.NET
You Completely Misunderstand Span in .NET | Code Cop #025
- Simply turning things into
Spans (a substring in this video’s case) doesn’t benefit you if the end consumer doesn’t deal with a span (considering you have to retype it out of that span).
Systems theory
Why does it feel like the world is falling apart?
- Humans developed in an environment of local instability and global stability; their day to day lives were unpredictable. Modern society has inverted that: We can purchase things reliably and get the same cup of coffee everywhere, but globally there are climate problems and democracies are collapsing.
- Linear dynamics says that small causes produce small effects and big causes produce big effects. However, the world is nonlinear, meaning a small change can produce a big effect.
- Incorrect assumptions of social change that were used to make sense of the complex world:
- Every “why” has a clear cause.
- Understanding parts explains the whole system. (Complicated systems have many moving parts but are easy to explain and control — e.g., a Swiss watch. Complex systems adapt and the parts may change how they interact with each other.)
- Past patterns help predict the present and future. (Those patterns aren’t incorrect, but the starting conditions are now different.)
- Sandpile model — Continue adding grains of sand until it forms a pile. At some point it will become so tall that it will be on the “edge of chaos,” where a shift in a single grain will cause the pile to collapse.
- A black swan event is something that’s a highly consequential, rare event that is unpredictable.
- A new area of research is “critical slowing down” where parts of a system do not go back to equilibrium.
- As we try to accelerate toward efficiency, the pile of sand gets bigger and the avalanche is inevitable.
- We suffer from the mirage of regularity, where we think the world is controllable. Black swan events prove that forecasting is not 100% reliable.