This essay has a taste of “Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance”. Really enjoyable and authentic style.
Yeah, seems like the last post, does the author write elsewhere?
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
41–50 of 120 posts
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#42I really like the essay but I think there is a form of Stockholm syndrome playing out especially with the following statements: > using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were > If you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddli…
I agree that we can build better tools. I think what is missing in software is wholistic developer tooling and longevity of that tooling, such that we can invest in mastering them. UPM is a great example of a step in the right direction I think.
When you go into a carpentry workshop, there are hundreds of tools, all designed to work on wood, and a carpenter will know the majority of their tools quite well. They can invest in a tool knowing they can re-use that knowledge for the rest of their career.
When I inherit a software project, it can often have two, three, even four different language ecosystems involved with hundreds of libraries and tools as dependencies. In software we have to accept that we will be surrounded by dozens of tools we need to work with but will never have time to fully master.
Most people I meet are only proficient in many of their tools enough to get the job done and no more. Soon enough the status quo will change and the software industry will happily drop thousands of man-hours of learning right into bin.
The finer points of library X, framework Y, or tool Z are almost ephemeral. Even a company's core software product could just be thrown away and re-written in the new-hotness at the behest of a PM meeting, often losing nuanced domain knowledge in the process.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#43I think a better way to put it is, "People like programmers are prone to underestimating the amount of detail in things". "Amount of surprising detail" is relative to the assumed amount of detail.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#44This is why I think people should still learn their job through hands-on apprenticeship, as opposed to a lot of book-learning in the classroom. In fact I think people do still learn their jobs that way. It's just delayed by several years of book-learning that has little return on investment. When you finally land your job, your first few months are when you really start learning enough to become useful. Disclaimer: I…
> Nothing I read in a book sticks until I have tried my hand at it for a few weeks. I don't think this is universal, though. Book reading is very natural for me and sticks immediately. In fact, I often find that things I've read today and not understood become magically clear a few days later.
Doesn't that mean it doesn't stick immediately?
I've always assumed that's because you're sort of mulling it over in the back of your head.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#45I think this is an argument against the "we live in a simulator" idea - the amount of detail is just too much.
FWIW I think that simulation theory is fairly obviously bunk, but that's not really an argument. We have no frame of reference for the nature of the simulator, including its constraints and the level of detail it can manage.
I don't personally think the theory that we likely live in an artificial sim is true.
But I also don't think it's 'obviously' untrue. Yes, the level of detail is mind boggling. But quite a lot of that detail follows naturally from the framework itself: The complexity of an object moving through space and time, interacting with heat and light and atmosphere and etc. is huge. However once the framework is in place (physical laws, light models, properties of materials and so on) everything happens 'naturally' provided you have the processing power to render all the variables.
It's not difficult to imagine a point where a detailed enough framework, and the processing power to render it, could exist. Not soon, but eventually.
Add to that the established tendency of our minds to normalize (ignore things that don't seem to fit, rationalize and otherwise edit reality for palatability) and the power of our neurotransmitter systems to override rational thought... The biological interpreter of the theoretical simulation is well designed to be fooled given a deep enough understanding of it's workings. Which is also not difficult to imagine as a future possibility.
Still, not likely, but too compelling a thought experiment to call bunk IMO.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#46I notice this effect all the time when cooking, and the maddening part is how hard it can be to even figure out the right details. Like, the best sausages I ever cooked were at a barbecue in park, on a random public grill with no particular attention to the heat (I think the sausages caught fire briefly), and yet they were amazing . Juicy and delicious, with just the right amount of char on the outside. Over my home…
I've had very similar experiences and I've always wondered how much of that is expectations/perception. At home where I can control things better I have higher expectations. I didn't have any expectations for the camping grill. The 'best steak ever' from the camping trip is a great romantic story and a wonderful memory and maybe that is what makes it better.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#47I notice this effect all the time when cooking, and the maddening part is how hard it can be to even figure out the right details. Like, the best sausages I ever cooked were at a barbecue in park, on a random public grill with no particular attention to the heat (I think the sausages caught fire briefly), and yet they were amazing . Juicy and delicious, with just the right amount of char on the outside. Over my home…
Don’t forget the source of the heat: even “the best” gas grill is an entirely different thing than a (presumably wood fire underneath) public grill
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#48What a great read! But the staircase example seems overwrought.
Reality often doesn't need to be that precise. If you're a few degrees off in your angle, it won't matter. The floor and/or walls are probably not perfectly flat and may not even be perpendicular. Stairs will work anyway.
This angle problem has been solved in tooling. You set the (If you need precision, work with metal.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#49I agree a lot with this author, but after being in software for a long time, it still feels like one of the unique problems of software is we keep changing the details . I imagine constructing stairs is largely the same as it was 50 years ago. Most web development pretty much does the same thing as it did 20 years ago, but almost all the details have changed. So as a programmer it gets frustrating having to learn all…
I agree a lot with both of you, and add that after seeing things through the lens of software I went back and started looking at the details of people building things and found that for some reason unknown to me, even those professions are constantly changing. New materials, companies vying to be the “one true solution”, governments changing codes for various reasons.. I wouldn’t be surprised if building a basic staircase was more than 50% different than 50 years ago.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#50I think this is an argument against the "we live in a simulator" idea - the amount of detail is just too much.
Too much detail in relation what? Our current computers in 2020?
What if the humans that made the simulation are from the year 3020 or 10020?