Mice, over-optimization and AWS

I've always known that you should take animal studies with a grain of salt - demonstrated clearly by the awesome and often hilarious Just says in mice twitter account.

However today I heard something on the Peter Attia podcaast that reinforces that hugely - lab animals live in a pathogen free environment. What may extend their lives and improve their health, may also reduce their ability to deal with pathogens, but we would never know from these studies alone!

This is also a general problem which re-occurs in software engineering: over-optimization. There is not just the loss of time spent optimizing, but it can cause increases in complexity and whence fragility.

A brief thought: AWS is built to make your journey into over-optimization very easy - and I believe this is why they are so efficient at taking our money :)