Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by sjs382 » Sat, Feb 22, 2025, 12:48 AM UTC

tombert wrote: post #129

suby wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you seen the virtual pinball tables that emulate depth by tracking your head? It's a great effect

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

#132

Post by rachofsunshine » Sat, Feb 22, 2025, 12:50 AM UTC

snikeris wrote: post #52

> If you wish to not get stuck, seek to perceive what you have not yet perceived This may seem like impractical advice. How does one increase the scope of perception? Personally, I’ve found that a meditation practice leads to this.

The way I did it was by deliberately going against my normal impulses. The rule was "whatever you would normally do, do the opposite of that". If you would stay home, go out. If you would eat a steak, eat spaghetti instead. If you would get drunk, stay sober. If you would stay sober, get drunk. Basically, as long as it's not something that's likely to do irrevocable harm, do things that don't seem like good ideas and just see what happens.

The limits on our experiences are usually self-imposed by the fact that we tend to make specific choices limited to specific contexts. The experiences you have are the experiences that derive from what you think is a good idea. So doing things you think are bad ideas tends to result in a lot of new experiences.

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

#133

Post by tombert » Sat, Feb 22, 2025, 12:54 AM UTC

sjs382 wrote: post #131

tombert wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you seen the virtual pinball tables that emulate depth by tracking your head? It's a great effect

I have not, that sounds pretty cool. That might make the machines more fun, or at least feel more realistic.

I think having something more or less like a rumble feature would do a lot too. Even if you just had a solenoid that thumps when hitting a bumper would make it feel a lot more realistic.

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

#134

Post by andrewflnr » Sat, Feb 22, 2025, 1:18 AM UTC

nuancebydefault wrote: post #102

andrewflnr wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Results may vary" is not an acceptable methodology for the US Government, when millions of lives are potentially at stake. Ed: among the ways millions of lives could be lost: losing control of our nuclear arsenal or nuclear materials due to haphazardly firing people responsible for maintaining them. Bungling the response to the next pandemic, due to haphazardly firing people, cutting science funding and deleting inc…

Sometimes people (e.g. US voters) will only learn by running into a wall. How all exactly will turn out is hard to tell and frankly maybe we better don't know. I'm tending to the conclusion there's no way around the movement of the big picture, the shifting of geo-political order in the world.

Certainly, global trust in the US is already gone. That's locked in for the foreseeable future.

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

#135

Post by MichaelZuo » Sat, Feb 22, 2025, 1:22 AM UTC

andrewflnr wrote: post #124

MichaelZuo wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they’re not credible… then why would any one care…?

Readers are just going to assume it’s random noise, or at least indistinguishable from noise, from a rando on the internet.

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

#136

Post by rashkov » Sat, Feb 22, 2025, 1:28 AM UTC

wbakst wrote: post #76

dang wrote: post #44

Related. Others? Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38407851 - Nov 2023 (136 comments) Reality has a surprising amount of detail - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36309597 - June 2023 (1 comment) Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29429385 - Dec 2021 (118 comments) Reality has a surprising amount of detail (…

it's quite a good read, i'm not surprised it's been posted so many times!

I’ve seen it posted multiple times but only just read it for the first time. There’s value in repetition, and as it turns out I enjoyed the content quite a bit!

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

#137

Post by andrewflnr » Sat, Feb 22, 2025, 1:29 AM UTC

MichaelZuo wrote: post #135

andrewflnr wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said a hypothesis is automatically credible? Not me.

If they’re not credible… then why would any one care…? Readers are just going to assume it’s random noise, or at least indistinguishable from noise, from a rando on the internet.

That's equally true of all internet comments. None of us here on HN have or are claiming automatic credibility. We just make arguments that make sense to us. Feel free to close the tab if you don't find any value in this activity.

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

#138

Post by lynguist » Sat, Feb 22, 2025, 1:41 AM UTC

> ‘Spirit’ thermometers, made using brandy and other liquors, were in common use in the early days of thermometry. They were even considered as a potential standard fluid for thermometers. It wasn’t until the careful work of Swiss physicist Jean-André De Luc in the 18th century that physicists realized that alcohol thermometers are highly nonlinear and highly variable depending on concentration, which is in turn hard to measure.

During Deluc's time in the 18th century Geneva was not part of Switzerland, thus Deluc was Genevan/Genevese, not Swiss.

Geneva was an independent city republic with centuries of history until Napoleon (1798) when it was incorporated into France. After Napoleon during the Vienna Congress of 1815 - in the 19th century - Geneva joined Switzerland.

Other people from Geneva of the same time period include Rodolphe Töpffer, the first comic book artist, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

We don't use today's political borders for historic figures.

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

#139

Post by andrewflnr » Sat, Feb 22, 2025, 1:53 AM UTC

Terr_ wrote: post #126

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.

> fine features occur for different reasons than coarse features

Important point. This makes reality even less tractable than a fractal, by a solid margin!

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

#140

Post by akoboldfrying » Sat, Feb 22, 2025, 2:24 AM UTC

karparov wrote: post #112

And this is one of the main utilitarian arguments for diversity in teams. If everybody has the same socio-cultural background, it's harder to leave the frame.

It's a sound argument.

The argument that culturally homogeneous teams perform better due to more efficient communication (more is "already understood" at the outset, so there's less need to communicate explicitly, and fewer misunderstandings) is also sound.

So from a purely team-performance-maximising perspective, the question is: Which coefficient is higher? (More generally: What level of mixture is optimal?)