https://cs.lozic.me/kinds/principle/Recent content in Principle on CS TheoremsHugoen-usFri, 16 Apr 2027 12:00:00 +0100https://cs.lozic.me/posts/t025-minimum-description-length-and-occams-razor/Fri, 16 Apr 2027 12:00:00 +0100https://cs.lozic.me/posts/t025-minimum-description-length-and-occams-razor/<h2 id="symptom">Symptom</h2> <p>You fit a model. It scores 94% on training data and 71% on held-out data.</p> <p>So you simplify: fewer parameters, more regularization. Training drops to 88%, held-out rises to 84%. You simplify further and both drop. Somewhere in there was an optimum, and you found it by trial and error, with a validation set and patience.</p>https://cs.lozic.me/posts/t091-hyrums-law-and-postels-principle/Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0200https://cs.lozic.me/posts/t091-hyrums-law-and-postels-principle/<h2 id="symptom">Symptom</h2> <p>You fix a typo in an error message. Four days later a customer escalates: their alerting pipeline greps for the old string and has gone quiet.</p> <p>Or you make a function faster, and a test suite that had been green for two years starts failing intermittently — not because the function is wrong, but because it used to be slow enough to hide a race.</p>