[transpute]

Indeed. Speedrunning an LLM variation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law.

  Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

  — Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent?

> there's a fundamental shift when a system can no longer be held in a single mind

Should LLM users invest in both biological (e.g. memory palace) and silicon memory caches?

[JohnMakin]

This law took several years to understand for me. Early on, I'd come into an infra situation and kind of incredulously say stuff like "Why not do (incredibly obvious thing)?" and be frustrated by it quite often.

Usually it's not because people think it can't be done, or shouldn't be done, it's because of this law. Like yes in an ideal world we'd do xyz, but department head of product A is a complete anti-productive bozo that no one wants to talk to or deal with, so we'll engineer around him kind of a thing. It's incredibly common once you see it play out you'll see it everywhere.

[transpute]

> no one wants to talk to or deal with, so we'll engineer around him

Sometimes, forking product lines, departments or budgets.

[sunrunner]

I'm compelled to make sure any comment mentioning Conway's Law has a reply linking the following video (and perhaps I should create a bot to do this):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IUj1EZwpJY

This analysis of the real-world effects of Conway's Law seems deeply horrifying, because the implication seems to be that there's nothing you can do to keep communication efficiency and design quality high while also growing an organisation.

[exceptione]

I think you better link to a good article instead. Good grief, what a horror. A talking head rambling on for 60 minutes.

---

disclaimer: if low information density is your thing, then your mileage may vary. Video's are for documentaries, not for reading out an article in the camera.

[zahlman]

After opening the "transcript" on these kinds of videos (from a link in the description, which may need to be expanded), a few lines of JavaScript can extract the actual transcript text without needing to wrestle with browser copy-and-paste. Presumably the entire process could be automated, without even visiting the link in a browser.

[photonthug]

> A talking head rambling on for 60 minutes.

And probably a few minutes of commercials too. I get the impression this is an emerging generational thing, but unless it's a recorded university course or a very interesting and reputable person.. no thanks. What is weird is that the instinct to prefer video seems motivated by laziness, and laziness is actually an adaptive thing to deal with information overload.. yet this noble impulse is clearly self-defeating in this circumstance. Why wait and/or click-through ads for something that's low-density in the first place, you can't search, etc.

Especially now that you can transcript the video and quickly get AI to clean it up into a post, creating/linking a video potentially telegraphs stuff like: nothing much to say but a strong desire to be in the spotlight / narcissism / an acquisitiveness for clicks / engagement. Patiently enduring infinite ads while you're pursuing educational goals and assuming others are willing to, or assuming other people are paying for ad-free just because you do, all telegraphs a lack of respect for the audience, maybe also a lack of self-respect. Nothing against OP or this video in particular. More like a PSA about how this might come across to other people, because I can't be the only person that feels this way.

[sunrunner]

> a very interesting and reputable person

Always and entirely subjective of course, but I find Casey Muratori to be both interesting and reputable.

> What is weird is that the instinct to prefer video seems motivated by laziness, and laziness is actually an adaptive thing to deal with information overload...

What's even weirder is the instinct to not actually engage with the content of the linked video and a discussion on Conway's Law and organisational efficiency and instead head straight into a monologue about some kind of emerging generational phenomenon of laziness highlighted by a supposed preference for long video content, which seems somewhat ironic itself as ignoring the original subject matter to just post your preferences as 'PSA' is its own kind of laziness. To each their own I guess.

Although I do think the six-hour YouTube 'essays' really could do with some serious editing, so perhaps there's something there after all...

[sunrunner]

Okay, so you didn't even bother to take a few seconds to step through the video to see if there was anything other than the talking head (I'll help you out a bit, there is).

Either way, it's a step-by-step walk through of the ideas of the original article that introduced Conway's Law and a deeper inspection into ideas about _why_ it might be that way.

If that's not enough then my apologies but I haven't yet found an equivalent article that goes through the ideas in the same way but in the kind of information-dense format that I assume would help you hit your daily macros.

Edit: Accidentally a word

[exceptione]

(I didn't downvote you btw) But anyways, I did step through. And even in the section he should make his point, he couldn't. I rage quit this stuff.

Don't take it personally, you might have found great insight from it. But if you want to see my POV: I can scan, like most humans, a large text in seconds, processing it with a massive parallel network. When I find an anchor of interest, I can scan around for more context. I can go back to sections, to read it deeper.

A video is Gigabyte of download to convey a few bytes of information, dripping slowly over the span of an hour. A text is a few kilobytes, downloaded in an instant, and then it takes a few seconds to scan it, a minute to read some things deeper, and then I can decide if it is worth it to mine deeper. Even then the additional cost will be like 3 minutes.

But, to be fair, I know quite some people that do not have this ability. They struggle to dissect a text, to chop it apart and quickly pull out the information. But that could also be an issue of not being able to give full bandwidth to an information source. Some people can't focus on a text, but like to listen to books while driving for example.

[sunrunner]

(I also didn't, despite the sentiment ;) )

That's completely fair, and I actually completely agree about the information density thing. I honestly prefer well-written concise documentation over tutorial videos for this same reason, however I've not yet found the equivalent text form of this video yet (automatic transcription aside) so it's really the only example I've got that seems to extract some of the most salient points from Conway's paper and puts forward an idea as to _why_ this phenonemon is. Perhaps a blog post in the making.

[brulard]

Man, I don't know what kind of world you live in, but an hour long video is a little too much to swallow when reading HN comments. I even gave it a chance, but had to close the tab after the guy just prepared you for something and then steered away to explain "what is a law". That's absurd.

[transpute]

> horrifying

Self-regulating.

[sunrunner]

Self-regulating in a way that is designed to favour smaller independent groups with a more complete understanding and ownership of whatever <thing> that team does?