Several related reasons working at once. The nature of work changed. The boundary between accidental and incidental complexity shifted (and it’s unclear whether this distinction still exists). Niche specializations within the field emerged. The way to structure and decompose projects changed dramatically (agile and stuff).
One pathological example: if you’re running a server-based product, quite often what stands between you and a new feature launch is literally couple of thousands of lines of Kubernetes YAML. Would adding someone who’s proficient in Kubernetes slow you down? Of course not.
One may say, hey, this is just the server-side Kubernetes-based development being insane, and I’ll say, the whole modern business of software development is like this.
That’s a lovely comment, thank you. If you’re keen to think about it more, consider the fact that the existing members of the project that’s being late are actually in not as much of an advantage compared to the new joiners, as it’s common to think.
Yes, they know how the feature they work on relates to other features, but actually implementing that feature is very often mostly involves fighting with technology, wrangling the entire stack into the shape you need.
In Brooks’s times the stack was paper-thin, almost nonexistent. In modern times it’s not, and adding someone who knows the technology, but doesn’t have the domain knowledge related to your feature still helps you. It doesn’t slow you down.
One may argue that I’m again pointing to the difference between accidental and incidental complexity, and my argument is essentially “accidental complexity takes over”, but accidental complexity actually does influence your feature too, by defining what’s possible and what’s not.
I sort of agree that the surface area and incidental complexity of stacks give more space to plug more developers in than was true in the 70s and 80s. But I disagree strongly this invalidates Brooks Law. Certainly there are cases where adding people helps, especially if they are stronger engineers than the ones that are already there, but I’ve also seen way too many projects devolve into resourcing conversations when the real problem was over-complicated, poorly reasoned requirements, boil-the-ocean solutions promising a perfect end state without a clear plan to get there iteratively.
gov.uk has a tendancy to treat everyone like a 5 year old
Which is not a bug, but a feature of the gov.uk website, and it's the best and the most important one. 89 year old you would absolutely appreciate it when you'd need to renew your passport via gov.uk.
Funny you say that, I actually just did a company tax return and confirmation statement a couple of days in the midst of bad COVID (2 hours sleep per night) and I was still annoyed about the multi-step process:
1) gov.uk, search for 'file confirmation statement'
2) Despite there being a sole autocomplete result and clicking on it, taken to the search results page
3) Click the first result. Turns out it's the guidance page
4) Go back, click the second result. We're getting warmer
5) Click "Start Now"
6) Get redirected to the 'Sign in to WebFiling' landing page. You can't actually sign on on this page.
7) Click 'Continue'
8) Another landing/explainer page! ("We're taking you to GOV.UK One Login to sign in to this service")
9) Click 'Go to GOV.UK One Login'
10) You think we're done yet? Think again. Another landing page!
11) Click "Sign in"
12) Think they'd let you just enter an email and password on one page? Nope! Enter email
13) Click Continue
14) Enter password
Finally...
No idea how anyone who doesn't work for GDS can justify this. It's mad
It's a bug when you're neither 5 nor 89 or have used it 10 times before...
Look, I know it's a hard problem, and GDS have a lot of talented, smart people. I appreciate making something work for both an 18 year old and an 89 year old is a hard requiement.
IMHO there is nothing wrong with having those help docs easily available so you can read at your leisure, rather than being 'forced' to wade through it each time
Perhaps we can agree to disagree that it's not a 'bug' based on the Government's general approach to how it treats its citizens and what it deems as a requirement (as compared to eg the Netherlands/Germany which is a bit more 'it's not our fault you're stupid', 'go read the docs!')
It’s important to be empathetic here to how difficult these things can be for less tech literate people.
Adding more guidance and nudges doesn’t prevent capable users from succeeding, it just annoys them. But it means the lowest common denominators have a higher chance to succeed, which is much more valuable than level of annoyance.
No, the GDS should definitely replace all services on gov.uk to be only accessible via MCP. "Claude, I've logged into PayPal via oAuth, now renew my passport" /s
I like how the author correctly shown the cover image for the "The Sciences of the Artificial", with plural 's' in 'sciences', but then in the paragraph praising it gleefully ignored it.
Thanks, I will fix this one. And yes, I am an old guy who doesn’t use AI in writing my articles. I tried once, and I felt like I was a slave to the machine ;) So, I am proud of my human mistakes in the age of AI perfection.
To be honest, in the pre-internet era, paid paper copy of FT had ads too. The delivery mechanisms for ads in the internet era are trillion times nastier and more annoying, of course. By the standards of today’s web, the print ad for Cartier on the second page of paper FT looks almost classy, interesting to read.
But there's a big difference. The paper copy didn't harvest data from you, didn't infect you, didn't spy on you or steal resources from your computer or internet bandwidth.
All the advertiser knew about you was you were a subscriber to FT, and maybe what the _average_ demographic of an FT subscriber was. Nothing about you personally.
The paper copy did do that, just not as individualized. People would choose which publications to put their ads in based on data collected about their subscribers.
The job of ad men has always been just as much about were to put the ad as much as what the ad was.
"just not as individualized" is an enormous "just". Each ad is based on the total audience for a single publication. No fine-grained filtering, no personal dossiers.
And none of the rest of that list of bad things happens.
People who love thinking in false dichotomies like this one have absolutely no idea how much harder it is to “get paid for doing commercial/trendy art”.
It’s so easy to be a starving artist; and in the world of commercial art it’s bloody dog-eat-dog jungle, not made for faint-hearted sissies.
I need to think about this more, but the first thing that comes to my mind is not that this looks like “taxing the tool”, but that this can (ought to?) be similar to an alcohol or a fuel duty.
Nobody calls alcohol duty “micromanagement”.
For products like petrol, it’s widely known that from money paid for a liter when it’s sold, say, in the UK, more money stays in the UK’s government pocket via a complex web of taxes and duties, than profits the oil production company that supplied crude oil for that petrol.
Maybe taxing a kWh of the AI data center energy consumption should be a thing? I don’t know.
They don't, but it really is! There's different rates for different specific gravity and different processes.
Re: petrol, I note that the UK government is trying to replace this as part of the EV transition with a milage tax, which is proving controversial and fiddly.
Energy tax is a hugely fraught political issue. The "poster child" for cheap energy is a little old lady huddled over a 1kW one bar electric heater. Energy bills are a big "fixed" cost for households. Many small businesses have been affected by energy price rises - e.g. restaurants. And yet at the other end AI represents such a huge deployment of capital expenditure that it's distorting prices for everything else - energy, RAM, and so on.
I think I'd favor a "personal allowance" model similar to income tax, where you get the first X units of energy tax free and then have to pay VAT, carbon taxes etc. on the rest of it.
> I think I'd favor a "personal allowance" model similar to income tax, where you get the first X units of energy tax free and then have to pay VAT, carbon taxes etc. on the rest of it.
I can see why this is tempting, but I think there's a better way to legislate with this, especially with that poster child.
I'm a landlord of a flat. I used to live in it before I left the UK. The EPC rating is D, so despite the double glazing it's still pretty cold in winter. I am now living in a fancy new-build in Berlin which, despite being 3 times the size of that flat, can be kept warm for 10 months of the year just by body heat and waste energy from the white goods — even with higher electricity costs in Germany, it costs less to be comfortable in this building in a T-shirt all year round (even while snow is falling outside), than to be wearing fleeces and sleeping with hot water bottles and still not be completely comfortable in that flat in the UK.
A few years back there was a proposal for legislation that would increase the requirements for all rental property to be at minimum C-rated by 2030, as I understand it this was dropped and the current minimum is F or something ridiculous like that. My agent's advice is to not do anything until the legislation is actually sorted, even though I'm happy to spend whatever to upgrade the place, because until you know what the legislation demands there's always a risk of doing the wrong work beforehand, having to rip it out and put something else in.
IMO, government should push for this kind of boost, as it has with other energy-saving and insulation-boosting measures.
My first rental after graduation was a Welsh solid stone wall construction; like the example you gave, I couldn't keep warm there even with the electric bar heater a meter from me.
The current minimum EPC rating is D. The legislation to raise it to C hasn't been dropped, they just haven't decided exactly what date it will take place. And it's stupid legislation because many old properties cannot be sensibly raised from D to C, and these are the properties (e.g. terraced housing) which are typically rented out. So, we have a housing crisis with too few properties available to rent and the legislation will force landlords to take rental property off the market. Madness.
There's a lot of not-joined-up thinking in the UK government. Has been for ages.
Like, the housing crisis in the UK, there's a lot of empty houses, they're just in places with no jobs, could encourage employers to go there, but HS2 mumble mumble. Could build more houses, but greenbelt, and existing homeowners like the house prices going up, and lots of builders were Polish and oh look Brexit.
Right now, winter fuel allowance is literally burning money because the houses are not good enough. This is also not sensible.
I remember there was a pressure group "insulate britain". Their aggressive tactics got them banned and arrested, and the idea was never heard from again. I sometimes wonder if that wasn't the intended outcome, a low-temperature conspiracy theory.
Thinking about who might benefit from it being a conspiracy, the only finger I can point at would be Russia? (Well, unless it's a long-term generational anger at the British Empire, which I have discovered is more of a thing than most Brits realise).
That would be a highly bureaucratic solution with significant overheads.
Would everyone pay extra tax per kWh or just AI computers? Tax it on the producer or consumer side?
How would you verify that a particular data center is "bad computation" and needs a different tax rate on its energy usage.
Should an AI data center from pharmaceuticals or biotech startup be taxed extra per kWh, even if the AI is purely used for medical research?
Just big AI datacenters. If this encourages people to run local AI, all the better.
> Should an AI data center from pharmaceuticals or biotech startup be taxed extra per kWh, even if the AI is purely used for medical research?
That's not a gotcha.. those are all policy choices. My personal preference is, yes, of course - medical research today is taxed just fine. If there's lobbying to specifically grant tax benefits to medical research, I can see an exception being carved.
You think multiple localised heat centres are more efficient than centralised managed heat centres. Why don't we all just have a coal-fired power station in our back garden?
The issue I have with your proposal is that it discloses too much metadata to tax authorities in order to enforce compliance. They'll have an almost perfect map of the legal compute in their jurisdiction. Access to compute should be free to all and not gated by taxes.
Tax on electricity is already a thing. That can be adjusted and even be made progressive. Extra for fossils and so on.
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