Beethoven, The Beatles, and Beyoncé: more on the Lindy effect

This post is a set of footnotes to my previous post on the Lindy effect. This effect says that creative artifacts have lifetimes that follow a power law distribution, and hence the things that have been around the longest have the longest expected future. Works of art The previous post looked at technologies, but the […]

The Lindy effect

The longer a technology has been around, the longer it’s likely to stay around. This is a consequence of the Lindy effect. Nassim Taleb describes this effect in Antifragile but doesn’t provide much mathematical detail. Here I’ll fill in some detail. Taleb, following Mandelbrot, says that the lifetimes of intellectual artifacts follow a power law […]

Technological schadenfreude

I had a tweet Twitter go viral yesterday, at least relatively viral. Elon Musk could tweet a punctuation mark and get an orders of magnitude more traffic, but this was viral by my standards [1]. “That schadenfreude-like feeling when you realize something you felt you should learn but didn’t is now obsolete.” Apparently this resonated […]

How much do you really use?

I’ve been doing a little introspection lately about what software I use, not at an application level but at a feature level. LaTeX It started with looking at what parts of LaTeX I use. I wrote about this in April, and I revisited it this week in response to some client work [1]. LaTeX is […]

Why would anyone do that?

There are tools that I’ve used occasionally for many years that I’ve just started to appreciate lately. “Oh, that’s why they did that.” When you see something that looks poorly designed, don’t just exclaim “Why would anyone do that?!” but ask sincerely “Why would someone do that?” There’s probably a good reason, or at least […]

Programming language life expectancy

The Lindy effect says that what’s been around the longest is likely to remain around the longest. It applies to creative artifacts, not living things. A puppy is likely to live longer than an elderly dog, but a book that has been in press for a century is likely to be in press for another century. […]

Normal hazard continued fraction

The hazard function of a probability distribution is the instantaneous probability density of an event given that it hasn’t happened yet. This works out to be the ratio of the PDF (probability density function) to the CCDF (complementary cumulative density function). For the standard normal distribution, the hazard function is and has a surprisingly simple […]

Uniformitarian vs Paretoist

A uniformitarian view is that everything is equally important. For example, there are 118 elements in the periodic table, so all 118 are equally important to know about. The Pareto principle would say that importance is usually very unevenly distributed. The universe is essentially hydrogen and helium, with a few other elements sprinkled in. From […]