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From the article: 'In the discrete world of computing, there is no meaningful metric in which "small" changes and "small" effects go hand in hand, and there never will be.'

As brilliantly composed as the piece may be, it exhibits the same resistance to radical novelty that it condemns. Here we are not 40 years later, and small changes to big networks produce small effects. At sufficient scale, the digital reapproximates the analog.



Complete with feedback loops and chaos dynamics. Small changes to almost all code would yield small effects. A small change to libcurl or SQLite, creating an application-crashing bug and somehow slipping through tests, would likely halt the world in its tracks.


> it exhibits the same resistance to radical novelty that it condemns

You're talking about bio-mimetic systems that wouldn't arise for a generation, he was talking about "the discrete world of computing". There's no context there to resist.

We built large statistical systems out of the "discrete world" components. Different regimes, if you will.

The fascinating thing is that chemical/biological systems evolved discrete interactions (e.g. nervous systems that can be deranged by, say, a few micrograms of LSD.)

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Also, Cloudstrike/Clownstrike: small change, large effect?




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