Too small to live
There is a counterpart to the "too big to fail" adage, if we see it as an illustration of the power law scaling of metabolic rate (MR) by volume (V). In short, if a unit volume of an organism generates heat ∝MR, then the total heat ∝V will have to be dissipated through its surface, and noting that V∝r3 and S∝r2 leads us to the scaling law MR∝mass2⁄3.[1] This means the bigger the organism, the lower the metabolic & decay rates of its cells, and the longer it will live. The counterpart is that smaller critters live & die faster.
How is this relevant to posting? Well, first of all, thermodynamics is relevant to everything, dead or alive. This particular post sprang from an insight concerning the well known fact that the most important factor for a project's failure is incorrect scoping. For a long time I butchered this often repeated advice into a simplistic "big = bad, smol = good" rule-of-thumb. Fact is, some problems can be solved by reducing scope, but others require an increase.
Specifically, the problem of having posted a bad, cringy piece cannot be solved by ever more obsessive editing, joke sprinkling, rebuttals, or apologies. On the contrary, the solution arises from posting new, possibly even worse contraptions. A larger pool raises the opportunity cost of pointless attempts at fixing dead horses and creates the necessary space for higher level thinking. Individual posts can remain small and cute, and if a reader finds one useful, it can be shared independently.
I guess the lesson here is: give your baddies some friends and you might get surprised by how things can turn around within a larger picture.
In practice we have an empirical law MR∝mass3⁄4 that posits a higher than expected metabolism (3⁄4>2⁄3) in large organisms, a fact that could be heuristically explained by noting their circulatory system actively pumps heat to the surface, raising surface temperature to a higher value than it would otherwise have with passive heat diffusion alone. ↩︎