Exploiting Locality
April 11, 2025 • #I recently wrote about the tendency of creators to keep messy versus clean workspaces.
While sometimes the mess is a certifiable inefficient disaster resulting from laziness, the “organized chaoos” messy space acts like a mental buffer.
Here’s computer scientist Jim Gray on the purpose of buffering in a programming context, from his book Transaction Processing:
The main idea behind buffering is to exploit locality. Everybody employs it without even thinking about it. A desk should serve as a buffer of the things one needs to perform the current tasks.
Keeping things “in the buffer” redounds to productivity (and ideally, creativity). If something is closer at hand, it lowers the transaction costs of retrieval.
Memorization works this way, too. People question the benefits of rote memorization in school, but this is a useful metaphor for understanding its value. Memorizing reusable data keeps it “in RAM” for faster retrieval.
Faster retrieval reduces friction, which means faster feedback loops, faster learning.
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