I just read Daniel Boettger’s “Triple Tragedy And Thankful Theory”. There he argues that the thrival vs. survival dichotomy (or at least its implications on communication) can be understood as time-efficiency vs. space-efficiency in algorithms. However, it seems to me that a better parallel is bandwidth-efficiency vs. latency-efficiency in communication protocols. Thrival-oriented systems want to be as efficient as possible in the long-term, so they optimize for bandwidth: enabling the transmission of as much information as possible over any given long period of time. On the other hand, survival-oriented systems want to be responsive to urgent interrupts which leads to optimizing for latency: reducing the time it takes between a piece of information appearing on one end of the channel and that piece of information becoming known on the other end.
I just read Daniel Boettger’s “Triple Tragedy And Thankful Theory”. There he argues that the thrival vs. survival dichotomy (or at least its implications on communication) can be understood as time-efficiency vs. space-efficiency in algorithms. However, it seems to me that a better parallel is bandwidth-efficiency vs. latency-efficiency in communication protocols. Thrival-oriented systems want to be as efficient as possible in the long-term, so they optimize for bandwidth: enabling the transmission of as much information as possible over any given long period of time. On the other hand, survival-oriented systems want to be responsive to urgent interrupts which leads to optimizing for latency: reducing the time it takes between a piece of information appearing on one end of the channel and that piece of information becoming known on the other end.