Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

johnsalvatier.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 234 posts

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#121

Post by codr7 »

daedrdev wrote: post #19
investguy1 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1800, the government of the USA spent 2% of GDP. In 2020, the government of the USA spent 30% of GDP. In 2024, the government of France spent 57% of GDP. Are the people of 2024 France really getting 28x the value from their government as 1800 USA? It is not evil to ask these questions or to experiment with government, And more people should consider backing off from political-media consumption as it is clearly tox…

France has a massive welfare state and pension system (which is causing a crisis as they cant afford it in the long run). People probably are getting 28x more from the government than before those existed.

I'm pretty sure they're paying for it though.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#122

Post by cma »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #66
lolinder wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we please not DOGEify every comment thread? I know that it's on a lot of minds all the time, but we have a whole spot on the front page effectively reserved for DOGE 24/7, and I'd like to see literally anything else in the other 29 slots.

Agreed. People are unhealthily obsessed with DOGE here. And on top of that, basically every DOGE thread turns into a flame war. It's extremely deleterious for the site to have everything collapse into DOGE talk.

Thiel was part of ycombinator for a time, current head of yc worked for Palantir and has been working on DOGE-related Curtis Yarvin type stuff, so it is likely to come up here a lot.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#123

Post by MichaelZuo »

andrewflnr wrote: post #96
MichaelZuo wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the remainder of the comment? It seems pretty clear to me at least why it would lead to circular arguments.

At this point, I've presented a handful of fairly straightforward hypotheses about cause and effect. They could be wrong, but it's on you to show that they're actually self-referential. There is no amount or kind of other people's opinions that will make them so.

Your opinions do not automatically turn into credible “hypotheses”…?

There is no such mechanism.

If there was then the vast majority of political debates on HN wouldn’t even exist.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#124

Post by andrewflnr »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #123
andrewflnr wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, I've presented a handful of fairly straightforward hypotheses about cause and effect. They could be wrong, but it's on you to show that they're actually self-referential. There is no amount or kind of other people's opinions that will make them so.

Your opinions do not automatically turn into credible “hypotheses”…? There is no such mechanism. If there was then the vast majority of political debates on HN wouldn’t even exist.

Who said a hypothesis is automatically credible? Not me.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#125

Post by bloomingkales »

codr7 wrote: post #119
bloomingkales wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be born with your perception. For example, opposite sexes generally attract and you don’t really have to teach this. We’re born to see things the same, but somehow we work to obstruct this by modding our perception. When one person mods their perception, they become god ( a creator). For example, you aren’t the tallest one in the room but you see yourself as that. You create a reality, and this is something p…

Where's the proof that humans of opposite sex are intrinsically attracted to each other? I can't see it.

Exactly. I got no clue who taught most of the billions of people this is the way.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#126

Post by Terr_ »

coliveira wrote: post #3

The universe seems to have a fractal structure. At every scale we can look there is a huge amount of detail.

I'd be cautious about the word "fractal" misleading us into looking for a scale-spanning pattern that dictates both large and small details simultaneously.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and fine features occur for different reasons than coarse features.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#127

Post by tombert »

A bit tangential, but I have been playing the game "Pinball FX" a lot. I really like it (and especially its spin-off/expansion Pinball M), but it's surprisingly taxing on my computer.

I mentioned this to a friend, and he was kind of confused, understandably so, and said "...it's pinball...why is that taxing?"

It's not a dumb question, we have had virtual pinball games since the Atari 2600 at least, and even pretty fun stuff on the Amiga and DOS like Pinball Dreams and Epic Pinball, so why would a modern pinball game make my relatively beefy laptop struggle playing it?

The answer is because virtual pinball occupies a strange kind of space in the world of video games, in that they're trying to emulate something that is entirely dependent on extremely precise and subtle physics. It's not like you can really have too accurate of physics; the better the physics, the closer it is to a "real" pinball machine, and generally speaking the more fun the game is.

As such, I think you could honestly make a pinball game that taxes any hardware. You'll never be able to have "perfect" physics (as in physics that completely and totally imitate reality), you can only get asymptotically close to "perfect", and the closer you are, the more taxing the computation will end up being.

It just made me think, this applies to nearly anything. We all work with abstractions, but if dive into the details of something and recurse, it's not like it ever ends.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#128

Post by suby »

tombert wrote: post #127

A bit tangential, but I have been playing the game "Pinball FX" a lot. I really like it (and especially its spin-off/expansion Pinball M), but it's surprisingly taxing on my computer. I mentioned this to a friend, and he was kind of confused, understandably so, and said "...it's pinball...why is that taxing?" It's not a dumb question, we have had virtual pinball games since the Atari 2600 at least, and even pretty fu…

I don't actually know, but I'd wager a lot that it's the graphics rather than the physics which causes the game to be slow. Generally the expensive thing in video games is rendering. Computing the next world state is generally relatively cheap, especially if we're talking about a confined area with a very small number of rigid bodies (the ball, flippers, bumpers). A pinball game like Pinball FX that's rendering a 3d world with lighting, it'd just be shocking to me if the physics were to blame for the performance.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#129

Post by tombert »

suby wrote: post #128
tombert wrote: post #127

A bit tangential, but I have been playing the game "Pinball FX" a lot. I really like it (and especially its spin-off/expansion Pinball M), but it's surprisingly taxing on my computer. I mentioned this to a friend, and he was kind of confused, understandably so, and said "...it's pinball...why is that taxing?" It's not a dumb question, we have had virtual pinball games since the Atari 2600 at least, and even pretty fu…

I don't actually know, but I'd wager a lot that it's the graphics rather than the physics which causes the game to be slow. Generally the expensive thing in video games is rendering. Computing the next world state is generally relatively cheap, especially if we're talking about a confined area with a very small number of rigid bodies (the ball, flippers, bumpers). A pinball game like Pinball FX that's rendering a 3d…

Yeah fair, it's tough to say; they're simulating a few non-obvious things too, like ball spin, but it's possible it's mostly graphics.

I think my overall point still stands, but you might be right.

ETA:

I would like to point out that my dad was debating buying one of those virtual pinball tables, and so we played one at a mall, it was decidedly not fun. The physics were way too floaty, and didn't feel good at all. It looked like they were running it on some shitty Android and just mounted a big TV.

That's why I thought that maybe it was the physics in PinballFX slowing things down.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#130

Post by rachofsunshine »

suby wrote: post #128
tombert wrote: post #127

A bit tangential, but I have been playing the game "Pinball FX" a lot. I really like it (and especially its spin-off/expansion Pinball M), but it's surprisingly taxing on my computer. I mentioned this to a friend, and he was kind of confused, understandably so, and said "...it's pinball...why is that taxing?" It's not a dumb question, we have had virtual pinball games since the Atari 2600 at least, and even pretty fu…

I don't actually know, but I'd wager a lot that it's the graphics rather than the physics which causes the game to be slow. Generally the expensive thing in video games is rendering. Computing the next world state is generally relatively cheap, especially if we're talking about a confined area with a very small number of rigid bodies (the ball, flippers, bumpers). A pinball game like Pinball FX that's rendering a 3d…

Especially with such a small number of rigid bodies to worry about. The literal only thing that has to collide with anything else is the pinball itself, unless we're talking about a pretty weird pinball machine.
Post reply on HN