This reminded - I noticed a while ago that being a computer science guy makes me think differently about physical storage and retrieval.
For example - my wife likes "shorts" to be in one drawer and "t-shirts" in another. I like for one drawer to be "workout clothes" and have the mix of gym shorts and t-shirts. To me this feels "obviously" right because the use-case requires both items so why pay for two costly "open drawer" IOs?
Similarly, she is very organized with her paper files, I just throw mine into a box. In the rare event I need something (eg when doing taxes) I don't mind scanning through the whole mess. Seems like a better strategy than making each "write" costly (neatly organizing) since writes are frequent and reads are rare.
Your first example could have a different explanation, assuming she is the one that more often does the laundry. Ordering clothes by type is cognitively easy: a shirt is a shirt, shorts are shorts. When you have a stack of freshly washed clothes, sorting them according to type is so trivial it is a thoughtless process.
However, sorting according to use case is more involved. For each piece of clothing in the clothes pile, the clothes organizer must think of how this particular piece of cloth is used. Is this just an old t-shirt? Or is this particular old t-shirt out of favor with my husband and so he uses it for his workout? Or should it go in the pyjama t-shirts pile?
So writes seem to be much more costly (cognitively) when organizing clothes according to usage rather than type (if these clothes are not your own in which case determining their usage does seem trivial), and your wife may be optimizing for it (again, see initial assumption)
Clothes I can use in multiple situations (like a pair of jeans or normal t-shirts) are grouped together but I also use "use-case-drawers" (like sports or outside work clothes).
My girlfriend (no tech background) uses a more seperated system (work t-shirts are not sorted to work pants) but still seperated by use-case (normal pants /= work pants).
I guess it's up to everyones own preferences then..
Reasonable analysis. In the case of my wife, it's a matter of what she believes is right (shirts go together because they are shirts) not of expediency of any of the operations :)
I thought of doing the "writes" as per the use case as having to denormalize the "record" first which is extra work from insert point of view (but optimized for "fetch" - the entire dataset of shirt+pant is right there) - that is not how they come out of the washing machine. They come out normalized as "shirt" "pant" which is optimum for inserts. So if she doing the laundry, her method is the least effort for her.
When folding the washing, I don't make sure the t-shirts / pants / etc are the "right way out", reducing the already heavy burden on the folding server, and pushing that work onto the less heavily burdened clients.
I know someone who is similar with the paper files, but lazily sorts them when she needs to retrieve something, so the full scan only happens at most once.
This is pretty efficient. She lazily sorts them on first access. They are stored in a thunk and then lazily evaluates them. After that repeated access is efficient.
> Similarly, she is very organized with her paper files, I just throw mine into a box. In the rare event I need something (eg when doing taxes) I don't mind scanning through the whole mess. Seems like a better strategy than making each "write" costly (neatly organizing) since writes are frequent and reads are rare.
This is why I have given up trying to organise my downloaded papers and books by subject. It's faster to search through them when I have a term in mind.
This reminds me of the days before "Downloads" folders were provided by OSes for use by browsers, and one would need to select a destination for every file at download time. I think macOS got it right with the "stack" widget (truncated listing of the Downloads folder sorted by date).
My wife keeps on reorganising my toolboxes and it’s driving me nuts. She ends up organising the contents by colour, or by size, so now I find my woodworking chisels in a box with filter spanners and solder (the soldering irons are in the box with glue and mallets). It’s driving me crazy, but she won’t stop, and gets mad at me when I can’t find stuff because “it’s organised”.
Different people have different minds. I group by function and efficiency of use - she by colour or shape, as she doesn’t know what half the tools are. My organisation looks chaotic but I know exactly where everything is, and I know that the tools I’ll need for a given task will all be in the same box.
Now, I have to haul everything out, rummage, have an argument, get called an idiot. So much better.
A crap bowl would be illegal here. Everything must go back in its place, no matter how inconvenient that place is.
The key at least for me is to recognize that my wife's desire to clean and organize is a huge net positive for my life, with things like you just described being relatively small side effects.
Here's how I manage it. One important thing is to label anything that's messy and needs to remain that way "a work in progress.". It indicates to the wife that (a) you care about neatness and (b) there's an end in sight.
The other thing is to claim areas. Sounds like tools are your domain - have you discussed that maybe you should just be in charge of that one small part of your life? :)
Oh my, do I get this. My wife has worked for years as a professional organizer, so she definitely has an idea for How Things Should Be Done.
That way is not mine however. I've been known to have something much like Shitbowl as a system, except I called it my "sedimentary filing system." It has layers, like a parfait, and very much an LRU cache.
She likes things to be away, which to me, is not always having them usable. Sometimes, things that are stashed out of sight are less than accessible when I decide I want them.
Different strokes I guess. After nigh on thirty years, I'm somewhat tidier, while she has become more tolerant of a bit of disorder.
Workout clothes make sense, these are things that get sweaty and I don't want to sort through all my t-shirts and underwear to find a wicking ones. And fancy clothes (wedding/funeral) go together so I can just open the closet bag and have my suit, shirt, tie, and dress socks all there - one "go bag" for each suit color (black, blue, grey) with shoes below.
However, everything else is interchangeable throughout the year.
For paper, there is some basic sorting I'll do. Pets, cars, home, and tax related items. I just put the new piece at the end of the folder which is hardly any 'write cost' and makes for a much easier read later if the need arises. Besides taxes where I just need all of the papers, most of the time the thing I need to reference is near the end
I have a sports drawer: t-shirts, shorts, ankle braces.
Other t-shirts hung in wardrobe and a separate drawer for other shorts.
Paper files: chucked into a tray haphazardly after being attended to. Sorted into filling cabinet once tray is full (which it is now and arguably has been for a month or two).
I'm reminded of cars, which are designed for assembly. They are easy to put together and they're put together in layers.
Same with your clothes, designed for laundry. (defined by laundry?) easier to have bins for socks, and underwear and pants and shirts. they wash in one batch. Easier to load the socks drawer all at once.
But not as easy to find everything when you're getting dressed.
That said, I have two kinds of toolsets.
generic - all the tools in one chest - drawer for pliers, anothers for screwdrivers, ratchets, sockets, etc
project-specific - near my computer I have phillips 2,1,0,00,000 and a keypuller and a paperclip.
row order vs column order I guess. array of structures, structure of arrays.
I spend my whole work day figuring out those problems but not once got the idea to apply them to organising my personal life.
Questioning a lot of decisions now...
The idea is pretty good, but misses the mark.
Bitcoin has shown that decentralization is a bad idea. What people actually want is Sharebowl: a single bowl, the size of oregon, that you can trust to keep your valuables safe.
We plan an ICO by 2022, IPO by 2023, and IBS[1] by next week.
No, a single centralized bowl carries massive risk. What happens when it goes down? Do you even trust the SLA? What about privacy?
What we need is Peerbowl: a network of millions of bowls interconnected via an interdimensional wormhole.
We're in the last stages of ironing out all the kinks. Race conditions have resulted in a few lost fingers but also some extra tentacles which users report are surprisingly handy! Stay tuned for our IPO*.
Haha love the simplicity of "bitcoin has shown decentralisation is a bad idea". No whiff of a justification, just a straightforward statement of fact. A masterclass in empty marketing. This company knows their shit.
I'm a bit late to the bitcoin game (and gearing up to accept bitcoin payments in an upcoming project) so excuse me if my question is trivial, but how does bitcoin show that decentralization is a bad idea?
Aside from energy consumption and stability, bitcoin seems like a resounding success to outsiders like me.
Decentralization is a feature. As with most features, it has technical and behavioral costs. In the case of Bitcoin, this cost is an enormous computational and environmental burden. However, I’m pretty sure that this commenter was joking.
Hi guys it's me the Fusion 360 Persondudeguy here with a 45 minute video on how to 3D print yourself one of these at home! Start out by opening Fusion 360, and then create a sketch! Then press C to draw a circle. Then press C to draw another circle. Now you may be wondering how to 3D print this because you're subscribed to a channel about 3D printing and somehow need a helping hand with literally the most basic operation ever in 3D CAD. But that's okay, because thanks to today's sponsor, NerdVPN, your fishy ISP won't be able to somehow silently break TLS and find out what you're watching on YouTube and extort you for money! That is something that could actually happen, at least in a world that I've made up to sell you something you don't need! For just $9.99 a month you can connect to an OpenVPN instance someone set up on a $3/month VPS that one time. There's no logging because we looked for some and didn't find anyway, but then again, this whole "systemd" thing is new to us and we don't have logs of anything anywhere. Actually we can't even log into that box anymore. That's how you know it's secure! OK, $9.99 go buy it now! I use it myself if saying that will make you buy it. Now back to our content. We left off where you created two circles that will form the wall of your shitbowl! Now you just need to press E to extrude that out! How do you remember all these keys? Well it's actually pretty simple. C is for circle, because C is kind of shaped like a circle. E is for extrude because E is the letter after D, and this is the first 3D operation you'll be doing. It's little tips and tricks like this that real pros use to become productive in complex software products like this. Now that your shitbowl is 3D, just print it out. I recommend using whatever chinese knockoff Prusa i3 clone is for sale on Amazon because I personally get a cut when you buy it, and if it burns your house down it's not technically my fault. OK guys has it been 45 minutes yet? It has? Great. See you next week where I'll shove my entire $6000 microphone down my throat so you can hear what the inside of my mouth sounds like while I demonstrate basic features of CAD software! Like, subscribe, click the bell, click the bell again, then click it one more time so that your phone will make an incredibly loud noise when I next send out a YouTube poll!
I simply purchase whatever I need, have it delivered to an Amazon locker nearby, and then when I’m done with it I throw it out and order a new one.
The most frequently used ones are always at the locker and the least frequently used one is automatically returned for a refund. The cache miss is approximately two days.
It’s expensive, but you can’t beat the fact that it scales to a practically unlimited degree.
Little known fact, the PDP11 had a machine instruction that implemented shitbowls in the cpu. It’s interesting that these days you need ruby, a vm, two layers of package managers and oauth just for a shotbowl. Also, someone should rewrite this in rust.
Wow, from that era, but never encountered this (did not Usenet much though).
Still, maybe this kind of staggered onboarding into forums isn't that bad of an idea. Its not like a site couldn't enforce it. Sign up to join. Get email indicating when participation begins.
On the flip side this is a real process that essentially works. The book "Algorithms to Love By" decides a chapter to solutions to meat space retrieval problems.
I’m pretty sure you mean “Algorithms to _Live_ By”- but I love the typo, since one anecdotes involves using CS/mathematical principles (secretary problem) to find an optimal romantic partner. Enjoyable read for sure!
Oh no! The Internet is more easily accessible providing more knowledge and access to millions worldwide! It's not limited to our extremely exclusive clique of 1337 hackers who also all happen to be white, college-educated American men!
Well with its relentless commercialisation it also brought in loads of trash tier entertainment, splintered attention, intense bubblification and collective amnesia for a significant part of its userbase.
All the potential for good that made users so enthusiastic (as we now know: over-enthusiastic) about it until the early 00s (maybe 10s) still exist, it's just big tech and other businesses have hijacked the community-driven governance and narrative for private gains.
All the cool ((internet) cultural, but not necessarily technical) stuff that existed and exists... you'd never find out about it today if you weren't there and already know what to look for (and even then search result quality has gone down the drain due to massive spam. Not that you can reasonably filter search results to not include businesses or other SEO spam for instance...). Of course things that don't make money/grab attention eventually are "rationalised away" or forgotten about in this ungodly screaming contest.
Not all is bad; it's just the drop in average quality of substance and intransparency of its gatekeepers that worries me. I always keep my hope that a diverse array of communities continue to exist in which cool things happen on a regular basis. Mainstream social media is not this place though.
FWIW, I was one of the clique of 1337 hackers without being American or college educated!
In seriousness, the radicalism of the early internet was great for autodidacts, and I loved it. It shaped me as a person and I still don't have or need a university degree.
The thing that was nice in the past was that it seemed so easy to find other people finding their own path. It was a bit less commercial and a bit more communal. It was a great thing, but communities have a finite capacity for on boarding people. It is easy to squash that, and it was definitely squashed pretty hard as the internet popularised.
Yeah I worry about all the enterprise shit you don't think until you need it -- If one bowl goes down, will it fail over to another in a different region? In the case of a network partition, does my wife get my car?
I'm working on a quantum version of this. Items placed in the bowl may randomly disappear then reappear in a different quantum bowl somewhere else in the universe.
We have already seeded the market with test prototypes shaped like laundry baskets that are limited to small pieces of cloth footwear. But we hope to scale up to Level 5 Flinging of Massive Objects (FOMO) before the end of the year.
I hate to break this to you, but they've beaten you to the quantum bowl: I think it was patented some years ago as the "latrine". It has the same properties you describe, similar properties to the OP's "shitbowl" concept, and can quickly deploy artifacts in one button push*.
(Unless your artifact volume exceeds the recommended capacity in the readme, also helps to make sure the pipeline has sufficient capacity for large deploys to efficiently release to the municipal cloud)
All Shitbowls possess this feature, it's involved by a simple formula of
(age in bowl x proximity to bottom x urgency of real-time need)
Some items such as padlock keys, unused postage stamps, and nearly expired gift cards will override and invoke a quantum certainty of 1.0 when they are trying to be located.
Readit News
For example - my wife likes "shorts" to be in one drawer and "t-shirts" in another. I like for one drawer to be "workout clothes" and have the mix of gym shorts and t-shirts. To me this feels "obviously" right because the use-case requires both items so why pay for two costly "open drawer" IOs?
Similarly, she is very organized with her paper files, I just throw mine into a box. In the rare event I need something (eg when doing taxes) I don't mind scanning through the whole mess. Seems like a better strategy than making each "write" costly (neatly organizing) since writes are frequent and reads are rare.
Anyone else like that?
However, sorting according to use case is more involved. For each piece of clothing in the clothes pile, the clothes organizer must think of how this particular piece of cloth is used. Is this just an old t-shirt? Or is this particular old t-shirt out of favor with my husband and so he uses it for his workout? Or should it go in the pyjama t-shirts pile?
So writes seem to be much more costly (cognitively) when organizing clothes according to usage rather than type (if these clothes are not your own in which case determining their usage does seem trivial), and your wife may be optimizing for it (again, see initial assumption)
Think about the cognitive load of your spouse when you decide how a system should work.
Clothes I can use in multiple situations (like a pair of jeans or normal t-shirts) are grouped together but I also use "use-case-drawers" (like sports or outside work clothes).
My girlfriend (no tech background) uses a more seperated system (work t-shirts are not sorted to work pants) but still seperated by use-case (normal pants /= work pants).
I guess it's up to everyones own preferences then..
This is why I have given up trying to organise my downloaded papers and books by subject. It's faster to search through them when I have a term in mind.
Different people have different minds. I group by function and efficiency of use - she by colour or shape, as she doesn’t know what half the tools are. My organisation looks chaotic but I know exactly where everything is, and I know that the tools I’ll need for a given task will all be in the same box.
Now, I have to haul everything out, rummage, have an argument, get called an idiot. So much better.
A crap bowl would be illegal here. Everything must go back in its place, no matter how inconvenient that place is.
Here's how I manage it. One important thing is to label anything that's messy and needs to remain that way "a work in progress.". It indicates to the wife that (a) you care about neatness and (b) there's an end in sight.
The other thing is to claim areas. Sounds like tools are your domain - have you discussed that maybe you should just be in charge of that one small part of your life? :)
That way is not mine however. I've been known to have something much like Shitbowl as a system, except I called it my "sedimentary filing system." It has layers, like a parfait, and very much an LRU cache.
She likes things to be away, which to me, is not always having them usable. Sometimes, things that are stashed out of sight are less than accessible when I decide I want them.
Different strokes I guess. After nigh on thirty years, I'm somewhat tidier, while she has become more tolerant of a bit of disorder.
At least you can find the nut drivers. ;)
Workout clothes make sense, these are things that get sweaty and I don't want to sort through all my t-shirts and underwear to find a wicking ones. And fancy clothes (wedding/funeral) go together so I can just open the closet bag and have my suit, shirt, tie, and dress socks all there - one "go bag" for each suit color (black, blue, grey) with shoes below.
However, everything else is interchangeable throughout the year.
For paper, there is some basic sorting I'll do. Pets, cars, home, and tax related items. I just put the new piece at the end of the folder which is hardly any 'write cost' and makes for a much easier read later if the need arises. Besides taxes where I just need all of the papers, most of the time the thing I need to reference is near the end
Other t-shirts hung in wardrobe and a separate drawer for other shorts.
Paper files: chucked into a tray haphazardly after being attended to. Sorted into filling cabinet once tray is full (which it is now and arguably has been for a month or two).
Same with your clothes, designed for laundry. (defined by laundry?) easier to have bins for socks, and underwear and pants and shirts. they wash in one batch. Easier to load the socks drawer all at once.
But not as easy to find everything when you're getting dressed.
That said, I have two kinds of toolsets.
generic - all the tools in one chest - drawer for pliers, anothers for screwdrivers, ratchets, sockets, etc
project-specific - near my computer I have phillips 2,1,0,00,000 and a keypuller and a paperclip.
row order vs column order I guess. array of structures, structure of arrays.
We plan an ICO by 2022, IPO by 2023, and IBS[1] by next week.
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/irritable-bow...
What we need is Peerbowl: a network of millions of bowls interconnected via an interdimensional wormhole.
We're in the last stages of ironing out all the kinks. Race conditions have resulted in a few lost fingers but also some extra tentacles which users report are surprisingly handy! Stay tuned for our IPO*.
* Interplanetary Public Offering
Deleted Comment
Aside from energy consumption and stability, bitcoin seems like a resounding success to outsiders like me.
That’s the sound of a joke flying overhead.
Decentralization is a feature. As with most features, it has technical and behavioral costs. In the case of Bitcoin, this cost is an enormous computational and environmental burden. However, I’m pretty sure that this commenter was joking.
Am I a millionaire yet?
We expect you to contact us within 5 business days to settle the outstanding licensing fees you owe us as a result of your infringement.
I simply purchase whatever I need, have it delivered to an Amazon locker nearby, and then when I’m done with it I throw it out and order a new one.
The most frequently used ones are always at the locker and the least frequently used one is automatically returned for a refund. The cache miss is approximately two days.
It’s expensive, but you can’t beat the fact that it scales to a practically unlimited degree.
I call it “bowl-less” caching.
Completely agree
Deleted Comment
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/bb/8d/c6/bb8dc61f7bc93b996c71...
NB: Cached items will be need to be reindexed once sharding has been enabled.
Still, maybe this kind of staggered onboarding into forums isn't that bad of an idea. Its not like a site couldn't enforce it. Sign up to join. Get email indicating when participation begins.
All the potential for good that made users so enthusiastic (as we now know: over-enthusiastic) about it until the early 00s (maybe 10s) still exist, it's just big tech and other businesses have hijacked the community-driven governance and narrative for private gains.
All the cool ((internet) cultural, but not necessarily technical) stuff that existed and exists... you'd never find out about it today if you weren't there and already know what to look for (and even then search result quality has gone down the drain due to massive spam. Not that you can reasonably filter search results to not include businesses or other SEO spam for instance...). Of course things that don't make money/grab attention eventually are "rationalised away" or forgotten about in this ungodly screaming contest.
Not all is bad; it's just the drop in average quality of substance and intransparency of its gatekeepers that worries me. I always keep my hope that a diverse array of communities continue to exist in which cool things happen on a regular basis. Mainstream social media is not this place though.
In seriousness, the radicalism of the early internet was great for autodidacts, and I loved it. It shaped me as a person and I still don't have or need a university degree.
The thing that was nice in the past was that it seemed so easy to find other people finding their own path. It was a bit less commercial and a bit more communal. It was a great thing, but communities have a finite capacity for on boarding people. It is easy to squash that, and it was definitely squashed pretty hard as the internet popularised.
If the last thing used was a half drank rocks glass of tequila the integrity of the entire cache will be threatened.
* they all sound like "stupid problems" till your boss is calling at 3AM because the system is down.
The last bowl bubble was devastating. In 2013 there were literally bowls selling for millions of dollars[1]. My kids didn't eat cereal that year.
Please consider the consequences of your startups. It's "just a landing page" one day but the next, you're ruining lives.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2013/03/20/business/sothebys-china-bowl/...
We have already seeded the market with test prototypes shaped like laundry baskets that are limited to small pieces of cloth footwear. But we hope to scale up to Level 5 Flinging of Massive Objects (FOMO) before the end of the year.
(Unless your artifact volume exceeds the recommended capacity in the readme, also helps to make sure the pipeline has sufficient capacity for large deploys to efficiently release to the municipal cloud)
(age in bowl x proximity to bottom x urgency of real-time need)
Some items such as padlock keys, unused postage stamps, and nearly expired gift cards will override and invoke a quantum certainty of 1.0 when they are trying to be located.