It's too bad that Elon Musk and Kelly Johnson never met. Both are engineers' engineers doing impossible things, and I bet they would have had a blast.
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Hats off to the Engineers Engineers that Engineered the chopsticks catch, there were quite a few getting into the technical weeds:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F2...
P.S. I've read full length biographies of both, and am an ME/AE engineer myself. I think I have at least some grasp of what they have accomplished.
I dont know what the general solution is here.. make sure (organizational) Hierarchies are as fluid as the Recompense (including, by reputation) & Responsibilties, i suppose
nu_H = nu_RR
where nu has units of viscosity
Failing so, i’d prefer to defer judgement after we’ve had blood samples from both Kelly n Musk. (For lead, fluoride, other psychoactives etc)
(IMX rapidly expanding Hierarchies do not [pace Landau] relax on a negligible time scale)
Length scales are impt too, we are obsessed with highly localized organizations like Musk’s (other than X) & Kelly’s because they seem so effective but the most insidious ones tend to rely on (the discrepancy bewtween?) long (or even mid) range info/materiel exchanges..
(Wuz thinking how the revolutionary structures (i.e. artillery stds?) were mostly already in place for decades before NB)
Q: how did these not diffuse to french navy? [Boudriot-Berti]?
> Napoleon would dictate to his secretaries exactly what he wanted published in the Paris newspaper [p22]
> « Je redoute trois journaux plus que 100.000 baïonnettes. » (I fear 3 newspapers more than 100'000 infantry) —NB
There's a nice (but very long) soviet joke that concludes with Bonaparte admiring Pravda.
> the Emperor makes war not with our arms but with our legs [p28]
As in the days of the Renaissance Condottieri; oddly enough the same is true in fencing: whoever has the stronger legs controls the distance (I wouldn't be surprised if 膝行 had been meant as leg training in the land of 間合い).
I wonder if the reliance on foraging for manoeuvre was part of his defeat by General Winter? Early canning (jarring in champagne bottles, I believe) had been developed under his version of ARPA, but I don't know if he had had that logistical element in 1812, nor if it would have been available much beyond metropolitan france.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_invasion_of_Russia#Logi... suggests french planning had assumed russia would be nearly as dense as poland.
EDIT: when in high-functioning global teams, I've noticed how time zone diversity allows development to proceed nearly continuously; B's habit [p24] of sleeping from 19h00-01h00, in order to process yesterday's reports and get the new Orders of the Day out (~03h00) before his army woke up, seems similar.
EDIT2: (a) no such thing as foraging for a blue-water cruising naval vessel, (b) navies already operated with admirals using flag signals to coordinate their fleets, and (c) before modern comms, navies were already nearly "relativistic" in that news travelled about as fast as they did and so, eg if you sent a captain to the indies you had to have great confidence in them, because it'd take on the order of a year to close the accountability loop.
> ...j’espérais remplacer le général Dahlmann, colonel de vos guides. » L’Empereur répondit : « Quand le général Lasalle ne jurera plus et ne fumera plus, non seulement je le mettrai à la tête d’un régiment de cavalerie de ma garde, mais je le ferai un de mes chambellans. » Le général Lasalle s’inclina et dit à l’Empereur : « Sire, puisque j’ai toutes les qualités d’un marin, je demande à Votre Majesté le commandement d’une frégate...
(Lasalle hopes for a promotion, but the Emperor tells him if he quits swearing and quits smoking he'll not only get the promotion but become a chamberlain as well. Lasalle responds, "As I have all the qualities of a sailor, why don't you put me in charge of a frigate?")
More seriously, today I learned two ways to say "legacy code" in chinese, of which I suspect 问题代码 to be more polite, and 屎山代码 somewhat less.
Poking around in https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/三民主義/民權主義第五講 I found another trichotomy, just a little less cynical than Rao's:
SYS Gervais SYS example
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先知先覺 psychopaths civil engineer
後知後覺 clueless foreman
不知不覺 losers workmen
> 都是靠這三種人，無論是缺少了那一種人都是不可能的。... 先知先覺的人要有一份，後知後覺的人要有一份，就是不知不覺的人也要有一份。