to highlight the observation that how a slow and steady progress is the typical modus operandi for an academic lab/group. A famous saying comes to mind: Rome isn't built in a day.
This video is one of about 60 recorded in a year long series of lectures that were delivered at Caltech early on in the project. They are archived by Pau Amaro Seoane at this address https://astro-gr.org/online-course-gravitational-waves/
I think that pretty much everything we work on (as tecchies) is the endpoint of a very long timeline.
Every advancement stands on the shoulders of those that came before. Maybe we can run an LLM, because some Roman architect figured out how to make an aqueduct stay up in a seismically-active area.
If you watch James Burke's Connections[0], you get a feel for it (I think some of them are a bit of a stretch, but I really enjoyed it).
I think in the western world, Art, and music are both long term projects. So much so that
we seem to have "reinvented" music at least twice. Once after the Greeks into classical western music, then again when jazz went into tonal harmony.
Long-term projects make me strangely proud to be a human (for all of our faults and foibles). "A society grows great when the old plant trees in whose shade they will never sit."
Some are projects that have a changing variable over a long period of time (Framingham Heart Study, E. coli long-term evolution experiment) or strive to exist a long time (Clock of the Long Now). I would argue that these projects -- their process, data collection methods, and goals -- may have been developed quickly, in a short amount of time. Their longevity is proof that the original project was well established. But the same could be said of the invention of the wheel, shoe, sliced bread, etc
If we look beyond problems that humans solve, well, evolution of diverse and specialized species seems to require time (and be undone by humans going fast)
. My work aims to help create systems which support creativity and discovery. Currently, my main projects are working on metascience, programmable matter, and tools for thought. In the past I've worked on quantum computing, open science, and artificial intelligence, and there's a lot of crossover with my current interests. Bio (2020).
I love the story of the Framingham Heart Study, it's one I've referenced a lot when I talk to people and organizations about how they might not have the data they need and how important data collection is.
The Sagrada Familia has been criticized as a symbol of bureaucratic inertia, some critics insinuating that the delays are deliberate for financial interests.
Fortran has multiple incompatible implementations and a standard that's supported completely by none of them, and that hasn't maintained 100% forward compatibility across revisions. It'll still be around in the sense that English will be -- there will be a thing by that name -- but it's impossible to say now exactly what it will be, or to write Fortran now that will still work identically without change for the next century. I think C'89 uniprocessor code would stand a better chance.
> That's an accuracy comparable to measuring the distance to the Sun to an accuracy of one atom.
This does not exist, because "the location of the Sun" cannot be defined to the precision of one atom, as the Sun is constantly changing shape and size on a much, much larger scale (easily half the orders of magnitude of the distance to be measured).
> Will Unix Time or TCP/IP ever be replaced? Modified: sure.
UNIX time is already being replaced with a 64 bit value instead of signed 32 bit. TCP/IP has already been replaced, that's QUIC over IPv6 which is what my computer uses every time it connects to Google.
I mean you can claim IPv6 is still "IP" because it shares the same first two letters, but IPv6 is different enough to be easily considered a different protocol.
Fundamentally, IPv6 and 64 bit UNIX time are modifications of their predecessors. QUIC not so much, but it's still a long way from replacing TCP on the web, let alone the internet.
But then you could argue that UNIX time is just a modification of other forms of date/time reckoning. It becomes a semantic debate over what counts as a separate thing, and that's not a fantastically interesting question anymore.
Well, in 1980 when I got my hands on the first "powerful" benchtop computer that I had complete control of, I started a project to do a little machine learning so that I would one day have some of the foundation I needed to handle the data more intelligently in the future.
That's what I always wanted to have a computer for and why I took Fortran in college to begin with.
I knew I wasn't going to reach the "intelligence" part within a short number of years, for one thing I had figured out it would be much faster on a more specialized chip than a CPU, plus it would require megabytes of memory when I only had kilobytes, and way more storage space too.
I couldn't be spending years concentrating on this while waiting for hardware technology to progress, and for survival otherwise I gravitated to a niche within a natural science career that would not be replaced by the AI which I expected to be rapidly approaching from those who had a much better head start both financially as well as in computer science.
Now by the time the late 90's rolled around, I already had my own company for a number of years (knew that was going to take decades too so I had started in that direction as a teenager) and by then had more than one computer. Woo hoo!
And megabytes! Oh Yeah!
Plus Office '97 which put the "paperless office" within reach even though paperwork was my primary deliverable product.
With Y2K looming I decided to use some of the megabytes in the more powerful PC to try a bit of the old ML again, with much more of a bent for AI this time. I had already been pitched in the early '90's by neural net vendors but I wasn't ready for that. After a few more years of consideration I had a much better idea of the groundwork I would need, separated the raw automation from the intelligent input I was making and that was a good milestone in efficiency right there. I was barely able to get a bit of my concept from 1980 put on to a "powerful" DOS/Windows platform when it crashed and set me back a couple months before starting to get hammered into eventual submission by years of stacked natural disasters.
Growth had been halted but by this time I was pretty mature and charge enough per page that I personally wasn't going to be the one that needed any more automation than I already had. When I first started I could afford to type each page manually on a (intelligent) typewriter to begin with, and I could make even more at today's prices now doing that again if I had too. This was another marginally positive trend that was not very obvious, and it was so marginal that was when I accepted that I would have to actually outlive most of my contemporaries if I was going to make very much of it.
Whew, that wasn't easy and it took a while too.
Even if total automation doesn't make me any more than total manual effort, it is the kind of thing that the bigger multinational groups could really take to the bank. So I've always kept it in mind, I knew about it all along, that's where I got started.
Anyway, there's still a blank tab on an XLS spreadsheet where the tabs to the left are all the "very important" data which I ruminate about then do a little typing accordingly before hitting the button. Then the tabs to the right get populated sequentially and filtered until the final tab spits out a file that gets emailed to the client. It comes straight from Excel with letterhead and fonts virtually indistinguishable from Word. At the beginning with MS-Word I was faxing with a dedicated land line plugged directly into the PC, now email or not when the client prints it there are very few ways to tell the difference from when I would fax them a signed page from my typewriter too.
It took quite a while to reach the point today where AI might be getting close enough in my lifetime to where I could train it to fill in that blank tab for me.
Replicators won't dispense with capitalism, at least not automatically. Replicators need tremendous energy which can be privately controlled, plus capitalism can maintain minority control over a technology like this via trade secrets etc. and keep selling the technology for high prices. If you're thinking that you can just use a replicator to make more replicators, that's kinda like asking a 3D printer to 3D print another 3D printer, or asking an LLM to just program another LLM.
No, we need to dispense with capitalism ourselves instead of hoping for a magical technology to do it for us.
I'm reminded of the famous story of (I think) the central beam in a building at Oxford. The story goes something like:
The central beam was beginning to fail and the Oxford administration knew they needed to replace it. When they went around for quotes, no one could replace the beam because it was 100 ft in length and sourced from an old growth tree. Such logs were simply unavailable to buy. To solve the issue, the staff begin to look at major renovations to the building's architecture.
Until the Oxford groundskeeper heard about the problem. "We have a replacement beam," he said.
The groundskeeper took the curious admins to the edge of the grounds. There stood two old growth trees, over 150 feet tall.
"But these must be over 200 years old! When were they planted?" the admins asked.
"The day they replaced the previous beam."
This is an urban legend. The college archivist covered it: http://web.archive.org/web/20020816065622/http://www.new.ox....
> In 1859, the JCR told the SCR that the roof in Hall needed repairing, which was true.
> In 1862, the senior fellow was visiting College estates on `progress', i.e., an annual review of College property, which goes on to this day (performed by the Warden). Visiting forests in Akeley and Great Horwood, Buckinghamshire (forests which the College had owned since 1441), he had the largest oaks cut down and used to make new beams for the ceiling.
> It is not the case that these oaks were kept for the express purpose of replacing the Hall ceiling. It is standard woodland management to grow stands of mixed broadleaf trees e.g., oaks, interplanted with hazel and ash. The hazel and ash are coppiced approximately every 20-25 years to yield poles. The oaks, however, are left to grow on and eventally, after 150 years or more, they yield large pieces for major construction work such as beams, knees etc.
> It is not the case that these oaks were kept for the express purpose of replacing the Hall ceiling.
> The oaks, however, are left to grow on and eventally, after 150 years or more, they yield large pieces for major construction work such as beams, knees etc.
Splitting hairs a bit. In fact what they did was to maintain a more general solution, maintaining a supply of wood over the long term of 400 years.
But this urban legend must be over 150 years old! When was it created?
Right after they consumed the previous rural legend.
Remember it's "Town and Gown". Oxford is a city, even officially recognised so by the Crown.
Thank you.
> the roof in Hall needed repairing, which was true. > Visiting forests in Akeley and Great Horwood, Buckinghamshire (forests which the College had owned since 1441), he had the largest oaks cut down and used to make new beams for the ceiling.
So seems like the "legend" is true after all, the trees were 150+ old and let to grow, and the "takedown" is just not wanting to acknowledge that they did it purposefully, which is beside the point pedantic hair splitting...
> just not wanting to acknowledge that they did it purposefully
So the punchline of the urban legend is in question? The part that makes it so interesting? Not sure that qualifies as 'pedantic hair splitting'.
I would only "complain" about this urban legend if there was no way someone would be so future-thinker as to plant trees that are going to be used one or two centuries later.
But since I'm sure we have done things like that in the past, for me, the urban legend is "valid" and I don't feel like that specific case being true or false is that important, just the pattern...
Ah yes, "exacting young man debunks charming tale with touching moral, to the benefit of nobody". A tale as old as time.
It is good to be able to recognize charming tales and other biases and influences in a narrative. Having them pointed out counteracts the readiness of people to take things at face value. Knowing that something is a tale does not have to take away from it.
I don't know what irked you about the other comment, but I think there's a positive side to it.
>Knowing that something is a tale does not have to take away from it.
Oh, but it does.
Here's "a thing that happened" vs "here's a tall tale" means whatever message is approached very differently.
> Here's "a thing that happened" vs "here's a tall tale" means whatever message is approached very differently.
I agree. I meant to point out that tales can be entertaining and/or instructional, too, even while we're aware of what they are. ("Knowing that a story is fictional does not take away from it", maybe I should've written that.)
My point still stands, though: knowing a tale from a "thing that happened" is important, and what you said underscores why.
"You know the great story you've been telling others for years as truth? It was in fact a lie" is much much worse.
Better to know up front that a tale is only a parable.
I think it still works fine as a parable, and it doesn't hurt to know a little bit more about how the trees are Oxford are really kept.
There's a better version of this sort of story that I first heard also set at Oxford.
The stone steps in front of one of the college buildings have been worn down by centuries of people walking up them. The college decides to replace it, but it turns out that the stone used comes from a specific quarry in Wales that in the hundreds of year that have elapsed has been finished when it comes to this sort of rock.
Nobody is sure what to do. They want matching stone but the only other source is in South Africa and it would cost a fortune to ship the stone from there.
A young architect suddenly has a brilliant idea. "We could just extract the stone, turn it over and get a brand new edge". Everyone is very excited, and contractors and tools arrive to carry out the simultaneously tricky yet simple procedure.
It was at that point they discovered this had already been done.
"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit" - Paraphrased from Elton Trueblood
Which defines why American society seems to be F'ed of late. Decades of short term rewards combined with a baby boomer population looking at their last hoorah and declining relevance. Most of the old people I interact seem to be in a state of denial about soon not being here.
Or just compare the billionaires actions now - they are building tunnels in hawaii to prepare for survival just as they are knowingly destroying the future instead of spending their obscene wealth to protect it.
Elon Musk is working towards getting humanity to Mars in the low chance Earth becomes uninhabitable, and he'll never live to see the Mars dream become a reality even if everything goes as planned.
But I guess that doesn't fit the common narratives about a man that isn't a cartoon but a flawed human with strengths and weaknesses.
This is why we don't hear of great men anymore: We only hear about them when they're long dead and their transgressions forgiven and their strengths raised to a pedestal unattainable by real live human beings.
Goals and means. No matter what end goal is, if it requires eugenics (hyperbolic example) to reach there, people will resist.
He is not doing that.
Amen. Mankind is not going to Mars as an escape route. Elon uses this as a way of generating a vision/dream.
When mankind makes serious progress to any of a) living at the poles in scale b) living underwater at scale c) living subterranean (underground) at scale, get back to me and we can talk about offworld habitation (Mars, Venus, or Luna). All of these are hard enough, and provide mitigation against various disasters, at some level. They're hard enough problems to solve as it is.
So you claim contrary to interviews and public reporting and Wikipedia that no, he isn’t working towards that until he gets us there.
EDS is a thing, I guess. Sad to see on HN of all places.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Mars_colonization_pro...
I'm surprised this kind of garbage is allowed on Wikipedia. The whole article reads like a PR statement, constantly stating what is "possible" or "planned", but never any actual progress in terms of missions.
Basically lots of forward-looking hot air like a financials press release for shareholders.
Utter nonsense.
Parent didn't say he doesn't pay lip service to it, or doesn't make bullshit timelines and promises.
Parent didn't say _anything_ and frankly doesn't really meet HN's criteria for good discourse. All it said at time of my reply was "He is not doing that".
He is doing that. Whether you believe him, or whether he succeeds, or whether he's lying, is an entirely different conversation and something I can't _prove_. All I can prove is that there are public claims he is doing it, and he keeps saying it in interviews.
One can be both "working toward" a goal and "making bullshit timelines and promises" at the same time, those things are completely orthogonal.
There are places on earth where life is unhabitable and on mars its absolutely nonsense really.
But maybe its a dunning kruger effect, I asked an actual aerospace engineer and he said its doable but he's a bit of an elon fan too, and I did read on HN an article on how life on mars is impossible..
Still, it would be most likely be very bad life on mars compared to earth but nope, we all are ready to burn our earth so damn quickly... and listen Elon has a band around him and you could say that he was a salesman in the sense that he had a lot of hype around him which inadvertedly helped tesla
But one shouldn't live life on rocks floating in water [hype] since that might just be a dream or you are crashing down.
And he's a little pathetic in the sense that maybe when I think of all, that could actually be done to help people and with all the influence he had, he fulfilled his agenda really but the agenda was never to better us humans but to get him more power..
So lets call spade a spade shall we?
>Elon Musk is working towards getting humanity to Mars
Sure
Why? It's very easy to get people to plant trees for you. Just give a gardener, even a very old one, some money and they'll do it for you.
No amount of money allows the gardener to plant it in the past. You can pay money now to plant tree now whose benefit will be reaped 100 years down the line. Also, tree is symbolic so no point in going in details of tree growth.
The best to plant that tree is 50 years ago. The second best time is now. Just go plant it.
Because "caring for the future" is not a problem that's solved with money. Especially when short-term profit trumps it, and the people that should be caring wont be alive in that future and don't give a fuck.
Thinking "we'll just pay someone to do it" is exactly the mindset that fucked up everything.
(And, for starters, you need to care for X to pay someone to do X, to begin with).
> Thinking "we'll just pay someone to do it" is exactly the mindset that fucked up everything.
What do you mean? We are living in a golden age of unprecedented prosperity.
> Because "caring for the future" is not a problem that's solved with money. Especially when short-term profit trumps it, and the people that should be caring wont be alive in that future and don't give a fuck.
Have a look at the history of shareprices for eg Amazon or Tesla. The stock market loved these companies long before they ever turned a profit. Investors can and do look into the future. (And even short termist who only want to quickly flip some shares will look into the future to try and predict what other people are going to be willing to pay for the shares soon.)
Another exhibit: during the pandemic stock prices recovered long before the world emerged from Covid. They recovered as soon as traders anticipated the broader recovery.
> (And, for starters, you need to care for X to pay someone to do X, to begin with).
Well, if someone in fifty years is willing to pay for the tree (even if she's not born yet), markets will do the rest to come up with a positive price for the tree today.
>What do you mean? We are living in a golden age of unprecedented prosperity
Hahaha, that's next level cope. Compared to what, the 1910s?
Because compared to just a few decades ago we live in an era of diminishing middle class, less affordable rent and housing, worse job prospects, crap politics, worsening climate crisis, failing infrastructure, inflation, and more widespread depression...
>Well, if someone in fifty years is willing to pay for the tree (even if she's not born yet), markets will do the rest to come up with a positive price for the tree today.
Markets don't even solve today's problems anymore, they'd rather enshittify and seek short term profit
Greatness seems to come from long term vision, and with success that vision collapses to short term gains. It’s cultural. Why does that happen and how do you prevent it?
I don't know (not a philosopher or politician or whatnot), but I think great steps were taken when countries introduced a constitution; the US was one of the first modern countries 250 years ago. I think a constitution is that long-term vision, setting a country's morals and values in writing, spanning multiple generations and administrations.
Of course, it can never be set in stone because morals and values evolve; things like equal rights for PoC and women were only added later on, and they seem unsteady at best right now.
The other candidates for long-term vision (but not necessarily success) is organized religion (e.g. Holy Roman Empire) and generational authoritarianism (e.g. kingdoms/empires, North Korea). There's also an in-between with China's 5-year plans, where they make plans (or, feel like they do, I don't even know lol) instead of trying to make big changes one legislation or one budget term at a time.
Unfortunately, while they bridle at the truth, Boomers are the most selfish generation in American history. Every single political and economic action of their generation has been done explicitly at the expense of future generations to enrich themselves. They are the first and only generation in American history to leave their children worse off than themselves. Unfortunately, they are also one of the longest living generations in American history also, and still control the reins of power long after most other generations had passed along. I think we're far from reaching the pinnacle of the damage they will do to our society and to the world. Depending on how long the US lasts as an entity, they might well go down in history as the worst generational cohort ever.
What is the bad part? Still number 1 GDP.
When was the glory days? Pre 1900s with slavery? The war and interwar years?
The cold war?
Pessimistic.
> Still number 1 GDP.
China will overtake them in 10, 15 years; possibly sooner depending on the economic damage of the Trump admin's trade policies, possibly later if another US company does well abroad.
What a heinous posting. Judging about others shows true evil.
Zoom out: 200 years ago they were killing each other over slavery, 400 years ago, there was no american society.
The trend is up, but they're in a local minimum :D
> [...] 400 years ago, there was no american society.
Well, there were people living in that part of the world..
America went from a land populated by people so weak they were decimated by foreign soldiers on horses, to the strongest army in the world. It evolved, positively ?
Increased capacity for violence, yeah! Because that's the only thing that matters..
Can't wait to see this story used on some growth hacker / seeking new opportunities LinkedIn post talking about planning for success.
The funny thing is that 99% of the linkedin shills will miss the second crux of the allegory: To maintain the institutional knowledge for this to happen, you need to have a culture that nurtures employees, keeps them on long term and listens to them. And gives them time to write good documentation for future-proofing.
It's wild that they managed to retain this knowledge without a Confluence by Atlassian subscription (tm).
There's a youtube channel shadiversity that I haven't watched in awhile. It is mostly about fantasy media and swords but also spends a lot of time on medieval building techniques and clothing. One of the more interesting videos I watched talked about how before and even after saw mills could process and produce different sized boards people would 'grow' them instead by trimming trees to produce long straight narrow branches. There was even a still living example in some English village that some trimmed 100 years ago before the process was completely stopped.
This also reminds me of those Japanese temples where in order to preserve the institutional knowledge of how to rebuild the temple in case of disaster the monks tear it down and rebuild it from scratch every 30-40 years assuring the next generation has experience.
This reminds me of the US Navy's Oak forest for ship building: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Live_Oaks_Reservation
Although this story was debunked, many Universities own Timberland in their portfolios. They’re a good inflation hedge for schools with long time horizon. (Real estate and paper investments were historically very correlated to university costs)
https://blog.realestate.cornell.edu/2018/04/20/harvards-natu...
I have no idea if this story is true, but it should be.
We should all strive to make it so.
As said in Italian "si non è vero, è ben trovato".
Source: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/oak-beams-new-college-ox...
Funnily, my country has a similar story but with the opposite moral.
Scattered around my country you will see plantations of huge oak trees, all the same age. What gives? Well, in 1801 and 1807, my countrys navy suffered terrible defeats by the Brits as part of the Napoleonic wars. The fleet was eventually rebuilt, but that took cutting down many old oaks. Fearing that oaks are a rare resource that must be replenished, the king ordered the plantning of new ones, so that future generations could still build powerful battleships. Those oaks matured in the 1960s.
The moral of the story is that you can't actually plan 150 years into the future.
Literally what they do for Norte dame?
>Rebuilding Notre-Dame’s “forest” also meant selecting 1,300 oak trees from across France that were “as close as possible to those of the 13th century”, that is, “very straight and very slender”, according to Desmonts, with “no defects”. Jean-Louis Bidet, the technical director of Ateliers Perrault, remembers the rush to harvest the trees in autumn so the carpenters could begin squaring the green wood from “dozens of truckloads” before the end of 2022.
Fantastic!
What is a "growth tree"?
((Old growth) tree), not (old (growth tree)).
Old growth trees are trees or forests that are centuries old and not recently cultures.
That should have been hyphenated then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-growth_forest
It does not have to be. The English language has a process where phrases become hyphenated compounds which then become single words. It's permissible to be partway along that path, and for people to disagree where something is on that path.
Pick any point in the past few centuries, and there's going to be something, possibly nowadays always a single word, but not necessarily so even now, that was in a state of flux at the time. The same goes for today.
“Old growth forest” is incorrect in any formulation of English grammar that I'm familiar with. It's not about fixed phrases. It's about using an adjective+noun pair (in this case, old+growth) as an adjective modifying another noun (in this case, forest). This is a general rule that applies across the board, not an isolated phrase example.
The poster was correct in asking what a “growth forest” is, because without the hyphen, the phrase parses as an adjective (old) modifying a compound noun.
And "nowadays" is an example of that process https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nowadays,%20no...
Have a nice week-end! I fondly recall the days of my youth as a teen-ager.
Though I still lament the loss of the subjunctive form. And diaeresis.
Hyphenation is useful in phrasal adjectives, like "heavy-metal shield" (to distinguish it from a shield that is of metal and is heavy, but is not or a for example Pb) or in something like "four-day trips" (the trips last four days; they are not necessarily four in number).
I like it too, and you're talking to someone who has been trying, mostly in vain, to teach his kids the difference between "I wish I was there" and "I wish I were there", or how you can get eggs from a coop or a coöp, and they're different things, but eventually the hyphenation dies out and the phrase remains.
Tangential, how do you hyphenate (((very old) growth) tree)?
In English, we're making a compound adjective so it would be very-old-growth tree.
It's one step short of the German compound noun, and we make it easier to find the fragments...
English is the only language I know of that allows spaces in compound words at all. It's a very peculiar feature of English orthography.
Mandarin written in pinyin comes to mind as another example. Do you discount that because pinyin is not the primary writing system used for that language?
Nah I just didn't know anything about Mandarin really
This sort of thing comes up often for me. I use extended hyphenation to declare precedence: very-old--growth tree.
ancient-growth tree
Not "growth tree" but an "old growth" tree. It just means a tree that was left to mature, and never cut down.
It means a mature tree in an old-growth forest. Trees that grow in the dense shade of other trees grow slower, and their growth rings are much closer together. The result is that a tree takes a lot longer to grow but it's stronger and harder than the same species grown in the sunlight.
The reason for the distinction is that most of the old growth forests have been clear-cut and the lumber available today is fast-growth farmed lumber. If you compare a 2x4 at Lowe's with a 2x4 out of a 150-year-old house, you'll see that the wood itself is very different even though the species might be the same. The tree the new 2x4 came from was fairly young, while the tree the 150-year-old 2x4 came from was probably centuries old.
Typically it also means one left to grow naturally, without forcing the rate by various methods (as is done in many modern tree farms).
is there any difference to just saying "old tree"?
Old trees are not necessarily old-growth trees. A fallow tree farm left to age has zero old-growth trees, regardless of how old they are.
You have the real answer, but I suppose it is contrasted with a "value tree."
Here's another good example of a series of slow experiments: the cosmic distance ladder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdOXS_9_P4U https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_distance_ladder
You can compute the distance to the moon if you know the radius of the earth by looking at how long lunar eclipses take, data gathered over years of observations.
Eratosthenes computed the radius of the earth by clever trigonometry in ancient times, and Aristarchus computed that a 3.5-hour lunar eclipse indicates that the moon is ~61 earth radii away.
Once you have the distance to the moon, you can compute the size of the moon by measuring how long it takes the moon to rise. It takes about two minutes, and so the radius of the moon is about 0.0002 of the distance to the moon.
By cosmic coincidence, the sun and the moon appear to be approximately the same size in the sky, so the ratio of radius/distance is approximately the same for the sun and the moon. If you measure phases of the moon, you'll find that half moon is not exactly half the time between the full moon and new moon. Half moon occurs not when the moon and the sun make a right angle with the earth, but when the earth and the sun make a right angle with the moon.
You can use trigonometry to measure the difference between the half-time point between new/full moon, and the actual half moon, giving you an angle θ. The distance to the sun is equal to the distance to the moon divided by sin(θ).
To get θ exactly right, you need a very precise clock, which the Greeks didn't have. It turns out to be about half an hour. Aristarchus guessed 6 hours, which was off by an order of magnitude, but showed an important point: that the sun was much larger than the earth, which was the first indication that the earth revolved around the sun. (Aristarchus' peers mostly didn't believe him, not simply out of prejudice, but because the constellations don't seem to distort over the course of a year; they were, as we now know, greatly underestimating the distance to nearby stars.)
Next, you can compute the shape of the orbits of the planets, by observing which constellations the planets fall inside on which dates over the course of centuries. Kepler used this data first to show that the planetary orbits were elliptical, and to show the relative size of each orbit, but with only approximate measures of the distance to the sun (like the θ measurement above) there's not enough precision to compute exact distances between planets.
So, scientists observed the duration of the transit of Venus across the sun from near the north pole and the south pole, relied on their knowledge of the diameter of the earth, and used parallax to compute the distance to Venus, and thereby got an extremely precise measurement of the earth's distance to the sun, the "astronomical unit." It took decades to find the right dates to perform this measurement.
The cosmic distance ladder goes on, measuring the speed of light (without radar) based on our distance to the sun and the orbit of Jupiter's moon Io, using radar to measure astronomical distances based on the speed of light, measuring brightness and color of nearby stars to get their distance, measuring the expected brightness of variable stars in nearby galaxies to get their distance, which provided the data to discover redshift (Hubble's law), measuring the distance to far away galaxies (and thereby showing that the universe is expanding).
Looking forward to Tao’s book on the subject. This is worthy of its own post, thanks for sharing.
Beat me to it. Indeed, from that video I learned that astronomy work requires large and/or longitudinal datasets.
I loved the tidbit that Galileo had a spat with Tycho Brahe because Brahe wouldn't share his data, so Galileo stole it (?)
Johannes Kepler was in there somewhere I recall. It was Brahe's data on the motions of Mars that lead Kepler to the idea of elliptical orbits.
Oops, I may have confused Kepler for Galileo
solid! thank you!
Thank you.
In my free time, I have taken to trying to prove the Collatz conjecture.
People much smarter and more educated than me have failed at this quest, so I will nearly certainly fail at it, but that's not really the point in my mind. Even if I'm not the one to actually prove it, I can at least try and contribute to the body of work towards proving it. Mathematics is, more than nearly anything else, the result of generations building upon previous generations work. It's never "done", always growing and refining and figuring out new things to look at.
I have a few ideas on how to prove Collatz that I have not seen done anywhere [1], and usually (at least for me) that means it's a bad idea, but it's worth a try.
One of the greatest things about humans is our willingness to have multi-generational projects. I think maybe the coolest thing humans have ever done was eliminate smallpox, and that took hundreds of years.
[1] Which I'm going to keep to myself for now because they're not very fleshed out.
A related thing occurs in academia for very niche topics on which only very few people are working. Perhaps nobody for most of the time. A paper might "reply" to another paper from years or decades ago, and receive itself a reply only years later, but from a different author.
The cool thing is that you can easily become the current world leading expert on such a niche topic, because there aren't that many papers. So it's easy to know every single one of them, and the few experts are spread out in time rather than space.
It's like a web forum thread on a very obscure question, where only every few years someone contributes a new comment, likely never to be read by most of the previous authors, but read by all that come later.
> A related thing occurs in academia for very niche topics on which only very few people are working. Perhaps nobody for most of the time. A paper might "reply" to another paper from years or decades ago, and receive itself a reply only years later, but from a different author.
Reminds me of certain parts of "Anathem".
I do want to say often math papers have gaps, purely explained parts and sometimes mistakes which can make it quite hard to understand a topic of literally no one else still remembers it though. However the overall advancement of math sometimes helps in this regard
And it’s not only never done, it’s always on the verge of dying off. Like Bill Thurston said, mathematical understanding basically lives in communities of mathematicians, every one of them a cell in the superorganism that is the field. You’re part of the distributed filesystem providing persistence as well as the possibility of new understanding.
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/43690/whats-a-mathematici...
Interesting new contender for simplest to state unsolved problem: The Antihydra
Does this program halt?
(// being integer division, equivalently a binary shift one to the right: >> 1)https://www.sligocki.com/2024/07/06/bb-6-2-is-hard.html
https://bbchallenge.org/antihydra
Interesting, I hadn't heard this one.
I should see if I can model this in Isabelle or something and see what happens.
for reference, the statement has been formalized in Lean in Deepmind's open problem database: https://github.com/google-deepmind/formal-conjectures/blob/e...
Is that also the simplest unsolved state problem?
How does overflow behave?
It doesn't overflow.
Too bad, that makes it harder.
Fwiw, ChatGPT is able to say that it doesn't. I wonder what other classes of programs it's able to state if it halts?
Tom from the pub says that it does.
The math community surely expects a proof of that, and ChatGPT surely doesn't (yet) have one. (Maybe some day it will, as Kevin Buzzard and others are experimenting with asking language models to produce formal proofs.)
You could get LLMs to opine on many unresolved math conjectures, but I doubt much credence should be given to their responses, when not accompanied by a proof.
Most LLMs I've tried come up with invalid reasoning, many confuse empirical evidence (of simulating it for a few steps and it 'most probably not halting') with definite proof that it never does, some create invalid probabilistic mathematical arguments to the same effect
Others I've tried are caught in a loop of trying to prove the same, insufficient approach over and over again, lacking explorative and "creative" behavior
Generally it seems that LLMs lack the 'motivation' to actually try to solve unsolved problems especially if they know that they are unsolved or difficult
ChatGPT is able to say anything it wants. Surely you know this by now ...
What ChatGPT says has no relevance to whether it halts.
Reminds me of Stewart Brand and the Clock of the Long Now (and other longer time horizon projects they are working on).
Reminds me of a statement he made during a Tim Ferris interview that I think is quite profound for our mental health. ".... being proud is the most reliable source of happiness that I know."
Proud of your work, not proud of yourself. The latter is quite a reliable source of unhappiness, I've found.
In the full quote, he is talking about fitness and being able to lift things and being proud of your abilities to do so. I'm not saying it works for everyone but it is nice to have a "thing" that you can hang your hat on. The whole interview is quite interesting and worth a read.
That's all fine and good. But nothing lasts. And then when you can no longer lift things, the humiliation you suffer is proportional to the pride you take in it.
Saying "it is nice to have a thing to hang your hat on" sounds like a very pleasant form of personal pride that is easy to let go of. But Hubris is a mortal sin for a valid spiritual reason, and pride is a slippery slope. The advice I gave--pride for your accomplishments, not for yourself--is similar to the advice to how to praise a child: for their efforts, not for their talents.
here's a even more damning look: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/why-it-costs-4-billion...
edit: I've been on a tirade about this subject this week. https://www.brethorsting.com/blog/2025/07/state-capacity-and...
Super enjoyed this read today. And a much shorter punchline. https://www.volts.wtf/p/us-transit-costs-and-how-to-tame https://bsky.app/profile/volts.wtf/post/3lvbpy6p2zk2c
It's just so sad having a nation where disbelief & being against things is so the spirit.
Alon Levy being brought up on this topic always tweaks my “but somebody is wrong in the internet.” I’ve been on several of the projects he talks about. He’s right about the macro numbers and the general vibe, but often wrong when he starts talking about he details.
The main issues are, in general: 1) increased regulation, which includes internal self-regulation. Lots of rules that are preventing potential minor problems, but have a lot of overhead to follow. 2) large projects are treated like a Christmas Tree. Everybody expects their vaguely adjacent hobby horse to be addressed by the project… so scope keeps growing. There is ALWAYS something you can point to that has a good cost/benefit; and always addressing these ensures that the project never actually finishes. 3) lack of decision making. There is a general analysis paralysis and fear of making the wrong call. It’s often cheaper to just move ahead and risk rework. By not moving ahead, change orders are being incurred anyway.
As much as a hate saying it, the best thing for any large project in these orgs is being run by a semi-dictator who has enough political capital internal to the org, and who strongly objects to anything outside of scope.
I was really sad that we lost Andy Byford. As far as benevolent transit dictators go, I can’t imagine doing much better.
I was really disappointed when David Roberts stopped writing due to persistent hand pain, but the podcast series he's turned Volts into as a result has been eye opening for me. I haven't listened to this episode yet. thanks for highlighting it!
> It's just so sad having a nation where disbelief & being against things is so the spirit.
Yeah, being French sucks.
... what?
The “it is not immediately clear” part should be taken to heart a lot more than it is. Right now I’d bet you could elect Ezra Klein president and he would be as unable to improve things as most, and he probably has a somewhat clearer picture of the factors than your average internet commentator.
Railing against optimizing for caution in a vague sense really isn’t articulating specific dynamics however well it leans into the shallow strawmanification of “regulation” that doesn’t merely dominate lay discourse but has essentially ascended into conceptual godhood without having paid real dues in sacrifice or insight.
There is no respectable theory of why that has even begun to grasp the problem.
I recommend checking out the Vital City NYC link i shared. It articulates some of the “specific dynamics” you’re thoughtfully, if turgidly requesting.
no more turgid than the much of the boner for building boosterism, just more notes, which may not be a bad thing if some of the scope of consideration could stand to be inflated.
before I check vital city, should I anticipate that they go beyond articulating “here’s a series of public institutions that took a long time to do things“ and perhaps even into “here’s our theory of the incentives and other motivations that underlie the sociology of this behavior”? or mostly the former?
Put down the thesaurus, my dude. And yes.
Thank you for using "turgidly" as such. You've given me a new appreciation for the term.
Theories are hard because the world is complex. I guess that sounds trivial but it really should be said more often. There is no silver bullet with these things, because the systems are so complicated that it is hard to reason about how one thing is the true root cause without implicating another cause. That's also why economics is so difficult I suppose.
A friend of mine once wrote a dictionary[1]. It has all the (normal) one syllable words in English, defined using only other one syllable words. He decided to work on it by focusing on one letter per year, so A was in 1991, B was 1992, and the book was finished in 2017, 26 years later.
It's not even a very long book - only a few hundred pages - but I'm sure if I tried to do the same thing all at once, I'd probably have lost interest around B or C, so I suppose it was a worthwhile strategy.
[1] It's not online anywhere as far as I know, sorry.
that seems to be in the same vain as this presentation by guy steele https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0 .
I question how well many of the words that come to mind could be defined using only other one syllable words, but it sounds like a fun project.
Most of them aren't defined as rigorously as a dictionary would do, it's more like trying to come up with a plausible description for each word.
"day" might be "time in which the sun goes round the earth" even though that's not technically correct.
"sit" could be "to take a chair" and "sat" might be "to have took a chair"
"moth" is "a bug that flies and likes to eat cloth", and so on.
I made the “sit” gloss long: “to rest your body on your bum (while your bum is on a thing such as a chair or the ground) while your back is up”.
I bet your friend is good at Scrabble.
Hopefully their interest expands beyond single syllable words, otherwise the highest scores according to a cursory search are 'zizzed' (34) and 'jazzed' (32) which are probably slightly below the average for an elite player.
Zizzed and jazzed if spelled in scrabble would be worth less than 32, since only one of the zs would be worth 10 points, the rest being blank tiles which are worth zero.
Of course most good players will create more than 1 word per turn, and will lay down over multiplier tiles.
You can probably do fairly well with just single syllable words, although at a certain level not being able to get a lay down bonus will prevent you from winning.
Single-syllable words can still be pretty long, like "squished" or "scrambled"
I just ran some code over the CMU pronouncing dictionary and the longest words identified as single-syllable that are English-origin and not proper names or possessives were
For eight letters, it found dozens of examples!The CMU dictionary thinks that "scrambled" is two syllables as a vowel ends up between the "b" and the "l" in pronunciation. Wiktionary thinks this is a syllabic l (/l̩/), which should probably be counted as a separate syllable even if it isn't considered a vowel.
Wikipedia says
> Many dialects of English may use syllabic consonants in words such as even [ˈiːvn̩], awful [ˈɔːfɫ̩] and rhythm [ˈɹɪðm̩], which English dictionaries' respelling systems usually treat as realizations of underlying sequences of schwa and a consonant (for example, /ˈiːvən/).
That's consistent with what the CMU dictionary is doing, perhaps treating /l̩/ as /əl/.
yeah, "quizzed" (35) is the highest I found
The SAS is a joke, putting its name on the same list as actually impressive feats like the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem insults everything else on the list. It's the most expensive subway line worldwide per mile, ever, despite the existence of technology that made tunnelling easier. Inflation adjusted, it costs more per mile than hand-digging one of the PATH tubes with 1900s technology [1]. Its cost and duration are almost entirely due to politics and not technical and logistical challenges, including the MTA political fiefdom fighting the Park Board political fiefdom, make-work-program labour spending, staff paid to have their thumbs up their asses in the tunnels [2], deep-bore tunneling instead of cut-and-cover to avoid political fighting, and MTA departments wanting their miniature fiefdom dug into the ground at each station [3]. The SAS is a project that should bring great shame to everyone in charge and everyone who stood around in the tunnels getting paid to do nothing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uptown_Hudson_Tubes (tunnel happens to be about a mile and it cost 21 million 1905 dollars)
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
[3] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/12/09/the-mta-sticks...
I dunno. I think we should separate out the stuff that fundamentally has to take a long time, like the pitch experiment, from stuff like Notre Dame, which just took a long time because they lacked the resources to do it all at once. Like OK, it takes a long time to build a big church because you need to find all the right rocks or whatever. But the pitch, that’s the universe taking a long time to tell us something.
(I’m being flip for comedy/emphasis sake, of course Notre Dame is pretty impressive too).
When they started building cathedrals they knew they weren't going to see it finished. They did it anyway. That's the point.
As I recall, Gaudi wasn't even finished with the design when the construction started. He kept working at it until his death.
When people complained about the time scale, Gaudi famously replied that his client was in no hurry.
I think it is part of the point for a cathedral to take several generations. If you can point to a building and say "that took 5 years to build and I was there for all of it!", then that's great, but the building is in some way "smaller" than you. If you can point to a partially constructed building and say "my grandfather worked on it, my father worked on it, I'm working on it and my children will work on it too", that's a building that is "larger" than any one person.
Taking a century or more to construct anything makes that thing larger than life. There's a certain sublime quality in such efforts, whether they're explicitly dedicated to a god/pantheon but also if they are "just" earthly like the White House (technically took 178 years to construct from start to finish).
There's certainly something interesting about taking multiple generations, but it also feels kinda wrong to attribute greater meaning to something because you dragged it out or intentionally scoped the project too big.
Maybe if the project served a greater purpose and couldn't possibly be built in a shorter time, then it would mean more. But a cathedral? What's wrong with a modest church or two?
Sure, the same amount of stone could be used to construct several smaller churches. The US congress could also just rent a conference room at a nearby hotel if they chose. The Eiffel tower could supply iron for several kilometres of rail track, or maybe a small boat.
But building something extravagantly big has a signaling value all of its own: "see the glory of <whatever it is we constructed this for> and how much resources they command". You don't build a cathedral because it's more practical than a normal church for holding services and stuff, you build a cathedral to express the power of your religion and impress it on others.
I'm imagining a spectrum between "has to be slow" and "needlessly slow", with a middle slider for that one razor where things take as much time as you give them.
Intentionality is a big theme in math research (so i've heard), where solving "useful" problems isn't the ideal goal. The goal is to solve interesting problems, which might seem useless, but along the way achieve results with much wider implications that would have been impossible to discover directly. Or, how inventions like toothpaste came from space travel research.
(rhetorically) Does an indirect result "justify" a longer, slower project? Is speed an inherent property of the problem, or is it only knowable once it's complete? Or both, in the cases of misused funds?
This reminded me of an old comic or meme about people’s expectations about science that went like:
Protester: What do we want??
Crowd: High quality, double blinded, N of 100000, 20 year longitudinal, preregistered studies!!
Protester: When do we want it??
Crowd: Now!!!
Related by content (OP says "This page is a riff on Patrick Collison's list of /fast projects"):
Fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36605912 - July 2023 (298 comments)
Fast (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30872279 - March 2022 (97 comments)
Fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848860 - Dec 2019 (291 comments)
Fast · Patrick Collison - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21355237 - Oct 2019 (5 comments)
--
Also related, if only by title, this from yesterday:
Fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 - July 2025 (418 comments)
Kind of amusing to have this at the top of the front page considering “Fast” was there yesterday
I imagine the two events are correlated.
Just to add to that, it does link to
https://patrickcollison.com/fast (which has 300 comments from 2019 on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848860 )
which is different than yesterday's link to https://www.catherinejue.com/fast (426 comments as of now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 )
Pretty bad title that should've been editorialized imo...kind of clickbait
Next?
Medium.
Posted on Medium, ofc.
You know why they call it Medium, of course? Because it's definitely not Rare and usually also not Well Done.
A comment such as yours is Rare, and also Well Done!
It's even more admirable, since comments in this Medium are Rarely Well Done.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44750838
Kudos to the OP for writing this.
That PC post always irked me. Not because it showed positive examples of going fast but because it felt slightly demeaning to teams/projects that move slowly on purpose, with intent.
I disagree. The PC post never demeans projects that purposefully move slowly with intent, but rather criticizes boondoggles that move slowly due to utter incompetence. The only pejorative text in the PC post is this:
>San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. It opened in 2022, yielding a project duration of around 7,600 days. “The project has been delayed due to an increase of wet weather since the project started,” said Paul Rose, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson. The project cost $346 million, i.e. $110,000 per meter. The Alaska Highway, mentioned above, constructed across remote tundra, cost $793 per meter in 2019 dollars.
At least 30 deaths in the construction of the Alaska highway and obviously much lower eminent domain costs for remote tundra vs downtown SF after the second tech boom.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/alaska-...
I think of The Art of Computer Programming...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programmin...
Definitely belongs on the list; notable not just because it's a slow/long project spanning 60 years and counting, but because part of it included the side trip to write TeX and METAFONT in order to be able to write and typeset the rest of TAOCP properly.
The Art of Computer Programming has been a work in progress since 1962.
That’s longer than some of the list items.
Thanks. I was going to ask about long book (or film etc) projects like that. Some dictionaries and encyclopedias took decades to finish. The "Deutsches Wörterbuch" by the Brothers Grimm was started in 1838 and it got finished only in 1961, long after their death.
Unlike most of the list items or a dictionary, Knuth’s work is an ongoing personal creative process rather than an independent mechanism or a collection of data.
Most democracies have elections every 4 or 5 years. That is good, in that we can get rid of underperforming politicians and parties. But it is bad, in that there isn't a lot of incentive for politicians and parties to plan over a longer timescale than 4 or 5 years.
China has the opposite problem. It can plan and finance long term projects. But there is little prospect of peacefully changing the leadership.
Long-term planning on a colossal scale (like nation-state-level) (or even on a not-so-colossal scale - think of how many plans YOU have made and how they turned out) is pointless because of black swans
Sure, having a general idea of where you want things to go is fine, and everyone already does that; but when a government starts thinking that they should set a concrete goal X and they should do Y to achieve it, it's just akin to trying to predict the future, and we all know how well that always works out, because theyre under the faulty premise of thinkin Y will be constant forever, or that even the goal itself (X) should remain constant in a world that is anything but constant
So, this is a terrible argument for not having elections, or bigger election cycles. I'm sure someone could potentially put forward a better argument, but this one is not it
"Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." (variously attributed)
Definitely not advocating for "not having elections, or bigger election cycles" BTW.
I think the way that democratic governments can achieve these long-term plans is by establishing (or using existing) entities to complete these goals on their behalf.
An example that comes to mind is the Apollo program: JFK announced a national goal to land a man on the moon in 1961 and this was finally achieved in 1969 - two presidencies (Johnson, Nixon) and one change of party (Dem->Rep) later - with NASA being that independent responsible entity.
Yes, but this sort of thing seems increasingly unlikely in an ever more partisan world. Especially when would-be autocrats are wrecking as many institutions as they can.
>A fun question: of these projects, which required a long time, and which could have been greatly accelerated?
Pretty much everything on the list is a research study of a long-term process that is inherently impossible to accelerate.
From the list, only the Second Avenue Subway and the Sagrada Familia unambiguously qualify as projects that could be greatly accelerated. The SAS was not under active construction for the vast majority of the time between 1942 and 2017 — actual construction only happened for a couple years in the early 70s, then another couple years in the late 80s, and finally from 2011-2017. The fits and starts were due to a combination of bureaucratic red tape, economic woes, and gross incompetence. The Sagrada Familia has also seen only intermittent construction over the last century, primarily because of lack of funding.
I personally find these examples underwhelming. Most of them are processes that require time, like the pitch drop experiment.
I suspect that the things in our lives that truly have value and take a long time aren’t easy to identify as projects. No one person starts it with a clear idea of where it will end. Investment in future capabilities. Knowledge gathering without clear application or business model. Strengthening institutions and traditions of human rights to ensure that no one group can arrest history.
Depending on how you draw the line, it could be argued that science — the project of uncovering the workings of the universe — is the longest-running of all. Although the word “science” isn't that old and is generally associated with the Age of Enlightenment, the desire to understand the world goes as far back as humans can think.
Two more to add to the list:
– The Voyager probes were launched in 1977 and reached interstellar space in the 2010s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program
– The oldest bonsai have been in training for centuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai
This goes hand in hand with the Lindy effect[0]. Some of the examples given in the article are a testament to it.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
I am fairly certain there will be almost as many Ford model Ts running around in 2108 than are running now, but within 30 or 40 years I doubt there will be many cybertrucks that do.
I'd forecast that most of the remaining ones would end up making their way to Southern Florida but they're already there.
I'm reminded of the quote: “Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.”
The article conflates a few different "slow" projects, rather than the premise which is efforts that required decades to come to fruition.
He mentions projects started long ago but are still ongoing, like the Sagrada Familia. Then there's innovations from long ago which are still being used, like Linux. Also, he includes ideas which took decades to finally be implemented, like LIGO.
In my opinion, none of these examples are particularly good at demonstrating, "What problems can human beings only solve over a very long period of time?", except for Fermat's Last Theorem.
All technology builds on that which came before, step by step. You can trace Unicode directly back to Morse Code, via various steps like ASCII, Telex, Baudot Code, etc. But the original goal of Morse wasn't to display emojis.
I'd say General Relativity might be a good example, starting with Newton's efforts to quantify the forces of the real world, ending with Einstein's explanation of spacetime. But again, it's not as clear of a problem as Fermat's Last Theorem which was a single problem that required centuries to solve.
AI may be a good example as well, starting with the advent of the digital computer. The very first scientists who worked with them like von Neumann immediately looked forward to the day of an electronic brain. It's taken nearly a century so far and is still underway.
Neural network was introduced in 1950s. However, the neural architecture, the compute and data required for them to be efficient has been only in last decade.
From perceptron to transformers (few hidden layers to 480B parameters), from multicore CPUs to distributed GPUs and WWW/social media has all contributed to the growth of Artificial Intelligence.
This has took almost 50+ years and so many iterations along the way.
I like this list (and Collison's)!
One thing I would say -- the Sagrada Familia definitely didn't have to take the incredible time it has. Maybe not a good example of something that could only be done over the long term. Gaudi didn't prioritize it, and a civil war ruined it.
It is, however, an example of something beautiful that did take a long period of time.
You can watch the Pitch drop experiment [1] live here http://thetenthwatch.com/feed/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment
Language itself is an interesting problem. We have texts that are ancient and some are unreadable and others are readable. I personally can't understand old variants of English while (American) English is the only language I speak.
There is so much assumed in our use of language that it can be largely unintelligible without detailed historical context. The first time I heard the term "in the car park" I chuckled at the thought of an amusement park for cars... "parking lot" only came a few thoughts later. We drive on parkways. We play in the park. We park in the lot. Lots are reading this sentence twice. Give this paragraph to a school-kid in just 100 years and it will seem like gibberish. Word.
There is a restaurant (or, perhaps, food purveyor is more accurate) in Japan that has lasted for several centuries. It's been owned by one family, I believe. When Covid hit and their clientele disappeared, they just continued to pay their staff and mostly closed operations until the pandemic was brought more or less under control. They had enough money socked away that they survived this period unscathed. I wish I could remember the name of the place.
Anyway, that's my dream - to own and run a small family business that can support the family even in times of extended crisis. I have no interest in unicorns or IPOs or buyouts or any of that.
As an academic, I fairly resonate with this message. Also notice that most examples he noticed are from academia/science endeavors. I see academia as probably the only place where slow projects are expected and even encouraged; think of PhD students working on basic science problems, often supported for 5-7 years at end (of course close to minimum wage).
This is not to hide that all slow undertakings are good or anything. Often because of inefficient executions or bureaucratic hurdles, academic suffers. But, I am trying to highlight the observation that how a slow and steady progress is the typical modus operandi for an academic lab/group. A famous saying comes to mind: Rome isn't built in a day.
There’s also John Cage’s “As Slow as Possible” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Slow_as_Possible
Regarding LIGO, if anyone finds the sensitivity of LIGO as shocking as I do, here's a 2002 lecture from Kip Thorne explaining how it's achieved.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGdbI24FvXQ&t=495s
This video is one of about 60 recorded in a year long series of lectures that were delivered at Caltech early on in the project. They are archived by Pau Amaro Seoane at this address https://astro-gr.org/online-course-gravitational-waves/
I think that pretty much everything we work on (as tecchies) is the endpoint of a very long timeline.
Every advancement stands on the shoulders of those that came before. Maybe we can run an LLM, because some Roman architect figured out how to make an aqueduct stay up in a seismically-active area.
If you watch James Burke's Connections[0], you get a feel for it (I think some of them are a bit of a stretch, but I really enjoyed it).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...
For open source, SQLite has pledged long term support through 2050: https://www.sqlite.org/lts.html
I imagine it will go on for much longer, though!
I think in the western world, Art, and music are both long term projects. So much so that we seem to have "reinvented" music at least twice. Once after the Greeks into classical western music, then again when jazz went into tonal harmony.
At least parts of it are "scientific" and "directed," see the Lydian Chromatic concept for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydian_Chromatic_Concept_of_To...
Long-term projects make me strangely proud to be a human (for all of our faults and foibles). "A society grows great when the old plant trees in whose shade they will never sit."
Some are projects that have a changing variable over a long period of time (Framingham Heart Study, E. coli long-term evolution experiment) or strive to exist a long time (Clock of the Long Now). I would argue that these projects -- their process, data collection methods, and goals -- may have been developed quickly, in a short amount of time. Their longevity is proof that the original project was well established. But the same could be said of the invention of the wheel, shoe, sliced bread, etc
I will post this in defence of speed.
https://jsomers.net/blog/speed-matters
I had to enable third-party JavaScript and resource loading to see a rendering of… “1.0 × 10⁻²¹”. Sometimes people use TeX math markup superfluously.
I assume this is a response to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967
From TFA
> This page is a riff on Patrick Collison's list of /fast projects.
Maybe as a HN post, but the blog is in response to https://patrickcollison.com/fast
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 - July 2025 (417 comments)
The point of https://patrickcollison.com/fast is not that everything has to be fast, but that you can probably do it faster than you think. Quoting https://nat.org/: "time is the denominator"
If we look beyond problems that humans solve, well, evolution of diverse and specialized species seems to require time (and be undone by humans going fast)
A few other proposed entries:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program (the twin spacecraft that have since left the heliopause)
. My work aims to help create systems which support creativity and discovery. Currently, my main projects are working on metascience, programmable matter, and tools for thought. In the past I've worked on quantum computing, open science, and artificial intelligence, and there's a lot of crossover with my current interests. Bio (2020).
Quadratic equations took something like from the ancient Greeks to the middle ages, afaik.
> Many Cathedrals were built over more than a century. An example is Notre Dame, over 1163-1345.
Or Cologne Cathedral, which took more than 600 years to complete. Though actual build times were a bit shorter (1248–1560, 1842–1880).
The Crazy Horse Memorial has been going since the 1940s. It's progressing nicely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Horse_Memorial
Made me think of https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/as-slow-as-possible/
Interestingly, the post titled "Fast" made the front page yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967
I love the story of the Framingham Heart Study, it's one I've referenced a lot when I talk to people and organizations about how they might not have the data they need and how important data collection is.
Nice post! This rhymes with the ideas Cal Newport presents in Slow Productivity.
Next should be a series of posts on the Slow movement.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_movement_(culture)
Post them slowly, i.e. not all on the same day. We need time to read them - slowly.
I'd add https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light to this list.
Making the argument for "Medium" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44750838
The Sagrada Familia has been criticized as a symbol of bureaucratic inertia, some critics insinuating that the delays are deliberate for financial interests.
In case the author is here…
Here’s my pedant nitpicking: La Sagrada Familia is not a cathedral. It’s just a regular church, albeit a large and impressive one.
There is/was an experiment to domesticate foxes that began in the early 1950s; something that can only be done slowly generation after generation.
> I suspect many key open source systems (Linux, Wikipedia) will still be around in 100 years.
Bet FORTRAN will still be around. Maybe PHP, as well. Def C.
Fortran has multiple incompatible implementations and a standard that's supported completely by none of them, and that hasn't maintained 100% forward compatibility across revisions. It'll still be around in the sense that English will be -- there will be a thing by that name -- but it's impossible to say now exactly what it will be, or to write Fortran now that will still work identically without change for the next century. I think C'89 uniprocessor code would stand a better chance.
nitpick:
> That's an accuracy comparable to measuring the distance to the Sun to an accuracy of one atom.
This does not exist, because "the location of the Sun" cannot be defined to the precision of one atom, as the Sun is constantly changing shape and size on a much, much larger scale (easily half the orders of magnitude of the distance to be measured).
The 2nd av subway is a bad example… that’s just a masterclass in political incompetence.
I guess tomorow's front page top article will be called "Steady" ?
Missing the California high-speed rail on their list of examples.
The bitcoin block chain should be on this list
Also, all my side-projects.
(No, I will NOT use LLM for side-projects. That defeats the purpose of side-projects for me!)
Cool list, but to be a party pooper:
> Will Unix Time or TCP/IP ever be replaced? Modified: sure.
UNIX time is already being replaced with a 64 bit value instead of signed 32 bit. TCP/IP has already been replaced, that's QUIC over IPv6 which is what my computer uses every time it connects to Google.
I mean you can claim IPv6 is still "IP" because it shares the same first two letters, but IPv6 is different enough to be easily considered a different protocol.
From TFA:
> Modified: sure.
Fundamentally, IPv6 and 64 bit UNIX time are modifications of their predecessors. QUIC not so much, but it's still a long way from replacing TCP on the web, let alone the internet.
But then you could argue that UNIX time is just a modification of other forms of date/time reckoning. It becomes a semantic debate over what counts as a separate thing, and that's not a fantastically interesting question anymore.
> TCP/IP has already been replaced
Only in terms of the possible, not in terms of the real.
> QUIC over IPv6 which is what my computer uses every time it connects to Google.
You don't have to adopt everything Google tells you to adopt, you know...
Well, in 1980 when I got my hands on the first "powerful" benchtop computer that I had complete control of, I started a project to do a little machine learning so that I would one day have some of the foundation I needed to handle the data more intelligently in the future.
That's what I always wanted to have a computer for and why I took Fortran in college to begin with.
I knew I wasn't going to reach the "intelligence" part within a short number of years, for one thing I had figured out it would be much faster on a more specialized chip than a CPU, plus it would require megabytes of memory when I only had kilobytes, and way more storage space too.
I couldn't be spending years concentrating on this while waiting for hardware technology to progress, and for survival otherwise I gravitated to a niche within a natural science career that would not be replaced by the AI which I expected to be rapidly approaching from those who had a much better head start both financially as well as in computer science.
Now by the time the late 90's rolled around, I already had my own company for a number of years (knew that was going to take decades too so I had started in that direction as a teenager) and by then had more than one computer. Woo hoo!
And megabytes! Oh Yeah!
Plus Office '97 which put the "paperless office" within reach even though paperwork was my primary deliverable product.
With Y2K looming I decided to use some of the megabytes in the more powerful PC to try a bit of the old ML again, with much more of a bent for AI this time. I had already been pitched in the early '90's by neural net vendors but I wasn't ready for that. After a few more years of consideration I had a much better idea of the groundwork I would need, separated the raw automation from the intelligent input I was making and that was a good milestone in efficiency right there. I was barely able to get a bit of my concept from 1980 put on to a "powerful" DOS/Windows platform when it crashed and set me back a couple months before starting to get hammered into eventual submission by years of stacked natural disasters.
Growth had been halted but by this time I was pretty mature and charge enough per page that I personally wasn't going to be the one that needed any more automation than I already had. When I first started I could afford to type each page manually on a (intelligent) typewriter to begin with, and I could make even more at today's prices now doing that again if I had too. This was another marginally positive trend that was not very obvious, and it was so marginal that was when I accepted that I would have to actually outlive most of my contemporaries if I was going to make very much of it.
Whew, that wasn't easy and it took a while too.
Even if total automation doesn't make me any more than total manual effort, it is the kind of thing that the bigger multinational groups could really take to the bank. So I've always kept it in mind, I knew about it all along, that's where I got started.
Anyway, there's still a blank tab on an XLS spreadsheet where the tabs to the left are all the "very important" data which I ruminate about then do a little typing accordingly before hitting the button. Then the tabs to the right get populated sequentially and filtered until the final tab spits out a file that gets emailed to the client. It comes straight from Excel with letterhead and fonts virtually indistinguishable from Word. At the beginning with MS-Word I was faxing with a dedicated land line plugged directly into the PC, now email or not when the client prints it there are very few ways to tell the difference from when I would fax them a signed page from my typewriter too.
It took quite a while to reach the point today where AI might be getting close enough in my lifetime to where I could train it to fill in that blank tab for me.
It would have to be about perfect though.
Patience, my friend.
Figuring out a good reason to colonize the solar system
An optimal manufacturing and logistics network for the solar system
Inventing replicators and dispensing with capitalism
Replicators won't dispense with capitalism, at least not automatically. Replicators need tremendous energy which can be privately controlled, plus capitalism can maintain minority control over a technology like this via trade secrets etc. and keep selling the technology for high prices. If you're thinking that you can just use a replicator to make more replicators, that's kinda like asking a 3D printer to 3D print another 3D printer, or asking an LLM to just program another LLM.
No, we need to dispense with capitalism ourselves instead of hoping for a magical technology to do it for us.
How to game HN: always write rebuttals