Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
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Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
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Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#2Good read
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#3Good read
a good read indeed! Makes me think about my use of coding agents differently, as the main thing they do is deal with a lot of details that matter to the execution but don't matter to me personally enough to figure them out. Would love to see this author's more recent take as this was written pre-LLMs taking over the world.....
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#4This has always been the fun part of programming to me. I know most people hate it, but I really don’t mind being on-call (ok I hate being woken up) and fixing weird bugs that users run into. All these small edge cases that people run into because reality is odd. Of course I’m in scientific programming so that probably colors my view.
It’s always a little disappointing to me when I think I’ve run into something unique but it ends up being user error or something.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#5Good read
a good read indeed! Makes me think about my use of coding agents differently, as the main thing they do is deal with a lot of details that matter to the execution but don't matter to me personally enough to figure them out. Would love to see this author's more recent take as this was written pre-LLMs taking over the world.....
That sort of abstraction has always existed, it's just been a matter of hiring experts or labor from other humans. Reality still has a surprising amount of detail. You deal with it by engaging directly, delegating to someone else to engage with, or just brute force your way to a crooked staircase.
When you hire someone to work on the stairs for you, you /hope/ they know what they're doing, especially if you don't have the skills yourself to judge their work. Same for an agent.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#6(2017) with a few significant past discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255 - Jan 19, 2018
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020495 - Jan 11, 2020
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29429385 - Dec 3, 2021
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38407851 - Nov 24, 2023
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43087779 - Feb 21, 2025
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#7The first time I built a freestanding bookshelf, I put a lot of effort into making the feet level and the back straight and at a right angle to the feet. Once I put it up against the wall I'd built it for, I realized I'd solved completely different problem than the problem I really had. I needed crooked bookshelf, since the wall was totally tilted.
In the end I screwed some wall shelves in and called it good enough.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#8This sentence is the exact reason laying people off and replacing them with AI doesn’t work.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#9This sentence is the exact reason laying people off and replacing them with AI doesn’t work.
The fact that machine learning can learn highly detailed patterns is the very reason why AI is so useful. So what you’re saying doesn’t really make much sense
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#10Based on what is the level of detail to reality suprising? To me suprising means mysteriously or improbably unexpected. Why should we expect reality to be simple. Note complex and simple are somewhat subjective. The human brain evolved to just sufficient baseline level be able to handle the level of complexity of reality. So why would it be unexpected that humans find realty complex when our brains are calibrated just enough to handle it.