I'm reminded of the famous story of (I think) the central beam in a building at Oxford. The story goes something like:
The central beam was beginning to fail and the Oxford administration knew they needed to replace it. When they went around for quotes, no one could replace the beam because it was 100 ft in length and sourced from an old growth tree. Such logs were simply unavailable to buy. To solve the issue, the staff begin to look at major renovations to the building's architecture.
Until the Oxford groundskeeper heard about the problem. "We have a replacement beam," he said.
The groundskeeper took the curious admins to the edge of the grounds. There stood two old growth trees, over 150 feet tall.
"But these must be over 200 years old! When were they planted?" the admins asked.
> In 1859, the JCR told the SCR that the roof in Hall needed repairing, which was true.
> In 1862, the senior fellow was visiting College estates on `progress', i.e., an annual review of College property, which goes on to this day (performed by the Warden). Visiting forests in Akeley and Great Horwood, Buckinghamshire (forests which the College had owned since 1441), he had the largest oaks cut down and used to make new beams for the ceiling.
> It is not the case that these oaks were kept for the express purpose of replacing the Hall ceiling. It is standard woodland management to grow stands of mixed broadleaf trees e.g., oaks, interplanted with hazel and ash. The hazel and ash are coppiced approximately every 20-25 years to yield poles. The oaks, however, are left to grow on and eventally, after 150 years or more, they yield large pieces for major construction work such as beams, knees etc.
stavros · 2h ago
But this urban legend must be over 150 years old! When was it created?
saltcured · 2h ago
Right after they consumed the previous rural legend.
gowld · 3m ago
> It is not the case that these oaks were kept for the express purpose of replacing the Hall ceiling.
> The oaks, however, are left to grow on and eventally, after 150 years or more, they yield large pieces for major construction work such as beams, knees etc.
Splitting hairs a bit. In fact what they did was to maintain a more general solution, maintaining a supply of wood over the long term of 400 years.
rfrey · 1h ago
Ah yes, "exacting young man debunks charming tale with touching moral, to the benefit of nobody". A tale as old as time.
K-Wall · 3h ago
Can't wait to see this story used on some growth hacker / seeking new opportunities LinkedIn post talking about planning for success.
neumann · 1h ago
The funny thing is that 99% of the linkedin shills will miss the second crux of the allegory: To maintain the institutional knowledge for this to happen, you need to have a culture that nurtures employees, keeps them on long term and listens to them. And gives them time to write good documentation for future-proofing.
hackitup7 · 36m ago
It's wild that they managed to retain this knowledge without a Confluence by Atlassian subscription (tm).
Avicebron · 5h ago
"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit" - Paraphrased from Elton Trueblood
travisgriggs · 2h ago
Which defines why American society seems to be F'ed of late. Decades of short term rewards combined with a baby boomer population looking at their last hoorah and declining relevance. Most of the old people I interact seem to be in a state of denial about soon not being here.
neumann · 1h ago
Or just compare the billionaires actions now - they are building tunnels in hawaii to prepare for survival just as they are knowingly destroying the future instead of spending their obscene wealth to protect it.
xwolfi · 19m ago
Zoom out: 200 years ago they were killing each other over slavery, 400 years ago, there was no american society.
The trend is up, but they're in a local minimum :D
Tangential, how do you hyphenate (((very old) growth) tree)?
gowld · 51s ago
This sort of thing comes up often for me. I use extended hyphenation to declare precedence: very-old--growth tree.
saltcured · 1h ago
In English, we're making a compound adjective so it would be very-old-growth tree.
It's one step short of the German compound noun, and we make it easier to find the fragments...
jodrellblank · 1h ago
ancient-growth tree
adamhartenz · 5h ago
Not "growth tree" but an "old growth" tree. It just means a tree that was left to mature, and never cut down.
ljlolel · 5h ago
Literally what they do for Norte dame?
tim333 · 4h ago
>Rebuilding Notre-Dame’s “forest” also meant selecting 1,300 oak trees from across France that were “as close as possible to those of the 13th century”, that is, “very straight and very slender”, according to Desmonts, with “no defects”. Jean-Louis Bidet, the technical director of Ateliers Perrault, remembers the rush to harvest the trees in autumn so the carpenters could begin squaring the green wood from “dozens of truckloads” before the end of 2022.
piker · 6h ago
Fantastic!
imoverclocked · 1m ago
Language itself is an interesting problem. We have texts that are ancient and some are unreadable and others are readable. I personally can't understand old variants of English while (American) English is the only language I speak.
There is so much assumed in our use of language that it can be largely unintelligible without detailed historical context. The first time I heard the term "in the car park" I chuckled at the thought of an amusement park for cars... "parking lot" only came a few thoughts later. We drive on parkways. We play in the park. We park in the lot. Lots are reading this sentence twice. Give this paragraph to a school-kid in just 100 years and it will seem like gibberish. Word.
tombert · 6h ago
In my free time, I have taken to trying to prove the Collatz conjecture.
People much smarter and more educated than me have failed at this quest, so I will nearly certainly fail at it, but that's not really the point in my mind. Even if I'm not the one to actually prove it, I can at least try and contribute to the body of work towards proving it. Mathematics is, more than nearly anything else, the result of generations building upon previous generations work. It's never "done", always growing and refining and figuring out new things to look at.
I have a few ideas on how to prove Collatz that I have not seen done anywhere [1], and usually (at least for me) that means it's a bad idea, but it's worth a try.
One of the greatest things about humans is our willingness to have multi-generational projects. I think maybe the coolest thing humans have ever done was eliminate smallpox, and that took hundreds of years.
[1] Which I'm going to keep to myself for now because they're not very fleshed out.
snarf21 · 5h ago
Reminds me of Stewart Brand and the Clock of the Long Now (and other longer time horizon projects they are working on).
Reminds me of a statement he made during a Tim Ferris interview that I think is quite profound for our mental health. ".... being proud is the most reliable source of happiness that I know."
saulpw · 4h ago
Proud of your work, not proud of yourself. The latter is quite a reliable source of unhappiness, I've found.
wwweston · 5h ago
And it’s not only never done, it’s always on the verge of dying off. Like Bill Thurston said, mathematical understanding basically lives in communities of mathematicians, every one of them a cell in the superorganism that is the field. You’re part of the distributed filesystem providing persistence as well as the possibility of new understanding.
A related thing occurs in academia for very niche topics on which only very few people are working. Perhaps nobody for most of the time. A paper might "reply" to another paper from years or decades ago, and receive itself a reply only years later, but from a different author.
The cool thing is that you can easily become the current world leading expert on such a niche topic, because there aren't that many papers. So it's easy to know every single one of them, and the few experts are spread out in time rather than space.
It's like a web forum thread on a very obscure question, where only every few years someone contributes a new comment, likely never to be read by most of the previous authors, but read by all that come later.
pavel_lishin · 5h ago
> A related thing occurs in academia for very niche topics on which only very few people are working. Perhaps nobody for most of the time. A paper might "reply" to another paper from years or decades ago, and receive itself a reply only years later, but from a different author.
Reminds me of certain parts of "Anathem".
Davidzheng · 2h ago
I do want to say often math papers have gaps, purely explained parts and sometimes mistakes which can make it quite hard to understand a topic of literally no one else still remembers it though. However the overall advancement of math sometimes helps in this regard
aaronbrethorst · 6h ago
The 2nd Ave Subway in Manhattan, with
preparatory construction beginning in
1942. First phase opened in 2017.
Although the outcome should be celebrated, the slowness and the added costs that brings certainly should not be.
While every project is unique, it is not
immediately clear why digging a subway
on the Upper East Side is twenty times
more expensive than in Seoul or ten
times more expensive than in Paris.
It's just so sad having a nation where disbelief & being against things is so the spirit.
persolb · 4h ago
Alon Levy being brought up on this topic always tweaks my “but somebody is wrong in the internet.” I’ve been on several of the projects he talks about. He’s right about the macro numbers and the general vibe, but often wrong when he starts talking about he details.
The main issues are, in general:
1) increased regulation, which includes internal self-regulation. Lots of rules that are preventing potential minor problems, but have a lot of overhead to follow.
2) large projects are treated like a Christmas Tree. Everybody expects their vaguely adjacent hobby horse to be addressed by the project… so scope keeps growing. There is ALWAYS something you can point to that has a good cost/benefit; and always addressing these ensures that the project never actually finishes.
3) lack of decision making. There is a general analysis paralysis and fear of making the wrong call. It’s often cheaper to just move ahead and risk rework. By not moving ahead, change orders are being incurred anyway.
As much as a hate saying it, the best thing for any large project in these orgs is being run by a semi-dictator who has enough political capital internal to the org, and who strongly objects to anything outside of scope.
aaronbrethorst · 5h ago
I was really disappointed when David Roberts stopped writing due to persistent hand pain, but the podcast series he's turned Volts into as a result has been eye opening for me. I haven't listened to this episode yet. thanks for highlighting it!
AceJohnny2 · 1h ago
> It's just so sad having a nation where disbelief & being against things is so the spirit.
Yeah, being French sucks.
... what?
wwweston · 5h ago
The “it is not immediately clear” part should be taken to heart a lot more than it is. Right now I’d bet you could elect Ezra Klein president and he would be as unable to improve things as most, and he probably has a somewhat clearer picture of the factors than your average internet commentator.
Railing against optimizing for caution in a vague sense really isn’t articulating specific dynamics however well it leans into the shallow strawmanification of “regulation” that doesn’t merely dominate lay discourse but has essentially ascended into conceptual godhood without having paid real dues in sacrifice or insight.
There is no respectable theory of why that has even begun to grasp the problem.
aaronbrethorst · 4h ago
I recommend checking out the Vital City NYC link i shared. It articulates some of the “specific dynamics” you’re thoughtfully, if turgidly requesting.
wwweston · 1h ago
no more turgid than the much of the boner for building boosterism, just more notes, which may not be a bad thing if some of the scope of consideration could stand to be inflated.
before I check vital city, should I anticipate that they go beyond articulating “here’s a series of public institutions that took a long time to do things“ and perhaps even into “here’s our theory of the incentives and other motivations that underlie the sociology of this behavior”? or mostly the former?
aaronbrethorst · 34m ago
Put down the thesaurus, my dude. And yes.
twojacobtwo · 4h ago
Thank you for using "turgidly" as such. You've given me a new appreciation for the term.
dfabulich · 4h ago
Here's another good example of a series of slow experiments: the cosmic distance ladder.
You can compute the distance to the moon if you know the radius of the earth by looking at how long lunar eclipses take, data gathered over years of observations.
Eratosthenes computed the radius of the earth by clever trigonometry in ancient times, and Aristarchus computed that a 3.5-hour lunar eclipse indicates that the moon is ~61 earth radii away.
Once you have the distance to the moon, you can compute the size of the moon by measuring how long it takes the moon to rise. It takes about two minutes, and so the radius of the moon is about 0.0002 of the distance to the moon.
By cosmic coincidence, the sun and the moon appear to be approximately the same size in the sky, so the ratio of radius/distance is approximately the same for the sun and the moon. If you measure phases of the moon, you'll find that half moon is not exactly half the time between the full moon and new moon. Half moon occurs not when the moon and the sun make a right angle with the earth, but when the earth and the sun make a right angle with the moon.
You can use trigonometry to measure the difference between the half-time point between new/full moon, and the actual half moon, giving you an angle θ. The distance to the sun is equal to the distance to the moon divided by sin(θ).
To get θ exactly right, you need a very precise clock, which the Greeks didn't have. It turns out to be about half an hour. Aristarchus guessed 6 hours, which was off by an order of magnitude, but showed an important point: that the sun was much larger than the earth, which was the first indication that the earth revolved around the sun. (Aristarchus' peers mostly didn't believe him, not simply out of prejudice, but because the constellations don't seem to distort over the course of a year; they were, as we now know, greatly underestimating the distance to nearby stars.)
Next, you can compute the shape of the orbits of the planets, by observing which constellations the planets fall inside on which dates over the course of centuries. Kepler used this data first to show that the planetary orbits were elliptical, and to show the relative size of each orbit, but with only approximate measures of the distance to the sun (like the θ measurement above) there's not enough precision to compute exact distances between planets.
So, scientists observed the duration of the transit of Venus across the sun from near the north pole and the south pole, relied on their knowledge of the diameter of the earth, and used parallax to compute the distance to Venus, and thereby got an extremely precise measurement of the earth's distance to the sun, the "astronomical unit." It took decades to find the right dates to perform this measurement.
The cosmic distance ladder goes on, measuring the speed of light (without radar) based on our distance to the sun and the orbit of Jupiter's moon Io, using radar to measure astronomical distances based on the speed of light, measuring brightness and color of nearby stars to get their distance, measuring the expected brightness of variable stars in nearby galaxies to get their distance, which provided the data to discover redshift (Hubble's law), measuring the distance to far away galaxies (and thereby showing that the universe is expanding).
AceJohnny2 · 1h ago
Beat me to it. Indeed, from that video I learned that astronomy work requires large and/or longitudinal datasets.
I loved the tidbit that Galileo had a spat with Tycho Brahe because Brahe wouldn't share his data, so Galileo stole it (?)
wwarner · 2h ago
solid! thank you!
alnwlsn · 6h ago
A friend of mine once wrote a dictionary[1]. It has all the (normal) one syllable words in English, defined using only other one syllable words. He decided to work on it by focusing on one letter per year, so A was in 1991, B was 1992, and the book was finished in 2017, 26 years later.
It's not even a very long book - only a few hundred pages - but I'm sure if I tried to do the same thing all at once, I'd probably have lost interest around B or C, so I suppose it was a worthwhile strategy.
[1] It's not online anywhere as far as I know, sorry.
autoexec · 5h ago
I question how well many of the words that come to mind could be defined using only other one syllable words, but it sounds like a fun project.
mateo411 · 4h ago
I bet your friend is good at Scrabble.
thom · 3h ago
Hopefully their interest expands beyond single syllable words, otherwise the highest scores according to a cursory search are 'zizzed' (34) and 'jazzed' (32) which are probably slightly below the average for an elite player.
yunwal · 49m ago
Zizzed and jazzed if spelled in scrabble would be worth less than 32, since only one of the zs would be worth 10 points, the rest being blank tiles which are worth zero.
Of course most good players will create more than 1 word per turn, and will lay down over multiplier tiles.
You can probably do fairly well with just single syllable words, although at a certain level not being able to get a lay down bonus will prevent you from winning.
saltcured · 1h ago
yeah, "quizzed" (35) is the highest I found
rangestransform · 4h ago
The SAS is a joke, putting its name on the same list as actually impressive feats like the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem insults everything else on the list. It's the most expensive subway line worldwide per mile, ever, despite the existence of technology that made tunnelling easier. Inflation adjusted, it costs more per mile than hand-digging one of the PATH tubes with 1900s technology [1]. Its cost and duration are almost entirely due to politics and not technical and logistical challenges, including the MTA political fiefdom fighting the Park Board political fiefdom, make-work-program labour spending, staff paid to have their thumbs up their asses in the tunnels [2], deep-bore tunneling instead of cut-and-cover to avoid political fighting, and MTA departments wanting their miniature fiefdom dug into the ground at each station [3]. The SAS is a project that should bring great shame to everyone in charge and everyone who stood around in the tunnels getting paid to do nothing.
I dunno. I think we should separate out the stuff that fundamentally has to take a long time, like the pitch experiment, from stuff like Notre Dame, which just took a long time because they lacked the resources to do it all at once. Like OK, it takes a long time to build a big church because you need to find all the right rocks or whatever. But the pitch, that’s the universe taking a long time to tell us something.
(I’m being flip for comedy/emphasis sake, of course Notre Dame is pretty impressive too).
tgv · 5h ago
When they started building cathedrals they knew they weren't going to see it finished. They did it anyway. That's the point.
pavel_lishin · 5h ago
As I recall, Gaudi wasn't even finished with the design when the construction started. He kept working at it until his death.
WJW · 5h ago
I think it is part of the point for a cathedral to take several generations. If you can point to a building and say "that took 5 years to build and I was there for all of it!", then that's great, but the building is in some way "smaller" than you. If you can point to a partially constructed building and say "my grandfather worked on it, my father worked on it, I'm working on it and my children will work on it too", that's a building that is "larger" than any one person.
Taking a century or more to construct anything makes that thing larger than life. There's a certain sublime quality in such efforts, whether they're explicitly dedicated to a god/pantheon but also if they are "just" earthly like the White House (technically took 178 years to construct from start to finish).
8n4vidtmkvmk · 1h ago
There's certainly something interesting about taking multiple generations, but it also feels kinda wrong to attribute greater meaning to something because you dragged it out or intentionally scoped the project too big.
Maybe if the project served a greater purpose and couldn't possibly be built in a shorter time, then it would mean more. But a cathedral? What's wrong with a modest church or two?
peterkos · 6h ago
I'm imagining a spectrum between "has to be slow" and "needlessly slow", with a middle slider for that one razor where things take as much time as you give them.
Intentionality is a big theme in math research (so i've heard), where solving "useful" problems isn't the ideal goal. The goal is to solve interesting problems, which might seem useless, but along the way achieve results with much wider implications that would have been impossible to discover directly. Or, how inventions like toothpaste came from space travel research.
(rhetorically) Does an indirect result "justify" a longer, slower project? Is speed an inherent property of the problem, or is it only knowable once it's complete? Or both, in the cases of misused funds?
Bukhmanizer · 6h ago
This reminded me of an old comic or meme about people’s expectations about science that went like:
Protester: What do we want??
Crowd: High quality, double blinded, N of 100000, 20 year longitudinal, preregistered studies!!
Protester: When do we want it??
Crowd: Now!!!
dang · 4h ago
Related by content (OP says "This page is a riff on Patrick Collison's list of /fast projects"):
The Sagrada Familia has been criticized as a symbol of bureaucratic inertia, some critics insinuating that the delays are deliberate for financial interests.
saagarjha · 6h ago
Kind of amusing to have this at the top of the front page considering “Fast” was there yesterday
One thing I would say -- the Sagrada Familia definitely didn't have to take the incredible time it has. Maybe not a good example of something that could only be done over the long term. Gaudi didn't prioritize it, and a civil war ruined it.
It is, however, an example of something beautiful that did take a long period of time.
brudgers · 6h ago
The Art of Computer Programming has been a work in progress since 1962.
That’s longer than some of the list items.
cubefox · 5h ago
Thanks. I was going to ask about long book (or film etc) projects like that. Some dictionaries and encyclopedias took decades to finish. The "Deutsches Wörterbuch" by the Brothers Grimm was started in 1838 and it got finished only in 1961, long after their death.
brudgers · 4h ago
Unlike most of the list items or a dictionary, Knuth’s work is an ongoing personal creative process rather than an independent mechanism or a collection of data.
rglover · 6h ago
Kudos to the OP for writing this.
That PC post always irked me. Not because it showed positive examples of going fast but because it felt slightly demeaning to teams/projects that move slowly on purpose, with intent.
MontyCarloHall · 6h ago
I disagree. The PC post never demeans projects that purposefully move slowly with intent, but rather criticizes boondoggles that move slowly due to utter incompetence. The only pejorative text in the PC post is this:
>San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. It opened in 2022, yielding a project duration of around 7,600 days. “The project has been delayed due to an increase of wet weather since the project started,” said Paul Rose, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson. The project cost $346 million, i.e. $110,000 per meter. The Alaska Highway, mentioned above, constructed across remote tundra, cost $793 per meter in 2019 dollars.
cma · 5h ago
At least 30 deaths in the construction of the Alaska highway and obviously much lower eminent domain costs for remote tundra vs downtown SF after the second tech boom.
I personally find these examples underwhelming. Most of them are processes that require time, like the pitch drop experiment.
I suspect that the things in our lives that truly have value and take a long time aren’t easy to identify as projects. No one person starts it with a clear idea of where it will end. Investment in future capabilities. Knowledge gathering without clear application or business model. Strengthening institutions and traditions of human rights to ensure that no one group can arrest history.
Timwi · 3h ago
Depending on how you draw the line, it could be argued that science — the project of uncovering the workings of the universe — is the longest-running of all. Although the word “science” isn't that old and is generally associated with the Age of Enlightenment, the desire to understand the world goes as far back as humans can think.
MontyCarloHall · 6h ago
>A fun question: of these projects, which required a long time, and which could have been greatly accelerated?
Pretty much everything on the list is a research study of a long-term process that is inherently impossible to accelerate.
From the list, only the Second Avenue Subway and the Sagrada Familia unambiguously qualify as projects that could be greatly accelerated. The SAS was not under active construction for the vast majority of the time between 1942 and 2017 — actual construction only happened for a couple years in the early 70s, then another couple years in the late 80s, and finally from 2011-2017. The fits and starts were due to a combination of bureaucratic red tape, economic woes, and gross incompetence. The Sagrada Familia has also seen only intermittent construction over the last century, primarily because of lack of funding.
smartmic · 6h ago
This goes hand in hand with the Lindy effect[0]. Some of the examples given in the article are a testament to it.
I am fairly certain there will be almost as many Ford model Ts running around in 2108 than are running now, but within 30 or 40 years I doubt there will be many cybertrucks that do.
treetalker · 5h ago
I'd forecast that most of the remaining ones would end up making their way to Southern Florida but they're already there.
hermitcrab · 6h ago
Most democracies have elections every 4 or 5 years. That is good, in that we can get rid of underperforming politicians and parties. But it is bad, in that there isn't a lot of incentive for politicians and parties to plan over a longer timescale than 4 or 5 years.
China has the opposite problem. It can plan and finance long term projects. But there is little prospect of peacefully changing the leadership.
vik0 · 4h ago
Long-term planning on a colossal scale (like nation-state-level) (or even on a not-so-colossal scale - think of how many plans YOU have made and how they turned out) is pointless because of black swans
Sure, having a general idea of where you want things to go is fine, and everyone already does that; but when a government starts thinking that they should set a concrete goal X and they should do Y to achieve it, it's just akin to trying to predict the future, and we all know how well that always works out, because theyre under the faulty premise of thinkin Y will be constant forever, or that even the goal itself (X) should remain constant in a world that is anything but constant
So, this is a terrible argument for not having elections, or bigger election cycles. I'm sure someone could potentially put forward a better argument, but this one is not it
dfex · 2h ago
I think the way that democratic governments can achieve these long-term plans is by establishing (or using existing) entities to complete these goals on their behalf.
An example that comes to mind is the Apollo program: JFK announced a national goal to land a man on the moon in 1961 and this was finally achieved in 1969 - two presidencies (Johnson, Nixon) and one change of party (Dem->Rep) later - with NASA being that independent responsible entity.
hermitcrab · 4h ago
"Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." (variously attributed)
Definitely not advocating for "not having elections, or bigger election cycles" BTW.
I'm reminded of the quote: “Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.”
ChrisMarshallNY · 3h ago
I think that pretty much everything we work on (as tecchies) is the endpoint of a very long timeline.
Every advancement stands on the shoulders of those that came before. Maybe we can run an LLM, because some Roman architect figured out how to make an aqueduct stay up in a seismically-active area.
If you watch James Burke's Connections[0], you get a feel for it (I think some of them are a bit of a stretch, but I really enjoyed it).
Long-term projects make me strangely proud to be a human (for all of our faults and foibles). "A society grows great when the old plant trees in whose shade they will never sit."
wwarner · 4h ago
Regarding LIGO, if anyone finds the sensitivity of LIGO as shocking as I do, here's a 2002 lecture from Kip Thorne explaining how it's achieved.
This video is one of about 60 recorded in a year long series of lectures that were delivered at Caltech early on in the project. They are archived by Pau Amaro Seoane at this address https://astro-gr.org/online-course-gravitational-waves/
MinimalAction · 5h ago
As an academic, I fairly resonate with this message. Also notice that most examples he noticed are from academia/science endeavors. I see academia as probably the only place where slow projects are expected and even encouraged; think of PhD students working on basic science problems, often supported for 5-7 years at end (of course close to minimum wage).
This is not to hide that all slow undertakings are good or anything. Often because of inefficient executions or bureaucratic hurdles, academic suffers. But, I am trying to highlight the observation that how a slow and steady progress is the typical modus operandi for an academic lab/group. A famous saying comes to mind: Rome isn't built in a day.
Some are projects that have a changing variable over a long period of time (Framingham Heart Study, E. coli long-term evolution experiment) or strive to exist a long time (Clock of the Long Now). I would argue that these projects -- their process, data collection methods, and goals -- may have been developed quickly, in a short amount of time. Their longevity is proof that the original project was well established. But the same could be said of the invention of the wheel, shoe, sliced bread, etc
I think in the western world, Art, and music are both long term projects. So much so that
we seem to have "reinvented" music at least twice. Once after the Greeks into classical western music, then again when jazz went into tonal harmony.
If we look beyond problems that humans solve, well, evolution of diverse and specialized species seems to require time (and be undone by humans going fast)
. My work aims to help create systems which support creativity and discovery. Currently, my main projects are working on metascience, programmable matter, and tools for thought. In the past I've worked on quantum computing, open science, and artificial intelligence, and there's a lot of crossover with my current interests. Bio (2020).
ChrisMarshallNY · 4h ago
> I suspect many key open source systems (Linux, Wikipedia) will still be around in 100 years.
Bet FORTRAN will still be around. Maybe PHP, as well. Def C.
pklausler · 2h ago
Fortran has multiple incompatible implementations and a standard that's supported completely by none of them, and that hasn't maintained 100% forward compatibility across revisions. It'll still be around in the sense that English will be -- there will be a thing by that name -- but it's impossible to say now exactly what it will be, or to write Fortran now that will still work identically without change for the next century. I think C'89 uniprocessor code would stand a better chance.
arkmm · 2h ago
Missing the California high-speed rail on their list of examples.
morkalork · 43m ago
There is/was an experiment to domesticate foxes that began in the early 1950s; something that can only be done slowly generation after generation.
mrbananagrabber · 6h ago
I love the story of the Framingham Heart Study, it's one I've referenced a lot when I talk to people and organizations about how they might not have the data they need and how important data collection is.
ananddtyagi · 6h ago
Nice post! This rhymes with the ideas Cal Newport presents in Slow Productivity.
fuzztester · 6h ago
Next should be a series of posts on the Slow movement.
Post them slowly, i.e. not all on the same day. We need time to read them - slowly.
urvader · 3h ago
The bitcoin block chain should be on this list
phtrivier · 6h ago
I guess tomorow's front page top article will be called "Steady" ?
qcnguy · 6h ago
Cool list, but to be a party pooper:
> Will Unix Time or TCP/IP ever be replaced? Modified: sure.
UNIX time is already being replaced with a 64 bit value instead of signed 32 bit. TCP/IP has already been replaced, that's QUIC over IPv6 which is what my computer uses every time it connects to Google.
I mean you can claim IPv6 is still "IP" because it shares the same first two letters, but IPv6 is different enough to be easily considered a different protocol.
mzajc · 5h ago
From TFA:
> Modified: sure.
Fundamentally, IPv6 and 64 bit UNIX time are modifications of their predecessors. QUIC not so much, but it's still a long way from replacing TCP on the web, let alone the internet.
Timwi · 3h ago
But then you could argue that UNIX time is just a modification of other forms of date/time reckoning. It becomes a semantic debate over what counts as a separate thing, and that's not a fantastically interesting question anymore.
mikestorrent · 5h ago
> TCP/IP has already been replaced
Only in terms of the possible, not in terms of the real.
nottorp · 5h ago
> QUIC over IPv6 which is what my computer uses every time it connects to Google.
You don't have to adopt everything Google tells you to adopt, you know...
russellbeattie · 3h ago
The article conflates a few different "slow" projects, rather than the premise which is efforts that required decades to come to fruition.
He mentions projects started long ago but are still ongoing, like the Sagrada Familia. Then there's innovations from long ago which are still being used, like Linux. Also, he includes ideas which took decades to finally be implemented, like LIGO.
In my opinion, none of these examples are particularly good at demonstrating, "What problems can human beings only solve over a very long period of time?", except for Fermat's Last Theorem.
All technology builds on that which came before, step by step. You can trace Unicode directly back to Morse Code, via various steps like ASCII, Telex, Baudot Code, etc. But the original goal of Morse wasn't to display emojis.
I'd say General Relativity might be a good example, starting with Newton's efforts to quantify the forces of the real world, ending with Einstein's explanation of spacetime. But again, it's not as clear of a problem as Fermat's Last Theorem which was a single problem that required centuries to solve.
AI may be a good example as well, starting with the advent of the digital computer. The very first scientists who worked with them like von Neumann immediately looked forward to the day of an electronic brain. It's taken nearly a century so far and is still underway.
baby · 5h ago
How to game HN: always write rebuttals
hnthrow90348765 · 6h ago
Figuring out a good reason to colonize the solar system
An optimal manufacturing and logistics network for the solar system
Inventing replicators and dispensing with capitalism
Timwi · 3h ago
Replicators won't dispense with capitalism, at least not automatically. Replicators need tremendous energy which can be privately controlled, plus capitalism can maintain minority control over a technology like this via trade secrets etc. and keep selling the technology for high prices. If you're thinking that you can just use a replicator to make more replicators, that's kinda like asking a 3D printer to 3D print another 3D printer, or asking an LLM to just program another LLM.
No, we need to dispense with capitalism ourselves instead of hoping for a magical technology to do it for us.
The central beam was beginning to fail and the Oxford administration knew they needed to replace it. When they went around for quotes, no one could replace the beam because it was 100 ft in length and sourced from an old growth tree. Such logs were simply unavailable to buy. To solve the issue, the staff begin to look at major renovations to the building's architecture.
Until the Oxford groundskeeper heard about the problem. "We have a replacement beam," he said.
The groundskeeper took the curious admins to the edge of the grounds. There stood two old growth trees, over 150 feet tall.
"But these must be over 200 years old! When were they planted?" the admins asked.
"The day they replaced the previous beam."
> In 1859, the JCR told the SCR that the roof in Hall needed repairing, which was true.
> In 1862, the senior fellow was visiting College estates on `progress', i.e., an annual review of College property, which goes on to this day (performed by the Warden). Visiting forests in Akeley and Great Horwood, Buckinghamshire (forests which the College had owned since 1441), he had the largest oaks cut down and used to make new beams for the ceiling.
> It is not the case that these oaks were kept for the express purpose of replacing the Hall ceiling. It is standard woodland management to grow stands of mixed broadleaf trees e.g., oaks, interplanted with hazel and ash. The hazel and ash are coppiced approximately every 20-25 years to yield poles. The oaks, however, are left to grow on and eventally, after 150 years or more, they yield large pieces for major construction work such as beams, knees etc.
> The oaks, however, are left to grow on and eventally, after 150 years or more, they yield large pieces for major construction work such as beams, knees etc.
Splitting hairs a bit. In fact what they did was to maintain a more general solution, maintaining a supply of wood over the long term of 400 years.
The trend is up, but they're in a local minimum :D
Old growth trees are trees or forests that are centuries old and not recently cultures.
It's one step short of the German compound noun, and we make it easier to find the fragments...
There is so much assumed in our use of language that it can be largely unintelligible without detailed historical context. The first time I heard the term "in the car park" I chuckled at the thought of an amusement park for cars... "parking lot" only came a few thoughts later. We drive on parkways. We play in the park. We park in the lot. Lots are reading this sentence twice. Give this paragraph to a school-kid in just 100 years and it will seem like gibberish. Word.
People much smarter and more educated than me have failed at this quest, so I will nearly certainly fail at it, but that's not really the point in my mind. Even if I'm not the one to actually prove it, I can at least try and contribute to the body of work towards proving it. Mathematics is, more than nearly anything else, the result of generations building upon previous generations work. It's never "done", always growing and refining and figuring out new things to look at.
I have a few ideas on how to prove Collatz that I have not seen done anywhere [1], and usually (at least for me) that means it's a bad idea, but it's worth a try.
One of the greatest things about humans is our willingness to have multi-generational projects. I think maybe the coolest thing humans have ever done was eliminate smallpox, and that took hundreds of years.
[1] Which I'm going to keep to myself for now because they're not very fleshed out.
Reminds me of a statement he made during a Tim Ferris interview that I think is quite profound for our mental health. ".... being proud is the most reliable source of happiness that I know."
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/43690/whats-a-mathematici...
Does this program halt?
(// being integer division, equivalently a binary shift one to the right: >> 1)https://www.sligocki.com/2024/07/06/bb-6-2-is-hard.html
https://bbchallenge.org/antihydra
I should see if I can model this in Isabelle or something and see what happens.
The cool thing is that you can easily become the current world leading expert on such a niche topic, because there aren't that many papers. So it's easy to know every single one of them, and the few experts are spread out in time rather than space.
It's like a web forum thread on a very obscure question, where only every few years someone contributes a new comment, likely never to be read by most of the previous authors, but read by all that come later.
Reminds me of certain parts of "Anathem".
here's a even more damning look: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/why-it-costs-4-billion...
edit: I've been on a tirade about this subject this week. https://www.brethorsting.com/blog/2025/07/state-capacity-and...
It's just so sad having a nation where disbelief & being against things is so the spirit.
The main issues are, in general: 1) increased regulation, which includes internal self-regulation. Lots of rules that are preventing potential minor problems, but have a lot of overhead to follow. 2) large projects are treated like a Christmas Tree. Everybody expects their vaguely adjacent hobby horse to be addressed by the project… so scope keeps growing. There is ALWAYS something you can point to that has a good cost/benefit; and always addressing these ensures that the project never actually finishes. 3) lack of decision making. There is a general analysis paralysis and fear of making the wrong call. It’s often cheaper to just move ahead and risk rework. By not moving ahead, change orders are being incurred anyway.
As much as a hate saying it, the best thing for any large project in these orgs is being run by a semi-dictator who has enough political capital internal to the org, and who strongly objects to anything outside of scope.
Yeah, being French sucks.
... what?
Railing against optimizing for caution in a vague sense really isn’t articulating specific dynamics however well it leans into the shallow strawmanification of “regulation” that doesn’t merely dominate lay discourse but has essentially ascended into conceptual godhood without having paid real dues in sacrifice or insight.
There is no respectable theory of why that has even begun to grasp the problem.
before I check vital city, should I anticipate that they go beyond articulating “here’s a series of public institutions that took a long time to do things“ and perhaps even into “here’s our theory of the incentives and other motivations that underlie the sociology of this behavior”? or mostly the former?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdOXS_9_P4U https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_distance_ladder
You can compute the distance to the moon if you know the radius of the earth by looking at how long lunar eclipses take, data gathered over years of observations.
Eratosthenes computed the radius of the earth by clever trigonometry in ancient times, and Aristarchus computed that a 3.5-hour lunar eclipse indicates that the moon is ~61 earth radii away.
Once you have the distance to the moon, you can compute the size of the moon by measuring how long it takes the moon to rise. It takes about two minutes, and so the radius of the moon is about 0.0002 of the distance to the moon.
By cosmic coincidence, the sun and the moon appear to be approximately the same size in the sky, so the ratio of radius/distance is approximately the same for the sun and the moon. If you measure phases of the moon, you'll find that half moon is not exactly half the time between the full moon and new moon. Half moon occurs not when the moon and the sun make a right angle with the earth, but when the earth and the sun make a right angle with the moon.
You can use trigonometry to measure the difference between the half-time point between new/full moon, and the actual half moon, giving you an angle θ. The distance to the sun is equal to the distance to the moon divided by sin(θ).
To get θ exactly right, you need a very precise clock, which the Greeks didn't have. It turns out to be about half an hour. Aristarchus guessed 6 hours, which was off by an order of magnitude, but showed an important point: that the sun was much larger than the earth, which was the first indication that the earth revolved around the sun. (Aristarchus' peers mostly didn't believe him, not simply out of prejudice, but because the constellations don't seem to distort over the course of a year; they were, as we now know, greatly underestimating the distance to nearby stars.)
Next, you can compute the shape of the orbits of the planets, by observing which constellations the planets fall inside on which dates over the course of centuries. Kepler used this data first to show that the planetary orbits were elliptical, and to show the relative size of each orbit, but with only approximate measures of the distance to the sun (like the θ measurement above) there's not enough precision to compute exact distances between planets.
So, scientists observed the duration of the transit of Venus across the sun from near the north pole and the south pole, relied on their knowledge of the diameter of the earth, and used parallax to compute the distance to Venus, and thereby got an extremely precise measurement of the earth's distance to the sun, the "astronomical unit." It took decades to find the right dates to perform this measurement.
The cosmic distance ladder goes on, measuring the speed of light (without radar) based on our distance to the sun and the orbit of Jupiter's moon Io, using radar to measure astronomical distances based on the speed of light, measuring brightness and color of nearby stars to get their distance, measuring the expected brightness of variable stars in nearby galaxies to get their distance, which provided the data to discover redshift (Hubble's law), measuring the distance to far away galaxies (and thereby showing that the universe is expanding).
I loved the tidbit that Galileo had a spat with Tycho Brahe because Brahe wouldn't share his data, so Galileo stole it (?)
It's not even a very long book - only a few hundred pages - but I'm sure if I tried to do the same thing all at once, I'd probably have lost interest around B or C, so I suppose it was a worthwhile strategy.
[1] It's not online anywhere as far as I know, sorry.
Of course most good players will create more than 1 word per turn, and will lay down over multiplier tiles.
You can probably do fairly well with just single syllable words, although at a certain level not being able to get a lay down bonus will prevent you from winning.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uptown_Hudson_Tubes (tunnel happens to be about a mile and it cost 21 million 1905 dollars)
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
[3] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/12/09/the-mta-sticks...
(I’m being flip for comedy/emphasis sake, of course Notre Dame is pretty impressive too).
Taking a century or more to construct anything makes that thing larger than life. There's a certain sublime quality in such efforts, whether they're explicitly dedicated to a god/pantheon but also if they are "just" earthly like the White House (technically took 178 years to construct from start to finish).
Maybe if the project served a greater purpose and couldn't possibly be built in a shorter time, then it would mean more. But a cathedral? What's wrong with a modest church or two?
Intentionality is a big theme in math research (so i've heard), where solving "useful" problems isn't the ideal goal. The goal is to solve interesting problems, which might seem useless, but along the way achieve results with much wider implications that would have been impossible to discover directly. Or, how inventions like toothpaste came from space travel research.
(rhetorically) Does an indirect result "justify" a longer, slower project? Is speed an inherent property of the problem, or is it only knowable once it's complete? Or both, in the cases of misused funds?
Protester: What do we want??
Crowd: High quality, double blinded, N of 100000, 20 year longitudinal, preregistered studies!!
Protester: When do we want it??
Crowd: Now!!!
Fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36605912 - July 2023 (298 comments)
Fast (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30872279 - March 2022 (97 comments)
Fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848860 - Dec 2019 (291 comments)
Fast · Patrick Collison - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21355237 - Oct 2019 (5 comments)
--
Also related, if only by title, this from yesterday:
Fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 - July 2025 (418 comments)
https://patrickcollison.com/fast (which has 300 comments from 2019 on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848860 )
which is different than yesterday's link to https://www.catherinejue.com/fast (426 comments as of now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 )
Medium.
Posted on Medium, ofc.
One thing I would say -- the Sagrada Familia definitely didn't have to take the incredible time it has. Maybe not a good example of something that could only be done over the long term. Gaudi didn't prioritize it, and a civil war ruined it.
It is, however, an example of something beautiful that did take a long period of time.
That’s longer than some of the list items.
That PC post always irked me. Not because it showed positive examples of going fast but because it felt slightly demeaning to teams/projects that move slowly on purpose, with intent.
>San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. It opened in 2022, yielding a project duration of around 7,600 days. “The project has been delayed due to an increase of wet weather since the project started,” said Paul Rose, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson. The project cost $346 million, i.e. $110,000 per meter. The Alaska Highway, mentioned above, constructed across remote tundra, cost $793 per meter in 2019 dollars.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/alaska-...
I suspect that the things in our lives that truly have value and take a long time aren’t easy to identify as projects. No one person starts it with a clear idea of where it will end. Investment in future capabilities. Knowledge gathering without clear application or business model. Strengthening institutions and traditions of human rights to ensure that no one group can arrest history.
Pretty much everything on the list is a research study of a long-term process that is inherently impossible to accelerate.
From the list, only the Second Avenue Subway and the Sagrada Familia unambiguously qualify as projects that could be greatly accelerated. The SAS was not under active construction for the vast majority of the time between 1942 and 2017 — actual construction only happened for a couple years in the early 70s, then another couple years in the late 80s, and finally from 2011-2017. The fits and starts were due to a combination of bureaucratic red tape, economic woes, and gross incompetence. The Sagrada Familia has also seen only intermittent construction over the last century, primarily because of lack of funding.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
China has the opposite problem. It can plan and finance long term projects. But there is little prospect of peacefully changing the leadership.
Sure, having a general idea of where you want things to go is fine, and everyone already does that; but when a government starts thinking that they should set a concrete goal X and they should do Y to achieve it, it's just akin to trying to predict the future, and we all know how well that always works out, because theyre under the faulty premise of thinkin Y will be constant forever, or that even the goal itself (X) should remain constant in a world that is anything but constant
So, this is a terrible argument for not having elections, or bigger election cycles. I'm sure someone could potentially put forward a better argument, but this one is not it
An example that comes to mind is the Apollo program: JFK announced a national goal to land a man on the moon in 1961 and this was finally achieved in 1969 - two presidencies (Johnson, Nixon) and one change of party (Dem->Rep) later - with NASA being that independent responsible entity.
Definitely not advocating for "not having elections, or bigger election cycles" BTW.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment
Every advancement stands on the shoulders of those that came before. Maybe we can run an LLM, because some Roman architect figured out how to make an aqueduct stay up in a seismically-active area.
If you watch James Burke's Connections[0], you get a feel for it (I think some of them are a bit of a stretch, but I really enjoyed it).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGdbI24FvXQ&t=495s
This video is one of about 60 recorded in a year long series of lectures that were delivered at Caltech early on in the project. They are archived by Pau Amaro Seoane at this address https://astro-gr.org/online-course-gravitational-waves/
This is not to hide that all slow undertakings are good or anything. Often because of inefficient executions or bureaucratic hurdles, academic suffers. But, I am trying to highlight the observation that how a slow and steady progress is the typical modus operandi for an academic lab/group. A famous saying comes to mind: Rome isn't built in a day.
https://jsomers.net/blog/speed-matters
I imagine it will go on for much longer, though!
At least parts of it are "scientific" and "directed," see the Lydian Chromatic concept for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydian_Chromatic_Concept_of_To...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Horse_Memorial
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program (the twin spacecraft that have since left the heliopause)
> This page is a riff on Patrick Collison's list of /fast projects.
Maybe as a HN post, but the blog is in response to https://patrickcollison.com/fast
Fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967 - July 2025 (417 comments)
Bet FORTRAN will still be around. Maybe PHP, as well. Def C.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_movement_(culture)
Post them slowly, i.e. not all on the same day. We need time to read them - slowly.
> Will Unix Time or TCP/IP ever be replaced? Modified: sure.
UNIX time is already being replaced with a 64 bit value instead of signed 32 bit. TCP/IP has already been replaced, that's QUIC over IPv6 which is what my computer uses every time it connects to Google.
I mean you can claim IPv6 is still "IP" because it shares the same first two letters, but IPv6 is different enough to be easily considered a different protocol.
> Modified: sure.
Fundamentally, IPv6 and 64 bit UNIX time are modifications of their predecessors. QUIC not so much, but it's still a long way from replacing TCP on the web, let alone the internet.
Only in terms of the possible, not in terms of the real.
You don't have to adopt everything Google tells you to adopt, you know...
He mentions projects started long ago but are still ongoing, like the Sagrada Familia. Then there's innovations from long ago which are still being used, like Linux. Also, he includes ideas which took decades to finally be implemented, like LIGO.
In my opinion, none of these examples are particularly good at demonstrating, "What problems can human beings only solve over a very long period of time?", except for Fermat's Last Theorem.
All technology builds on that which came before, step by step. You can trace Unicode directly back to Morse Code, via various steps like ASCII, Telex, Baudot Code, etc. But the original goal of Morse wasn't to display emojis.
I'd say General Relativity might be a good example, starting with Newton's efforts to quantify the forces of the real world, ending with Einstein's explanation of spacetime. But again, it's not as clear of a problem as Fermat's Last Theorem which was a single problem that required centuries to solve.
AI may be a good example as well, starting with the advent of the digital computer. The very first scientists who worked with them like von Neumann immediately looked forward to the day of an electronic brain. It's taken nearly a century so far and is still underway.
An optimal manufacturing and logistics network for the solar system
Inventing replicators and dispensing with capitalism
No, we need to dispense with capitalism ourselves instead of hoping for a magical technology to do it for us.