A reiterative application of Occam’s Razor to ideas, code and tiddlywiki

Café
#1

Following on from I see dead people, no, shortcuts everywhere idea of Occams Razor is very important to me, not from its argument that;

when faced with multiple explanations for a phenomenon, the simplest one is usually the best

but why this would even be so?

  • One of my ideas is that it helps address the human proclivity to make things unnecessarily difficult.
  • Or the consequences of a harried and pragmatic approach to solution making.

But of course a similar principal in design and making things, especially code, and specifically TiddlyWiki. There seems to be application here to reiterative design.

You see a need, and an approach to address it, you design a solution for that that, demonstrate the solution is possible. As you come to know the issues and the implementation of the solution it tends to be improved further with small iterative changes, such that it eventually becomes fully featured and very useful.

  • However it has now lost its simplicity and elegance

After a little more time, and with the previous solution in mind we often come across a new way to do the old solution in a simpler more elegant way.

  • This new approach often achieves the same complex outcomes of the original solution but with less complexity.

This approach is in keeping with both iterative design approach and set based design. Set based design encourages blackbox solutions, that meet a need and operate in an environment where you can improve the solution as long as it fits in the same blackbox. This reduces dependencies and allows incremental or continuous improvement with a reduced risk of unwanted side effects.

It seems to me a kind or reiterative process

  • Analyse
  • Understand
  • Enhance
  • Synthesise
  • Use
  • Return to the top

It’s like build and collapse into its essence, build again and collapse again, indefinitely.

A case in point is my as yet unpublished “show code solution”. Which has passed through a number of implementations and my most recent is easier to use and more functional in fact its simplicity hides it’s extensibility and utility.

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#2

I think that the new features of tiddlywiki developed by individuals for personal or community contributions can be used, except that there are no 170 million if loops, I can use them as my reference, just kidding, my purpose is to use this feature, and ignore the logic of the code implementation, (for example, adding a timestamp function to a tiddler, there is already an existing solution, its function is simple, even in the code implementation may be a little complicated, but for this simple task the hardware is affordable, and may not be much different from the most complete version in terms of CPU running time(Unless you’re a perfectionist, then I didn’t say it) unless it takes up too much space, I might consider a better solution, or I need my own custom tiddlywiki features that I think about, or I need a templated data structure when taking notes, but I usually consider using software such as emacs, python to help me solve a one-time problem (like batch processing of tiddlers data under the same tag), and html/ CSS technology to solve the bright spot problem of permanent deployment on TiddlyWiki, and finally I will consider using wiki syntax to do the final struggle, I will discuss this problem with my friends on the forum or ask AI assistants such as ChatGPT-4, but ask it about HTML-related feeling that it is still competent, ask it questions about TiddlyWiki (let it help me automatically generate TiddlyWiki custom function code) It is easy to twitch, there is a solution is to deploy a local inference model on the local computer, and let this big model understand and digest all the technologies in the forumThis kind of accuracy is acceptable, but sadly my computer hardware can’t afford this cutting-edge technology model that can run with low code, and sometimes I like to browse the forums and record the solutions I am interested in to tiddlywiki with my own understanding, and my behavior is like a collector in the game, and I get excited to collect a card (tiddlers).

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