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Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

johnsalvatier.org

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

#41

Post by inatreecrown2 »

farfatched wrote: post #24

> 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…

Until the next OS update...

With wood you are up against nature. With software you are up against corporations and comities.

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

#42

Post by bigmattystyles »

jadbox wrote: post #18
macNchz wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my first real DIY projects during a summer in college nearly 20 years ago was replacing the rotted out basement bulkhead doors on the ~120 year old house I grew up in. I took measurements of the old ones, bought some nice tongue-and-groove cedar and high-quality hardware, and built the new doors in the garage. When they were fully assembled, I carried them over to install on the old stone frame. I took off the…

I feel this in my soul. I thought I could replace a door in a day, but months of fiddling, I discovered by frame is not only a parallelogram but it literally shifts by over an inch between seasons. (~100yr old house 2nd floor)

That’s why most doors come prehung in a jamb. Just add shims and then cover them with trim.

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

#46

Post by rconti »

This hits for to me because I'm currently adding on to my house. Or rather, paying professionals to add on to my house, because I actually want it to get finished.

I visit every couple of days. It's REMARKABLE how fast things get done. One day, there were no walls. The next day, almost all of the walls were in place!

... and yet, at the same time, things take a long amount of time because reality has a surprising amount of detail. I haven't taken into account how much you have to do to frame a house. So incredible amounts of work get done, day after day, but 3/4 of them are things I had no idea needed to get done! Gazing up into the roof, the detail is incredible. The PSL beams, the brackets, the joists, the trusses, just.. EVERYTHING!

I thought the structural engineer's plans had an incredible amount of detail on them, and they do, but they also don't really say anything about _how_ to build the thing. How to put up the walls, how to hold them together temporarily, how to lift beams into place. In what order things can and should be done. That all just takes experience.

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

#47

Post by airstrike »

bonoboTP wrote: post #21
lelanthran wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that machine learning can learn highly detailed patterns is the very reason why AI is so useful. AI doesn't deal with reality, it deals with tokens. This is why all those vibe-coded harnesses, little more than glue between various text IO interfaces, are several hundreds of thousands of source lines of code. It's why a SOTA model took 100kSLoK to write a C compiler to compile one specific project. It's why…

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?

Come on, now. That's irrelevant.

Reality is by definition our physical reality, which is about an infinite number of levels more detailed than the, you know, _virtual_ digital world computers exist in.

Whatever world we construct for LLMs, no matter how detailed we make it, will always be a blocky projection of the real domain onto a virtual one.

It follows then that any insight gained in the virtual world is at best a rough approximation which can be quite useful at times but also utterly faulty on occasion.

How often it is useful vs. wrong is (partially) a function of how complete the real-to-virtual approximation for a given domain.

Certain domains, given their limited degrees of freedom, can be quite accurately modeled, such as a subway map.

But many domains cannot, and it's important to be aware of that inherent limitation in digital models including but not limited to LLM """reasoning"""

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

#48

Post by smokefoot »

Yes but what about AI? (Perhaps the most annoying words written in the last few years mostly on LinkedIn).

But actually in the years since this was written, I do think the world has shifted. Doing things on a computer used to be really hard. Even just installing a framework or getting >python to call the right python on windows. Then install Django and get Django to work with nginx etc. It was just a lot of thankless, frustrating work to get from zero to 1%.

Aside from AI, the tools and packages and culture of computing has gotten better. But AI means you just get all the trivial but difficult stuff for free. And I think a lot of people who would have given up now make it through to see something work and they’ll feel the thrill of building something. It’s just better and easier now.

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

#49

Post by smokefoot »

dwd wrote: post #32
farfatched wrote: post #24

> 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 wit…

Woodworking taught me a lot about planning and design. As a young person, I was like the authors brother. I just wanted to do the thing, not draw a diagram and figure out how much wood I need, or build a fixture to mark the stair lines.

Woodworking (the more constructive, furniture-making kind), rewards a deliberate, controlled process and it savagely penalizes mistakes. Those lessons transfer well to other disciplines. I’d have been a much better student if I’d learned wood working in high school.

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

#50

Post by mcswell »

One thing he didn't mention is getting the first and last steps to be the same vertical distance as the others. Nothing will trip you up (literally!) so easily as a final step that is a different height than the other steps.

I thought of this because this morning I was putting a small fence around some plants we want to protect from deer. The fence consisted of 20 sections (bought on Amazon), each about 24 inches wide. Our ground is like rock, and the fence was not that sturdy, so I had to pound a heavy spike into the ground to the depth of the fence posts, then pull the spike out and put each section's legs in, leaving room for the next section's leg to go into the same spike hole. I wanted to be sure I was putting each section in at the right position, lest I end up with a 12 inch gap and have to go back and adjust lots of sections. Long story short, I pretty much succeeded, although when it cools down I may adjust a few sections. But the problem was sort of like the stairs: I wanted an integer number of fence sections, each the same length, to exactly fit around the bushes---just like you want an integer number of vertical steps in a diagonal stair, each of the same (more or less standard) height.

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