Jeff Dean on Back-of-the-Envelope Math: The Habit That Tells If Big Ideas Work
dawnsongtweets · x · 2026-09-21
In a conversation series, Google's Jeff Dean shares a timeless engineering habit for judging whether an ambitious idea is feasible: back-of-the-envelope calculations and first-principles thinking.
- Ask: how long to process that much data? Can it be sent over the network? "Would that take 100 years? If it's 10 seconds, that's very different."
- The goal is mentally exploring approaches to understand a solution's shape — feasibility, bottlenecks — before building
- Dean says this is a trainable skill until the rules of thumb become part of how you think
More from AGI Musings
- NYT Essay: AI Slopware Is Everywhere Now — and Nobody Is Using It — round · 2026-09-22
- What happens to Amazon's ad business when AI agents do the comparison shopping? — firstadopter · 2026-09-22
- Dev's Reversal Take: Tickets Will Use Agents to Find Buyers, Not the Other Way — cocktailpeanut · 2026-09-22
- Vacuum tubes weren't built by people trying to make computers — generativist · 2026-09-22
- Hugging Face CEO: 3M specialized models are the huge opportunity generalists crowded out — huggingface · 2026-09-22
- François Fleuret: ChatGPT helped a landlord double rent on a desperate tenant — francoisfleuret · 2026-09-22