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0 pointsGravityloss6mo ago0 comments

Am reminded by this quote from Ferdinand Porsche:

"The perfect racing car crosses the finish line first and subsequently falls into its component parts."

Games fit this philosophy, compared to many other pieces of software that are expected to be long-lived and receiving a lot of maintenance and changes and evolve.

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WJW6mo ago

The Porsche quote reflects a wider design philosophy that says "Ideally, all components of a system lasts as long as the design life of the entire system and there should be no component that lives significantly longer. If there is such a component, it has been overengineered and thus the system will be more expensive to the end consumer than it needs to be.". It kinda skips over maintenance, but overall most people find it unobjectionable when stated like this.

But plenty of people will find complaints when they try to drive their car beyond its design specs and more or less everything starts failing at once.

creaturemachine6mo ago

Porsche was talking about racing, where the primary focus is reaching the finish line faster an anyone else, and over-engineering can easily get in the way of that goal. Back in the real world, no race team would agree that their cars should disintegrate after one race.

AzN1337c0d3r6mo ago

> Back in the real world, no race team would agree that their cars should disintegrate after one race.

Wasn't F1 teams basically doing this by replacing their engines and transmissions until the rules introduced penalties for component swaps in 2014?

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ortusdux6mo ago

Anyone can build a bridge, but it takes an engineer to barely build a bridge.

mikepurvis6mo ago

Alan Weisman's lovely book World Without Us speculates a bit about this, basically saying that more recently built structures would be the first to collapse because they've all be engineered so close to the line. Meanwhile stuff that already been standing for 100+ years like the Brooklyn Bridge will probably still be there in another 100 years even without any maintenance just on account of how overbuilt it all had to be in an era before finite element analysis.

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The_Fox6mo ago

This is a great quote for the topic, but the quote is normally about a bridge that barely stands.

I'm chuckling at the thought of barely building something. (All in good fun, thank you.)

woliveirajr6mo ago

In my county, a company asked the Mayor if it was possible to improve some bridge because they need to carry 40t and the bridge had a sign telling it would only allow up to 32t. Their proposal was to do the construction and get tax rebates.

After two weeks, the Infrastructure department changed the sign allowing up to 45t.

signalToNose6mo ago

Consumer protection laws prevents businesses following this to it’s extreme. For many businesses the ideal would be to just sell stuff that immediately breaks down as soon as it’s sold. It has the fulfilled its purpose from their point of view

delichon6mo ago

I run sous vide cookers 24*7, and they uniformly break within 90 days or less. But they don't like to admit their smaller duty cycle, so they don't, and keep sending me warranty replacements instead. I keep buying different brands looking for one with a longer life. I'll bet most people do that when their gadgets die, and purposely making products that die as soon as sold isn't often a successful business model.

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doubled1126mo ago

When the design spec seems to be a 3 year long lease I can see why people get bothered.

aleks2246mo ago

There's a quote in the bible that says something similar:

"Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

(John 12:24)

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