High-cost engineering (==low-cost product) tends to create lower-hackability/bricolage-potential products. True or false? Good or bad?
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Starter prompt: Herbert Simon thought complex systems were those that were "partially decomposable"
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2 signs of low hackability: things that are destroyed by disassembly, things that are useless without docs (eg. mystery chip w/o pinout)
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You dichotomy b/w low cost / high cost engineering is driven mostly by post-creation optimization for lower cost, right?
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being destroyed by disassembly is a byproduct of the fact that reversibility is expensive; glue is cheaper than screws.
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Yes - entropy! Less general than that? (I don't have a term for the intermediate principle we're referring to, other than hackability.)
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