Useful Maxims
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- Lindy Effect: For non-perishable things, the longer something has already survived, the longer it can generally be expected to continue surviving.
- Gall’s Law: A complex system that works almost always evolved from a simpler system that worked; designing working complexity from scratch is unlikely to succeed.
- Amdahl’s Law: The speedup gained by parallelizing or optimizing a system is ultimately limited by the portion of the system that cannot be improved or parallelized.
- The Purpose of a System Is What It Does (POSIWID): Stafford Beer’s principle that a system’s real purpose should be inferred from the outcomes it consistently produces, not from its stated goals or designers’ intentions.