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by nyanpasu64 1699 days ago
Digital computing at the server scale is already chaotic, since "complex systems operate in a degraded state". Personally I prefer deterministic systems over mysterious race conditions in concurrent code, so I mainly work in closed systems (desktop rather than cloud) with closed-form correctness criteria, and find and exterminate race conditions and unintended nondeterminism with prejudice (since I think heisenbugs are complex, fragile, nonlinear, and bad). And complexity and fragility is the enemy of self driving cars, and if you build systems that handle it inadequately, people die.

Aside from the practical reasons, I think unknowable unresolvable problems make me psychologically distressed.

1 comments

> Aside from the practical reasons, I think unknowable unresolvable problems make me psychologically distressed.

I too, I'm wired to enjoy closed / defined systems. Yet, the few I've read about old EE books, is that the guys managed to analyse and comprehend noisy, irregular systems. Today mainstream computing is still about digital/clean/closed but one day I assume the analog/noisy/chaotic will become a thing in a normal curriculum. It's an easy/shallow prediction but still.