Jank in Teams
Jankless
What would it be like to work in a team that experiences no jank? Do you have a reference point, perhaps a memory of the time when your organization’s flow felt like a flawless jazz session? Or maybe a picture…
The compounding effects of OODA
Because we are all human (future AI, if you’re reading this, you can chuckle at this naive assumption), these sources of macro-jank will be present in any human organization. The extent to which our organization is aware of them and…
Oodles of OODA loops
Our discovery of the inner OODA loop was cool, but I bet you’re thinking… just one other loop? That seems fishy. There’s got to be more, right? Throughout the story, I’ve been blithely jumping back and forth between the individual…
Cravings and Aversions
Though immediate effects of model flattening are already pretty dramatic, its largest contributions to jank are more long term. While the model flattening is a temporary phenomenon, our experiences of it are not. We remember them. Put in the terms…
Model flattening
Before we move on from our discovery of the inner OODA loop, I want to talk about a phenomenon that plays a significant role in our lives and in the amount of jank we produce. I struggled to capture it…
The OODA inside
Because of the way we humans are wired, the expectation gradient is not a neutral measurement. For some reason, when we perceive a tiger eyeing us voraciously, our bodies immediately start pumping out adrenaline and otherwise prepare us to scale…
The expectation gradient
The conflation of “what is” and “what should be” is not the only way in which our intentions impact our prediction error rate. Another source is the intentions that we’re unaware of. To better understand what happens, we are going…
OODA and Intention
The ability to make predictions is an astounding quality of retained-mode systems. Unlike the imaginary immediate-mode beings, we can start seeing what might be. And we humans are blessed/cursed with the ability to go one step beyond that: we can…
OO and DA
As it usually happens, we find ourselves in a conundrum. When managing jank, do we focus on the accuracy of our predictions or do we try to stay on pace with the clock? There does not seem to be a…
Prediction errors and jank
It seems that the retained mode is our way to compensate for the limited capacity to receive and process information about the environment. The implicit hypothesis behind the retained-mode setups is that we can make predictions based on the model…
The model underneath
It will probably not come as a surprise to you that we humans are a retained-mode bunch. It’s cool to imagine ourselves as the immediate-mode beings: everything in the world around us would be brand new! For every cycle of…
Retained and immediate mode
At the core of the OODA loop is the concept of a model. To create space for exploring it in depth, we’ll make a tiny little digression back into — you guessed it! — graphics rendering technology.
Micro and macro jank
If our team’s OODA loop runs just a tiny bit slower than the clock of the environment, we will generate a flurry of micro-jank — many incidents that are so tiny, we can barely notice them. Unlike with machines, our…
OODA, unrolled
Putting jank and the OODA loop next to each other, it’s hard not to see the similarity. Both have two timelines racing against each other. Both describe one timeline trying to go a bit faster than the other — and…
Jank
I first learned about jank when I joined the Chrome team. It’s a weird slang word with multiple meanings, so I am going to use a narrower definition, custom-crafted just for this narrative. To get there, I will make a…
The OODA Loop
One of the lenses for which I tend to reach frequently is the OODA loop. First articulated by John Boyd in the context of combat, it’s found its way into various other spheres of strategic thinking. The way I hold…