Tell me about it, I maintain an open source project in the civil engineering space and it's ... detailed.
You have my curiosity
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
31–40 of 157 posts
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#32> If you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often. I think I'm drawn to programming because the fiddliness is tractable, and fixable. In which other domain can I: * introspect the relevant processes/state, step by…
Unless you have endless budget, many things can be one-shot. You can't do a test run first, or roll back a cut if the length is too short. You can patch misplaced nail holes, or re-dig a hole (messing up filling a hole with concrete is another matter) and hope you don't kill a tree transplanting it, but the end result isn't clean.
The best I could do with woodworking in the end to approximate programming was live with wasting some timber, leave a lot of margin on the main cuts and size all the pieces as a whole.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you exist in reality? Or just in a virtual world made up of sensory signals? Do you have access to the Ding an sich any more than a (multimodal) LLM?
> Do you exist in reality? Yes. > Or just in a virtual world made up of sensory signals? No, definitely reality. Things affect my thought whether I sense them or not.
How would you know? You have no external frame of reference; a virtual world of sensory signals would be identical from your perspective. (I agree that "reality" is the most parsimonious explanation by far, btw, but that's never been the point of the simulation thought experiment.)
I think the more interesting corollary of this article is that if we're living in a simulation, it's an impossibly, improbably detailed one. I really want some compute time on the HPC that's running it.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#34Reality does not have amount of details, it is infinite in all directions. Its only that we perceived certain amount of details, some more some less. One can spend their whole life mastering a single aspect and there always will be room to improve.
This is not my field, but are we sure that reality is not quantised at some level?
Infinite is a very big claim.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#35I think we have all written some code that looks bulletproof to us. We run a set of tests with all the inputs we can think of, and it passes with flying colors (after several iterations of course).
Then we give it to someone else and it fails on their first or second attempt. They simply tried to use it in a way that we did not anticipate. It doesn't mean that we are dumb for not thinking of those possibilities; it just means that we did not think of every one of them.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#36My favorite post on HN. Upvote it everytime. Use this phrase so often now.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#37The 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.
A related thing that took me a while to accept when I started woodworking is that wood moves, a lot.
If you built the bookshelf in wood, it will be expanding, contracting and shifting over time with temperature and humidity variation throughout the day and season. And asymmetrically depending on the grain.
The straight right angles won't stay that way, and it's better to design such that they change in complementary ways, rather than remain perfect.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#38I have read this article already and "reality has a surprising amount of detail" has become a phrase for me. But, I read it again today because the writing is so good. This guy is a gifted writer.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#39Related, amazing read about Meccano teaching you reality-based work, in contrast with Lego:
https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/truth-in-inconvenien...
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#40> If you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often. I think I'm drawn to programming because the fiddliness is tractable, and fixable. In which other domain can I: * introspect the relevant processes/state, step by…
I think this is a very common sentiment among a lot of people, including me.
And also that’s why AI tools create mix reactions. A couple of months ago a post went viral which was really insightful on what I was originally drawn to cs.