> If you wish to not get stuck, seek to perceive what you have not yet perceived.
Amen to that.
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
51–60 of 120 posts
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#52What 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.
Notching angles into boards is the reason framing squares exist. I've learned and forgotten this three times in my life, the last not so long ago.
Stairs are for human legs, and they care about the rise, the run, and the depth of the stair (tread). And all those can be done with a framing square. Angles are incidental to this (google around and you'll see a lot of stringers being cut with a circular saw).
A 3/5 ratio is 31°. You slap down the square, you measure 3 inches on one arm and 5 on the other, and you mark it with a pencil.
Random dude answering question on the internet:
> In US construction stair pitch (angle) is expressed as a ratio between rise and run (vertical and horizontal distances).
> For commercial construction the minimum ratio is 7:11 but 6:12 is often used (these are expressed as rise and run in inches which is why it’s 6:12 and not 1:2)
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#53This 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…
You need both. It's unfortunate that we separate out the two. It wasn't until the second semester of my third year of my accounting degree that we actually had a project where we would get fake checks we had to enter into the books, fill out, and put in a folder called "mailed." This should have been day 1 and we should have learned what it was we were doing as we were doing it. And this should have prepared us for some sort of internship.
On the other hand, I've met coders who somehow have managed to completely miss very basic CS concepts because they learned the entire thing ad hoc as they needed it and they never realized that they needed Big O, or that they needed to learn how modulo works.
For me, I flunked out of math my entire life until I learned coding and was able to find the answers to "what is this used for?" so I could put it into context. Book learning is good, but it's easier (at least for me) if you have a scaffolding of experience to know where to put each new thing you're learning.
Never neglect either!
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#54I 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 stai…
I think it sort of depends on what you count as different, but I think you're basically right. Power tools alone have made a big difference.
Still, I think stairs are conceptually almost identical, including in the internal details, in a way that software really isn't. Maybe the rise/run is a slight different ratio or the stringer is an incidentally different material, or the saw has a battery instead of elbow grease, but it's fundamentally similar.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#55This 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…
This is why I think people should still learn their job through hands-on apprenticeship
Isn't that what internships are for?
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why do you think it’s “obviously bunk”?
It's a horrible abuse of probability, which is not unlike saying that 0*∞ = 100%.
Not to say that we can't possibly be living in a simulation, but rather that the only way that can be shown, or even evidenced, is through concrete evidence. Thought experiment is insufficient evidence.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 (phy…
Absolutely, it could be that we are living in a simulation. It's just that there's no reason to believe that as yet. FWIW I think that a 'biological interpreter' is rather unlikely; it's probably just emergence from atomic interactions. (It could be planted there, however.)
The problem with your argument is that it makes too many assumptions. We know nothing about the nature of the simulator, nor do we have any reason to believe that (assuming we are not in a simulator) the universe works the way it does for any particular reason. Furthermore, the isomorphism you point out between the the physical world and computers are much more easily explained if you flip the causality chain: we are humans living in this world, and we modeled computers after ourselves and our surroundings.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#58I 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…
It's only details from that perspective though, from an user's perpective they're essential because of cultural relevancy that's tied to images, popularity and familiarity, that's what counts for most. It's really important to understand that details change depending on perspective.
Many people just expect more complicated web apps because of the alternatives they use and are familar with (native apps).
It compares well with the stairs example of the article. If there are no people other than you that expect a stairway, you may just pile up some boxes, or use a rope and combine it with your workout. Do you really need and expect a stairway if it's only you?
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Fair point. But I think that a lot of the support for the "we live in a simulation" idea is because we see ourselves able to produce better and better simulations, and it feels like we might be able to progress to the point where we can do it. Realizing how much detail there is makes it feel much less achievable. I use the word "feel" for a reason. I think we're dealing with emotional reasonableness, not careful anal…
[deleted]
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#60This 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…
You need both. It's unfortunate that we separate out the two. It wasn't until the second semester of my third year of my accounting degree that we actually had a project where we would get fake checks we had to enter into the books, fill out, and put in a folder called "mailed." This should have been day 1 and we should have learned what it was we were doing as we were doing it. And this should have prepared us for s…
>For me, I flunked out of math my entire life until I learned coding and was able to find the answers to "what is this used for?" so I could put it into context.
When all I used math for was wetlab biology work I found it tedious and annoying. Teaching myself how to code (for data analysis) made me go from disliking maths to loving it. It is easy to see how powerful and beautiful math is now.