GoKawiilwhere delays are shown to be counterintuitive.
Leaving the house (and the country) for a week or two during the holiday season is a great time to get out of my stereotypical ways of passing free time (entirely too much YouTube, Lobste.rs, HackerNews and BlueSky) and try something else.
For my recent vacation I have packed some grid paper to make a bitmap font, and two books: the first one was Nachové pustiny: a Czech post-apocalyptic novel to get some inspiration for my “Fallout but in Czech Republic” MMO game, and the other was Thinking in Systems: a book recommended at work (and bought with my work education budget) which was collecting dust in my bookshelf for a good few months now.
I’m happy to announce I managed to get through all three of these goals: I’ve created a bitmap font (though I still have kerning and accents to go through), devoured the post-apo novel (it was okay), and got through the systems book!
Thinking in Systems introduces a framework and a visual language of sources and sinks, stocks and flows, feedback loops and systems that (more often than not) emerge bottom-up from them.
It all roughly corresponds to mathematical models and differential equations, though the book doesn’t go into detail of those and only mentions the actual formulas for its examples in an appendix.
Delays are weird
There was one really cool chapter that IMHO is the highlight of the whole book. It concerns delays.
The running example (see image above) is a car dealership manager shepherding a stock of cars on their parking lot, aiming for it to always be 10x the amount of cars sold. When the customer demand rises, she starts ordering more cars to cover the gap.
Delay-less system
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