
Loopy: a tool for thinking in systems - foobar_
https://ncase.me/loopy/
======
canada_dry
I've often thought that municipal or even state governments should make
available an interactive budget tool for constituents using this kind of
visualization.

The purpose would be to show that everything the gov't does is connected
through incoming taxes and outgoing expenditures - and there are very tough
choices when it comes to the direction of taxes.

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memexy
This is a good idea. Why do you suppose they don't do it?

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LyndsySimon
Based on my own experience at local government meetings, I don’t think the
knowledge is all in one place.

The meeting I’m thinking of was the city council advocating extending a tax
that was due to expire. They had a presentation deck full of the things they
planned to use the money for. That’s all well and good, but when I raised my
hand and asked what proportion of incoming revenue for the public works
department and the overall city budget the tax currently made up... crickets.

No one there knew exactly how much public works was allocated, because the
director of public works. They had the overall city budget numbers handy, but
no one there had a breakdown by source, and no one knew where to find that
information.

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memexy
I see. So they didn't even have the tools to gather the data in the first
place it sounds like, let alone figure out how to put together a simulation
for it.

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aaanotherhnfolk
There's a much much more advanced version of this tool used for systems design
in game design called Machinations. You can model really complex economies
with it.

Now that I've left the games industry I still think about this tool often and
how it might be useful for modeling load on a backend. Kind of waiting for an
opportunity to try it out.

[https://machinations.io/](https://machinations.io/)

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malnourish
It says it's in open beta. Checking the FAQ indicates that a desktop version
used to exist. Which version did you use?

This is indeed an interesting tool, thanks for sharing.

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aaanotherhnfolk
I had used it back when it was an Adobe Air program. Maybe the death of Flash
contributed to the decision to build a web version instead; but I also think
the Google Docs metaphor is a much better fit for the tool commercially. I
hope they do well.

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groby_b
It's a nice idea, but it's too simple for most systems simulations. It is,
however, a splendid interface for building simulations. I'd hope the author
hooks it up to a simulation framework at some point, exposing a much wider
range of tools.

(Or builds their own framework, IDK. I just want to build more complex systems
by drawing on a canvas :)

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yanovskishai
Anyone got a chance to try the recently launched Hash.ai? From their
announcements it seemed like a tool aiming to more complex scenarios.

~~~
playeren
I've messed around with it a bit, and it's actually pretty great for agent
based modelling & Monte Carlo simulations. It does have nice visualizations,
but not so much geared toward representing complex relationships, but rather
showing realtime/step-by-step representations of simple relationships. But, I
have only played around with it for a bit - I may very well be grossly
underselling it.

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rotbart
It's a very simplistic tool, but it is great to help visualise and illustrate
some systems. It helped me demonstrate the dynamic between technical
complexity, delivery pressure and velocity (then add refactoring)
[https://medium.com/pageup-tech/the-system-of-technical-
compl...](https://medium.com/pageup-tech/the-system-of-technical-complexity-
velocity-and-delivery-pressure-93ac4478f4ba)

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vfinn
I've been also thinking about systems like this, but wouldn't you need
constraints and counting? I mean let's say you modeled human behavior based on
basic economic principles, then you'd have constrains/rules like:

if money < x, stay home (and you wouldn't meet new people and have an impact)

if money < y, walk instead of taking a bus (and you would get only so far,
your reach is small)

if money < z, have no energy to do new things (your behavior would stay the
same)

if energy < c, die

edit: adjustments

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ShroudedNight
Previous Discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13939645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13939645)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19498073](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19498073)

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truckerbill
There’s also Minsky. Looks to be a bit more comprehensive with an eye to
economics.

[https://sourceforge.net/projects/minsky/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/minsky/)

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oehpr
I love loopy for the crazy simplicity, it's good just to illustrate the moving
pieces. But when you want to model something, the next tool I'd turn to is
Insight Maker

Someone ported
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3)
to it: [https://insightmaker.com/insight/2531/My-
World3](https://insightmaker.com/insight/2531/My-World3)

So you can do a lot with it. You can even do sensitivity analysis with it! The
devs are super responsive, I made a feature request and they implemented it in
a day.

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yoloswagins
Loopy is pretty neat. I played around with modeling glucose, but I couldn't
get the arrows to model glucose uptake quite the way I wanted.
[https://bit.ly/2CjjaO0](https://bit.ly/2CjjaO0)

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foobar_
Not sure how we can debug it. It seems the simulation is sensitive to

1\. When you start each circle

2\. Length of the wires

It would be neat if actual numbers were shown and rates could be adjusted via
a hard reset.

I was messing with a procrastination model in
[https://bit.ly/2ZPNXdo](https://bit.ly/2ZPNXdo) .. it seems if you are not
feeling good and you procrastinate less, things improve over time. To test
this, decrease the feel good and then decrease procrastination.

~~~
totetsu
My procrastination model looks a bit different
[https://bit.ly/38Jto6M](https://bit.ly/38Jto6M)

~~~
foobar_
Never give up vs give up is such a classic dilemma. I do think the positive
aspect of procrastination is exploration, satisfying curiosity but on the flip
side exploration can also increase anxiety. If we did not explore then we
would be using the same fishing net to catch the same fish. All progress
depends on procrastination.

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hosh
I was playing with it to try to model a simple regenerative system from
permaculture design -- the "Three Sisters" plant guild:
[https://preview.tinyurl.com/ydxqmmwd](https://preview.tinyurl.com/ydxqmmwd)

The model is really off since I can't specify units or connection weights. I
was hoping the tool would be adequate enough to use as a kind of visualization
or a kind of sandbox/lab to illustrate different regenerative processes. Might
still work.

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KingOfCoders
Love it, always liked iThink to model systems but the price is going through
the ceiling in the last decade.

