If you think reality has a lot of detail, ‘unreality’ will blow your mind. (I’m referring to Hilbert space.)
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
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Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#62FWIW, the stairs drawn are still over simplified. Top step is unusable and dangereous. As an architect I would never accept it.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#63This is basically the reason why our current approaches to AI are so woefully inadequate, that they don’t even deserve the name “AI”. The manifestation of this in AI, as first discussed in the 80s, is called the “frame problem”. This is basically the problem with “big” data i.e. more comprehensive data (more columns) rather than more examples (more rows) — it’s difficult to winnow out the relevant features from the i…
Embodied intelligence seems to break this mold, in principle. I believe the principle to get good priors is called reinforcement learning, and that currently the problem you describe is called inductive bias. Or maybe I'm just pushing your goalposts to something I can talk about...
There are some really brave ideas being kicked around among the researchers who focus on their passion of AI, as opposed to those who post ever higher benchmark scores. They don't optimize their algorithms because they feel the algo should be serviceable out of the box. Cool stuff is happening.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#64This 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…
I largely agree that hands on experience is much better than book learning. I hope higher education moves towards this model instead of lectures.
However, in some jobs you do need a basic understanding of terminology and history. But probably 6-12 months of concentrated book learning is more than sufficient rather than 4+ years.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#65When I first read the title, I understood it more philosophically. As in––why is most of outer space just endless, indistinguishable dust, while here on Earth there's just so much _stuff_! There's nothing simple about reality at all. It's boundlessly complex and intricate for apparently no reason at all. It seems intuitively simpler that less "stuff" should exist. Another way of putting it: even if a supreme being did create the universe, why would it go to so much trouble to make sure that dust gradually accumulates on the top of my refrigerator?
EDIT: Going a step further, what's really weird is just how different human beings are from everything else. Compare a McDonald's bathroom stall to the surface of the moon. How can these things coexist? They don't go together. It's like a giant accident. Like someone spilled pink nail polish on the Mona Lisa.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#66This 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…
Agreed. A half-and-half course that was half degree, half practical would be pretty ideal. Some of these do exist, but they tend to be small experimental courses that not many people take.
I would: I don't think studying for 3 years upfront makes sense for most people. It would be better to spread learning out more.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 1. Completely self learned people are more often prone to develop some bad habits or worse have some subtil but fundamental misunderstandings which are hard to get out of them. (in my experience) I don't find this is particularly true of self-taught people. People who are raised in bad coding environments like working alone or, project-based consulting shops may have bad habits. Hint: the habits are not taught in s…
Isn't working alone part of being self-taught? My school tried to teach good habits. Many of the professors are out of touch with what good habits are though, so they usually teach to books of varying quality or practices specific to how they learned a few decades ago.
Not necessarily. Me and a friend both taught ourselves, and made projects together (games, websites, etc). I guess we partly taught each other, but there was no expert or teacher involved.
Besides, self-taught programmers have to work with others as soon as they get their first job.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Isn't programming all fundementally similar too? Ok, there are a few patterns you need to learn (functional, OOP, etc), and domain specific stuff. But that's also true of physical construction. Knowing how to build stairs is only going to get you so far if you want to build a wardrobe, and probably won't help much at all if you want to build a brick wall.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#69I 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…
50 years ago construction often required individual skill. My grandfather used to tile kitchens back when they still floated countertops using "mud" (dry-ish concrete mix) which resulted in a solid very level counter top (assuming skilled labor). Nowadays, you use concrete board or similar and hope the cabinets were leveled well (usually off about an inch) for cost. Most things are now some degree of prefab and plug-and-play built by less skilled workers so you can get by paying them less. They often have no experience in building and can't spot details that will cause problems. In some cases the technology makes for an overall better product or reduced waste, but often as not it's just less material resulting in flimsy construction. I'd be surprised if you couldn't get a staircase nowadays that was just a precut aluminum struts with pre-etched holes that you can tap out (or similar). Like an upscaled Ikea part. So that's what contractors use because otherwise they couldn't compete on labor costs with someone who did.
Oddly the overall costs for building a house have not correspondingly decreased for the consumer as banks and builders generally take a larger share. Though to be fair consumers also want larger "McMansions" as well so part of the factor is some of the savings do go into giving "more".
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is an argument for the "we live in a simulator" idea - details appear just when they are needed and whenever we think we completely discovered something, another layer of details opens beneath us.
Higgs Bostein (or is it Bostain?)
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