Drones, Hill plots, and optimising the wrong thing
We speculate about the cause of the Chinese push toward better drones. We look at a bunch of Hill plots. We take a hint from Optimising Oracle Performance.
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New articles
The Low-Altitude Economy Is About War
China invests big in drones. The Economist, and everyone else, seem to think it is about promoting growth of the country's economy. I feel like it might just as well be about a technological advantage in future wars.
Full article (1–3 minute read): The Low-Altitude Economy Is About War
Various Hill Plots
Hill plots can be used to estimate the tail exponent of power laws, but they also tell you something about what the tails of distributions are like, more generally. They're difficult to read, though. Maybe looking at many examples helps?
Full article (3–7 minute read): Various Hill Plots
Flashcard of the week
I have recommended the book Optimizing Oracle Performance before. Never mind "Oracle" in the title – this is a great book about how to optimise anything. (The authors have a newer book that doesn't have "Oracle" in the title, but I haven't read it so I can't recommend it. I see no reason why it would not be good.)
One of the things the Oracle book says is that database admins often end up spending time on solving problems, but in the end, the users are not happier. We can generalise that:
Why do product developers sometimes spend a lot of time on an issue that has little to no business impact?
It's not that the database admins/product developers are not solving real problems. They are! But they forgot an important step.
They are addressing a systemic issue before verifying that it's the cause of a specific problem.
In many cases, when diagnosing performance (or resource usage) problems we encounter a bunch of systemic issues with the performance (or resource usage), and we figure it can't hurt to fix them. So we spend a lot of time fixing them.
Often, the performance (or resource usage) user pain points are caused by one or two specific systemic problems, not all of the ones the developer spends time fixing. It is better to first isolate the systemic problem that actually causes the user pain, then fix that first. If there is time to spare after that, we can go after the other, currently-less-important issues.
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