Generalized Backhaul Law: Every sufficiently complex system has a preferred direction with forward DO behaviors being asymmetrically more efficient than backward UNDO behaviors.
Container shipping backhaul
Package returns (reverse logistics)
Payment reversals/refunds
Conversation
This asymmetry induced a native non-strict temporality.
It rhymes with the second law/entropy but is not always an obvious direct consequence.
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Corollary: In sufficiently complex systems that are also Turing-complete, this reduces to the second law via Landauer’s principle (deleting bits increases entropy in a universal Turing machine)
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Edge case. Locomotives used to be more efficient in one direction. So old railroads have turntables to turn locomotives around. Modern locomotives are equally efficient in both directions so don’t need turntables. Learned this from a guide at Bailey yard.
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For humans, the direction is set by digestion. Food to poop. Pooping is do (well, doodoo) and vomiting is undo.
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Replying to
yes it's an abstraction layer on a stack of arrows of time, what I call the temporality stack in the book I'm writing... this particular one is one I'm mulling about which layer it belongs in
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Thinking of data engineering as an example too. When releasing new code into production, especially that changes data, a good process will include a rollback script to return to pre-release state. It can be tricky, but the goal is to reduce the complexity to a button
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