Slow

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.

"The day they replaced the previous beam."

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.

    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.

https://marroninstitute.nyu.edu/blog/costly-lessons-from-the...

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...

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).

A few other proposed entries:

- 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 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!!!

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.

>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.

Kind of amusing to have this at the top of the front page considering “Fast” was there yesterday

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.”

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.

The Art of Computer Programming has been a work in progress since 1962.

That’s longer than some of the list items.

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.

This goes hand in hand with the Lindy effect[0]. Some of the examples given in the article are a testament to it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

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.

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...

For open source, SQLite has pledged long term support through 2050: https://www.sqlite.org/lts.html

I imagine it will go on for much longer, though!

I assume this is a response to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736967

How to game HN: always write rebuttals

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)

I guess tomorow's front page top article will be called "Steady" ?

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.

Nice post! This rhymes with the ideas Cal Newport presents in Slow Productivity.

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.

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