When I look at things that are slow I see only two things: natural disasters and analysis paralysis. When I look at software employment I see a lots of anxiety at multiple levels. People do and say all kinds of shit to mask their anxiety.
Some are definitely high-anxiety situations: the large-scale ambitious ones in the list were done during a war (or cold war). Many of the others are high-pressure scenarios where I am sure the construction workers had anything but low anxiety. They are typical of an economy which is growing very fast where bad working conditions and accidents are tolerated. It is not unlike condititions in current fast developing countries some with immigrant workers (Quatar) or in China.
As soon as something is done a few times, the barrier of entry goes up. We get the ability to measure and evaluate consequences. We have regulations based on safety or environmental isues. We have additional groups of people with specific concerns that must be consulted. Other nations may participate and we coerce then into increasing or decreasing their involvement. Its a wild big dynamic system.
To me this doesnt mean we shouldnt be able to move quickly. Just that the innovation requires tools that can navigate between these other constraints - or - that we only innovate in areas that have never been done before and we do so at a blistering pace.
It'd be interesting to try and quantify both columns - the good and the bad.
Ideally, we would go back to being able to do some things 'fast' and hopefully do a bit better at avoiding the bad things.
The destruction of black-owned neighborhoods for freeways is very much worth studying. Sweet Auburn had 30,000 residents displaced, turning a once prosperous and flourishing neighborhood into a crime-ridden shell of its former self.
I am left dreaming about what Atlanta may have looked like if they prioritized public transit and … not pursuing explicitly racist policies. I believe in a world where we can rapidly build and roll out infrastructure for everyone without destroying so much.
The difference now I guess is that we eventually learned and (mostly) everything is built without issue, sometimes at the tradeoff of time. But some countries are going through their own growing pains right now (with the tradeoff of money/people/shortcuts)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 Fast (catherinejue.com)
1500+ points, 400+ comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44748934 Slow (michaelnotebook.com)
800+ points, 200+ comments
> TGV. On April 30 1976, the French government approved a plan to build a high-speed rail link between Paris and Lyon, the first high-speed rail line in Europe. This line was to use completely new electric locomotives, also to be developed in France as part of the project. The ensuing line opened on September 26 1981, 1,975 days later. On September 24 1996, the California High-Speed Rail Authority was formed. The completion of the first phase of California's high-speed rail project, a line connecting San Francisco and Anaheim, is currently estimated to happen in 2033, 37 years (i.e. around 13,000 days) after the authority was formed.
Of course, these sorts of projects are still possible and do happen —— but they happen in China.
- Berlin airport took 14 years to build instead of 5 (finished in 2020)
- The new Munich Main Station will probably take 10 years in the end to finish (they spent 2 years trying to understand which signal cables to cut when digging and mostly paused the project during that time)
- Several public rail transit extensions have been in talk for over 20 years and they still struggle to green light the project.
- A colleague said it took 9 months to make a round about between 4 roads.
2023 (905 points, 298 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36605912
2022 (189 points, 97 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30872279
2019 (1314 points, 300 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848860
> On 11 February 1963, the Beatles recorded ten songs during a single studio session for their debut LP, Please Please Me.
> Martin asked the band if they had any songs that they could record quickly. According to Martin, "It was a straightforward performance of their stage repertoire – a broadcast, more or less." Initially, a morning and afternoon session only were booked; the evening session was added later. Mark Lewisohn later wrote: "There can scarcely have been 585 more productive minutes in the history of recorded music".
Interestingly,
> .... the Beatles arrived with John Lennon suffering from a bad cold, which he attempted to treat with a steady supply of throat lozenges
It was a real "move fast and break things" time period. We'll probably never see anything close ever again.
Hi,
re: fast: https://patrickcollison.com/fast
One day in mid-November, workers at OpenAI got an unexpected assignment: Release a chatbot, fast. The chatbot, an executive announced, would be known as "Chat with GPT-3.5," and it would be made available free to the public. In two weeks. The announcement confused some OpenAI employees.
...
OpenAI's top executives had changed their minds. Some were worried that rival companies might upstage them by releasing their own A.I. chatbots before GPT-4, according to the people with knowledge of OpenAI. And putting something out quickly using an old model, they reasoned, could help them collect feedback to improve the new one. So they decided to dust off and update an unreleased chatbot that used a souped-up version of GPT-3, the company’s previous language model, which came out in 2020.