Post by WaapFu on Mar 23, 2016 16:16:33 GMT
I have this terrible feeling that this is in the wrong place. May a moderator move this to the correct area if this is the case?
There's this thing that you have probably heard of before called exponential change. It is basically when something is changing faster depending on how fast it already is, which results in the rate of change increasing very slowly, and then very quickly when it reaches a turning point. Humans tend to struggle to mentally comprehend this, and we are a lot better at perceiving things that change at a static rate. When things change exponentially over time, people often note that things have changed very little in the past, so it seems unlikely that there will be any big change to happen soon. Those people are proven wrong by maths. We must all submit to the ultimate power of maths eventually.
Now, I'm usually not one for graphs, but this is one thing that can get me really excited under the right circumstances. These circumstances are Thrive's development, go figure. Thrive has been stagnant for many years now, with snail-pace development. There was the very rare and very questionable prototype, but it wasn't even proof-of-concept level stuff. Then, we started getting version releases. And devblogs! Proof of concept, proof of development. That was pretty recent. And there has already been a notable increase in the frequency of those. What does this lead to? More faith, more hype, more interest. More people wanting to participate, including people with vital skills. Development speed increases a little, the cycle continues. In practice this would not be able to increase indefinitely to the point where it's half-complete one day and fully complete the next, because there's an important element of co-operation and communication that puts a limit on how many people can efficiently work on a project without making a total mess. There are also other factors like outreach that need to be handled competently for things to improve, and a bunch of other nitty gritty messy human details, but basically this nasty graph is the reason why I now have a lot more hope for the future of Thrive than I ever did in the past.
Let me know if this was some kind of mind-boggling thing to read, or if everything I just said was completely redundant, or whatever else. I honestly have no idea.
There's this thing that you have probably heard of before called exponential change. It is basically when something is changing faster depending on how fast it already is, which results in the rate of change increasing very slowly, and then very quickly when it reaches a turning point. Humans tend to struggle to mentally comprehend this, and we are a lot better at perceiving things that change at a static rate. When things change exponentially over time, people often note that things have changed very little in the past, so it seems unlikely that there will be any big change to happen soon. Those people are proven wrong by maths. We must all submit to the ultimate power of maths eventually.
Now, I'm usually not one for graphs, but this is one thing that can get me really excited under the right circumstances. These circumstances are Thrive's development, go figure. Thrive has been stagnant for many years now, with snail-pace development. There was the very rare and very questionable prototype, but it wasn't even proof-of-concept level stuff. Then, we started getting version releases. And devblogs! Proof of concept, proof of development. That was pretty recent. And there has already been a notable increase in the frequency of those. What does this lead to? More faith, more hype, more interest. More people wanting to participate, including people with vital skills. Development speed increases a little, the cycle continues. In practice this would not be able to increase indefinitely to the point where it's half-complete one day and fully complete the next, because there's an important element of co-operation and communication that puts a limit on how many people can efficiently work on a project without making a total mess. There are also other factors like outreach that need to be handled competently for things to improve, and a bunch of other nitty gritty messy human details, but basically this nasty graph is the reason why I now have a lot more hope for the future of Thrive than I ever did in the past.
Let me know if this was some kind of mind-boggling thing to read, or if everything I just said was completely redundant, or whatever else. I honestly have no idea.
