Tag: systems

Think about the game theory of coalitions

If there’s a coalition, think about the game theory. Who is participating, and why? Who would defect, and why?

The Linux Kernel — a commons that holds up the world

Files and Ritual

An interview with Ver, conducted and edited by Claude Bigbooté.

Self-hosting email the hard way from your own routable IPv4 block up

How we refreshed self-hosted Recoil email with our own RIPE-allocated IPv4 block, and deployed Postfix/rspamd/Dovecot to get full SPF/DKIM/DMARC deliverability.

Groundswell and the rhetorical ecology of farming and food

Thoughts on farming, food systems and rhetorical ecology prompted by a documentary film trailer I didn't much like. #FoodStudies #agriculture #ecology #agroecology #systems

Rules Don't Scale

There's a pattern I keep seeing at every scale of AI governance: someone writes a rule, the rule gets violated, and we act surprised.

Ecosystems are smarter than we are

Beer thought that ecosystems are smarter than we are—not in their representational cognitive abilities, but in their performative ability to solve problems that exceed our cognitive ones. The quote above is from Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic…

Outcome over representation

But Beer started from this realization: in a world of exceedingly complex systems, for which any representation can only be provisional, performance is what we need to care about. ( Andrew Pickering , 2010, The Cybernetic Brain ) Stafford Beer and…

When data is bad, use simple models

Simple models outperform complex models when data is bad or sparse. Simple models work better in VUCA environments. From the SFI Podcast Apr 6, 2020 , discussing Jurgen Jost and Luu Hoang's paper on making the most of bad data : When data is really…

VUCA

We live in a networked world, a world governed by asymmetry, feedback loops , and power laws . The US Army and Navy War College has an acronym for this kind of world: VUCA . Volatile Uncertain Complex Ambiguous

Systems are counterintuitive

The human mind is not adapted to interpreting how social systems behave. Social systems belong to the class called multi-loop nonlinear feedback systems. In the long history of evolution it has not been necessary until very recent historical times…

Slowly, then all at once

How complex systems fail: slowly, then all at once. All complex sytems are full of non-linear feedback loops . In a healthy complex system, these will have balancing feedback loops, holding each other in dynamic equilibrium. Given a small…

Second System Syndrome

Second System Syndrome is the curse by which a simple system is doomed to be replaced by an excessively abstract, over-engeered, or bloated successor. You hack together a small simple program to solve a problem. Congratulations! It's wildly…

Places to intervene in a system

From Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System , by Donella Meadows: PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM (in increasing order of effectiveness) Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards). The sizes of buffers and other…

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations

Alfred North Whitehead : Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. And: Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number,…

Under the hood with Apple's new Containerization framework

Technical deep dive into Apple's new macOS Tahoe containerization framework using Kata Containers and Swift-based implementation.

Talks from LOCO24 are now available online

LOCO24 conference talks now available on self-hosted video platforms with peer-to-peer redundancy.

Webassembly on exotic architectures (a 2025 roundup)

Survey of WebAssembly implementations on non-traditional targets including native Linux port, kernel-mode runtime, POSIX browser support and FPGA ports.

Unikernels wins the ASPLOS most influential paper award

2013 MirageOS unikernels paper wins ASPLOS influential paper award with reflections on the journey from rejection to recognition.

How I design systems

A practical guide to designing distributed systems by breaking them down into functional areas: architecture, communication, ingress, events, databases, caching, testing, and instrumentation.

Requisite Variety

Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety: If a system is to be stable, the number of states of its control mechanism must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system being controlled. Or: Only variety can absorb variety. Variety is a…

Language is a Lamarckian cheatcode

The evolution of language is our Lamarckian cheat code. Learn some stuff, tell your kid. They start where you ended. Culture is a shared mechanism for problem solving Alphabets Evolution

Capping downside diminishes opportunities for emergence

By capping downside, you limit the evolutionary search space. A short term win in preventing downside may lop off whole evolutionary branches that could contain massive upside. This tradeoff might be worth it, but it's hard to ever know, because…

The boundary of an organism is defined by cooperation

An organism is a living system maintaining both a higher level of internal cooperation and a lower level of internal conflict than either its components or any larger systems of which it is a component. Fields, Levin, 2018, " Are Planaria…

Compositionality is composability without emergence

Compositionality is composability without emergence . I claim the opposite of compositionality is emergent effects. The common definition of emergence is a system being ‘more than the sum of its parts’, and so it is easy to see that such a system…

Evolution is a diversification algorithm

Evolution is a diversification algorithm. We mistakenly think of evolution as an optimization algorithm. It's actually a diversification algorithm. From Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned : It’s popular to explain evolution as a process in which…

Verbs that can act on many objects

When trying to provoke emergence , design verbs that can act on many objects. From The Art of Game Design , by Jesse Schell: Verbs that can act on many objects. This is possibly the single most powerful thing you can do to make an interesting game.…

Composable alphabets

Good alphabets compose at multiple levels. Letters combine into words, which describe ideas. DNA basepairs combin into genes, which encode traits. Minecraft lets you craft new blocks with new properties from combinations of other blocks. When…

Building Block Hypothesis

The building block hypothesis (Goldberg): Genetic algorithms select for compact genes that encode impactful traits, because a short gene is less likely to be disrupted by mutation and crossover than is a long gene, which has more exposed surface…

Genetic algorithms

Genetic algorithm design patterns : Principle of Meaningful Building Blocks. Learn from the building block hypothesis and find a coding that can express short, low-order schemata that are relevant to the underlying problem and relatively unrelated…

Alphabets

Emergence springs from alphabets. An alphabet is a kit of parts, together with rules for combining them. Christopher Alexander. "Systems Generating Systems" Architectural Design 38, no. December 1968 (1968): 605-610. If you want to provoke…

Small alphabets

When designing alphabets for emergence, constrain the alphabet, but don't constrain what may be written with it. Constrain the alphabet . Keeping the alphabet small makes it easy to learn. It also forces you, the designer, to create a composable…

How complex systems fail

Notes from paper How Complex Systems Fail , Richard I. Cook, MD. Insights from years of observing health systems. Any system that has managed to survive will have evolved many layers of defense. In human systems this looks like backups, training,…

Soft security

As opposed to hard security. Soft security patterns from Meatball Wiki : Soft Security is like water. It bends under attack, only to rush in from all directions to fill the gaps. It's strong over time yet adaptable to any shape. It seeks to…

TIMN

In a report for RAND , David Ronfeldt posits that 3 forms of political organization have evolved over the course of history, now joined by one more: Tribe — Lineage-based political organization. Hacks our natural evolutionary drive to protect our…

Markets do not make capitalism

Markets do not make capitalism. The fantasy of a frictionless, completely market-driven society is just a fantasy, because successful capitalism depends on nonmarket institutions—schools, police, courts, and all the rest—that are not run along…

Permissionless creation is where value comes from

Value creation (and destruction) = the system surprising itself. If it is in equilibrium, it must be dead. — John Holland If a system can’t knock itself out of equilibrium, it can’t create new value. Without ‘noise’ there can be no innovation.…

Ecology meta-patterns

Emergent patterns that recur in complex adaptive systems : Diversity Recirculation Niche and hierarchy Coevolution Diversity : an ecology is an economy made up of many currencies. Different species have different goals, and those goals interlock in…

Punctuated equilibrium

Complex systems exist in punctuated equilibrium, repeatedly evolving through distinct phases of randomness, growth, consolidation, and collapse. (Phase 1) Random : The system is unstructured. Random events occur without particularly changing the…

Containment can lead to contagion

Containment can lead to contagion. David Stark Evolutionary niches carve out room for new tactics to incubate, then spread. One of the lessons from the theory of natural selection is that a degree of isolation can be a great help to a new strategy…

Goodhart's law

Goodhart's Law : When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Goodhart's Law applies to feedback system with humans in the loop . It does not apply to feed-forward systems. Any system including people is a kind of feedback…

General-purpose languages eat everything around them

Given time, a Turing-complete language will eat every domain-specific language adjacent to it. Even on the web, where declarative, domain-specific languages had a 20 year head-start, JavaScript is eating HTML and CSS ( React , CSS-in-JS ). Why?…

Agent

From Signals and Boundaries , MIT Press: when a system is capable of reprogramming itself in response to outside signals, it can be modeled as an adaptive agent . Agents are enclosed within a boundary. Agents filter outside signals through…

Low floor, wide walls, high ceiling

"Low floor, wide walls" is the mantra that guides the design of MIT's Scratch language . When discussing technologies to support learning and education, my mentor Seymour Papert often emphasized the importance of “low floors” and “high…

Cities are like compost heaps

Cities are like compost heaps — just layers and layers of stuff. In cities, the past and the present and the future can all be totally adjacent. — William Gibson And also: Cities look to me to be our most characteristic technology. We didn’t really…

Generative Grammar

Generative grammars let you build generative systems that produce variety , and structure . A generative grammar describes a set of rules for constructing meaningful sentences from individual words. "Sentence" and "word" are…

Conformability

Looking through the lens of conformability means looking at what isn't changing, and asking how you can tailor your product/service/technology to conform to that landscape. What changes slowly? Our fundamental needs — food, water, shelter, energy.…

Pace layers

Pace layers are a model for thinking about change, developed by Stewart Brand . Each layer acts as a platform for the layer above it, and moves more slowly, else it wouldn't act as a platform. When exploring a problem space, ask What is changing…

Games with more than one player

Every game with more than one player becomes a game about the interactions between those players. Also: Provoking emergence , Villain, team, system .