Ambiguities

What is unknowable is just not knowable. It is an ambiguity. It could be one answer or it could be any other. There is no way to decide. The information to do so simply does not exist. It isn't open to discussion, it is a byproduct of our physical universe.

The languages we use to drive computers are often Turing Complete. This means they are highly expressive, that they are deterministic, yet buried beneath them there can also ambiguities. Some are accidentally put there by programmers; some are just intrinsically embedded.

I saw a post about a bug caused by one of the newer configuration languages. It was mistaken in the type of its data and made a really bad assumption about it. That is a deliberate ambiguity.

We choose implicit typing far too often just to save expression, but then we overload it later with polymorphic types, and we sometimes don’t get the precedence right. To be usable the data must be typed, but because it is left to the software to decide, and the precedence is incorrect, it forms an ambiguity. The correct data type is unknown and cannot be inferred. Mostly it works, right up until it doesn’t. If the original programmers forced typing, or the precedence was tight, the issue would go away.

My favorite ambiguity is the two generals’ problem. It sits deep in the heart of transactional integrity, plaguing distributed systems everywhere. It is simple: if one computational engine sends a message to another one and receives no response, you can never know if it was the message that disappeared or the response. The information needed to correctly choose just doesn’t exist.

If the message was an action, you can’t know right away if the action happened or not.

It is the cause of literally millions of bugs, some encountered so frequently that they are just papered over with manual interventions.

What makes it so fascinating is that although you can never reduce the ambiguity itself, you can still wire up the behavior to fail so infrequently that you might never encounter the problem in your lifetime. That is some pretty strange almost non-deterministic behavior.

Ambiguities are one of the great boundaries of software. Our code is limited. We can endeavor to craft perfect software, but can never exceed the imperfections of reality. Software isn’t nearly as soft as we would like to believe, it is always tied to physical machines, which so often mess up the purity of their formal mechanics.

Sometimes to build good software you have to have both a strong understanding of what it should do, but also a strong understanding of what it cannot do. That balance is important.

Value

We’ll start by defining ‘value’ as a product or service that somebody needs or wants. Their desire is strong enough that they are willing to pay something to get it.

There is a personal cost, in that money -- particularly when it comes from salary -- is an aspect of time. You have to spend time in your life to earn it. So, spending that money is also accepting that that time is gone too.

It is extraordinarily difficult to create value. Very few people can do it by themselves. There are not that many more people who can drive others to do it with them. Often it requires manifesting something complex, yet balanced, out of imagination, which is why it is such a rare ability.

Once value exists, lots of other people can build on top of it. They can enhance or expand it. They can focus on whatever parts of the production are time-consuming and minimize it. Value explodes when it is scaled; doing something for ten people is not nearly as rewarding as doing it for thousands.

The difference between the cost to produce and willingness to pay is profit. There is always some risk, as you have to spend money before you will see if it pays off. For new ideas, the risk is very high. But as the value proves itself those risks start to diminish. At some point, they are nearly zero, this is often referred to as ‘printing money’. You just need to keep on producing the value and collecting the profits.

At some point, the growth of the profitability of any value will be zero. The demand is saturated. If the production at zero is smooth, the profits are effectively capped. There is nowhere to go except down.

The easy thing you can do with value is degrade it. You can fall below the minimum for the product, then people will gradually stop wanting to pay for it. If it’s been around for a while habits will keep some purchases intact, but it will slowly trickle away. The profits will eventually disappear.

A common way to degrade value is to miss what is most valuable about it. People may be buying it, but their reasons for doing so are not necessarily obvious. The secondary concerns may be what is keeping them coming back. If you gut those for extra profit, you kill the primary value.

People incorrectly assume that all value has a life span. That a product or service lives or dies fairly quickly, and that turnover is normal. That is true for trendy industries, where the secondary aspects are that it is new and that is popular, but there is an awful lot of base value that people need in their lives and they do not want it to be shifting around. Trustworthy constants are strong secondary attributes. The market may fluctuate slightly, but the value is as strong as ever. Stable business with no growth, but good long-term potential.

Exploiting value is the core of business. They find it, get as much money out of it as possible, then move on to something else. When the goal is perpetual growth, which isn’t ever possible, the value turns over too quickly, leading to a lot of instability. That is a destabilizing force on any society.