--- > Let’s say that we all get a limited number of innovation tokens to spend. This is a purely fictional construct I just made up, and my ICO goes on sale next week. > These represent our limited capacity to do something creative, or weird, or hard. We really don’t have that many of these to allocate. ... If you think about innovation as a scarce resource, it starts to make less sense to also be on the front lines of innovating on databases. Or on programming paradigms. > The point isn’t that these things can’t work. Of course they can work. And there are many examples of them actually working. > But software that’s been around longer tends to need less care and feeding than software that just came out. --- > Software that’s 10 years old generally comes with a JIRA instance full of tickets describing broken stuff that nobody’s ever going to fix. And then there are always bugs that nobody knows about, even in software that’s been around forever. ... But it’d be wrong to say that all technology is therefore equivalent. New technology has a larger cardinality for both of these sets. > New tech typically has more known unknowns, and many more unknown unknowns. And this is really important. --- > But what I’m aiming for there is not technology that’s “boring” the way CSPAN is boring. I mean that it’s boring in the sense that it’s well understood. It’s bad, but you know why it’s bad. You can list all of the main ways it will let you down. - [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hbr4swr0g0yw46ff7wrqrhks) ---