8 hours ago
Amdahl's Law is one of my favorite things from college. It's general principle, optimize the largest parts of a project for the biggest impact, is applicable across more than just programming. I've used it to help prioritize tasks within projects, both professional and personal, that have little-to-nothing to do with programming, and decide where to optimize project costs.
8 hours ago
Cool for the perspective, but also subsumed by the concept of returns to scale (that entails diminishing returns and includes constant and increasing returns to scale). ie- rediscovery of microeconomics
6 hours ago
I think your point is that "other kinds of systems have different math," but Amdahl's point was that scalable distributed systems in software engineering have this kind of math.
Apples may be fruit, but people who grow apples still tend to focus on apples.
8 hours ago
Imo the microecon metaphor is off base. This is about any parallel process being limited by it's serial phases. There are ways of looking at economies that see this process angle where Amdhal's law plays a role. But it's not the rediscovery of microeconomics.
7 hours ago
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8 hours ago