Hacking Capitalism: Modeling, Humans, Computers, and Money.

by Kris Nóva

your ability to build efficient systems is how you’ll outperform them.

While an initial working prototype might satisfy the definition of success, it’ll likely be offensively inefficient.

You can then introduce small changes to the system. If you built the system well, it should be easy for you to demonstrate success or failure after each small change. Keeping the success cycle small lets you make dramatic changes over time.

In the same way that a definition of success lets you quickly check whether your system is working, a definition of efficiency can let you quickly check whether your system is as efficient as you need it to be.

Performance budgeting

Definition of Efficiency is a simple way of determining if a system is working as well as it needs to be.

You will need to be efficient in your career, and with your relationships with people.

A good builder should be able to advance both their reputation and their system’s purpose.

As an engineer, you should find excitement and joy in collecting an endless list

Every problem in the tech industry is a vastly underestimated exploitation opportunity with an enormous attack surface!

In the eyes of a tech corporation, architects apply technology to the capital to advance product development.

Architects and builders can use labeling to think about systems and later components. Once someone creates a label, people can understand what it means. You can focus more time on the labeled components than on defining what a component might do.

The easier a system to observe, the easier it is to operate. The easier it is to operate, the higher value the system can generate. Thus, higher revenue.

An ability to easily change the internal state of a system is its operability.

Over time, the markets have shown that having a common interface creates micromarkets that can operate with a product interchangeably.

The takeaway with the Bay Area bridges is that if you want to support elaborate projects such as the beautiful and famous Golden Gate Bridge, you must first start with the simple, economic, and less impressive functional work.

Build the boring bridges first.

Likewise, your projects should follow the same pattern. Whether you’re designing distributed systems, a monolithic software repository, or managing a complex structure of people, you’ll need to add support for commerce first. Supporting commerce can be unattractive, but it’s necessary.

Do the unattractive work first as a gift to your future self and future architects.

Remember, successful projects and platforms grow like cities. Organically. Start simple and enable commerce first and foremost.

Some systems will need to move fast and inspire innovation, such as Tesla. These systems are hungry for profit and their design should reflect this.

How should,design reflect this for Corral?

Building and applying systems lets good builders do more effective work with the same or fewer resources. This, unfortunately, is one of the few ways that you can progress toward the elite in capitalism.

The building process supports small iterative changes. With capitalism, your ability to turn limited resources into efficient machinery can be a compelling tactic.

Your ability to design more efficient systems will come from your experience with observability, measurability, and operability.

So if you can uncover new resources, that can free up time and energy that you can dedicate to accelerating toward the elite.

Breaking lets you introduce resources that wouldn’t otherwise exist. I often look at breaking as a way of rolling the dice for resources.

To break a system, you must first see the system in its many forms.

Breaking can show you where a system will end up. Breaking increases resiliency. The more that you break a system, the more you can repair the system and prevent it from breaking.

Many architects neglect to consider that systems exist in a perpetual state of brokenness.

You can apply breaking’s constructs to the tech industry by observing how the elite respond to breaking. Breaking will expose new resources, new functionality, and new opportunities to you. Where there’s carnage, there’s opportunity.

As systems break down new opportunities present themselves.

For example—and perhaps counterintuitively—forests need to periodically burn to achieve sustainability.

Fuzzing is the act of trying to break a system by providing invalid, unexpected, or overwhelming inputs to the system.

Destruction of Service is rendering a system inoperable by causing the maximum amount of long-lasting damage.

Market Disruption is the process of introducing economic innovation to a market by disrupting the current norms.

Where there’s market disruption, there’s room for growth. Where there’s systems destruction, there’s opportunity to exploit others. Where there’s chaos in an organization, there’s space for influence.

Breaking is a viable way of instilling innovation in a system.

An astonishing amount of groundbreaking change comes about during emergencies

These disasters break social structures and create opportunities.

These reorganizations of human resources can be frustrating to employees because the reorg’s debris can cause unexpected changes in employees' working experiences.

Take careful and detailed notes of newly forming systems. Observe these systems in their raw forms while they come to life. Exploit any vulnerabilities as soon as you detect them.

If your goal is to earn more money, you might structure the chaos toward your expertise.

If your goal is to earn a higher title, you might structure the chaos toward your ability to delegate and influence others.

If your goals are to do as little labor as possible and to preserve your mental health, you may want to take the chance to offlo...

It’s easy to exploit a system at the expense of others. It’s tolerable to exploit a system with no impact to others. It’s skillful to exploit a system and elevate others in the process.

Madness is widespread in the tech industry. Startups repeat the same product ideas, business models, and market strategies over and over while continuing to fail. But from one effort’s debris can come another effort’s foundation.

Remove yourself from the path of destruction in a madness cycle. Position yourself near the path of productivity in a madness cycle.

Trend of maximizing productive path in these books

It is possible to identify voids in the organizational structure and adopt a posture of "gap filling" temporarily.

This can be done much more effectively during the chaos of a breaking cycle, than during the st...

Organizations, companies, and even teams are subject to panicking when things suddenly break. During this panic, rules, behaviors, constraints, and system boundaries are often overlooked.

Breaking a system can offer tremendous value—whether that system may be economic, societal, or technical. And breaking is fundamental to success in capitalism because breaking exposes new opportunities and resources that wouldn’t otherwise be available. Without breaking, you lose vital opportunities to gain a competitive edge.