> <i>We might find that our field could benefit from mining math related to mechanical and electrical engineering. Feedback and control theory, in particular, looks like it i could have some utility.</i><p>This was all over the place behind the core theme of my CS master's degree, for which I happened to also have background in both mechanical and electrical engineering. There are a lot of things that felt quite natural to me but that were proving elusive and challenging to people I worked with who lacked an equally diverse background by being exclusively focused on CS.<p>Two points I raised were designing with, leveraging, and modelling feedback loops in component-based software using control theory (application was on auto-adaptative AV streaming across a network of varying quality† but the overarching theme was largely generalisable); and modelling execution flow using laws from electrical engineering (using high level concepts such as power potential and current intensity as well as qualifying code paths as being resistive, capacitive, and inductive) as an alternative approach to complexity and optimisation.<p>The resistance to cross-domain mixing was surprisingly high, entrenched thought processes are a remarkably deceitful thing, even when faced with provable results.<p>† Something I would find out to be implemented a couple of years later with zero-delay Xbox Live movie streaming.
>I’ve long thought that as we add code and dependencies to systems we approach biological levels of complexity.<p>According to Taleb: complexity is good for system reliability in the long term. (As well as redundancy in every aspect like head count, components count, technology stacks used in the same system) to mimic biological complexity.<p>But I strive to make everything as simple as possible, remove unnecessary components, etc.<p>I still cant understand contexts where complex is better than simple
I had a similar experience this past week at the ISSS conference in Corvallis.<p>I'm applying to the systems science PhD program at PSU this year and was amazed at the both the depth and breadth of the systems research and discussion to be had, but also noted the lack of software developers or computer/information systems discussion.<p>I'm looking forward to being able to bring some of my expertise to this field, while also mining the knowledge and concepts for use in better software systems design.<p>I'm going to definitely look into this conference for next year, though hopefully they won't be running the same week as the ISSS conference again.
Software systems are the perfect data generating processes. They are often compositional and yet complex because of simple interactions blowing things up. And we have effectively infinite data so it's a good place to get started. It would be amazing if an AI could reverse engineer a backend of an app just based on using the product and maybe making some scaling assumptions. But we're not that good with loss functions yet.<p>Maybe someday we can have an AI watch our log streams and tell us the ideal architecture for our systems. Then the trick will be to generate fake log data for what we want to happen in general. Perhaps we can just keep it coarse grained and say the AI can fill in the rest. The future of systems architecture!<p>Even more interesting is Conway's law. What if an AI could tell you how best to organize your company?
super interesting topic. I'm currently also looking more and more into how UNIX and the network layers manage complexity in abstract terms. Would've loved if the article would've been a bit more specific in terms of what takeaways from the conference might be of interest for software.
1st sentence: “This past week I was at a ¿conference?...”<p>(Stories about the mystery conference)<p>2nd sentence of 2nd paragraph: “I was at ICCS2018, a complex systems conference.“<p>Why is this normal now? It’s ruining the internet. Everything I read lately is wound up into a desperate suspense-arc.<p>I understand not everybody has liberal arts degrees (and definitely not this person) but that might be all the more reason to not make such an attempt.<p><i>Introductions come first</i>. It’s a lot like meeting a person for the first time. Creativity is not a bad thing, but if you’re sacrificing respect in the process, you’re blowing it.