Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Where does the cat live?
In the transformer matrix
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
71–80 of 157 posts
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#72Related, amazing read about Meccano teaching you reality-based work, in contrast with Lego: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/truth-in-inconvenien...
I want to thank you for the following reasons: - that's an amazing, mind-opening essay; - I've been looking for this toy (Meccano) for my entire adult life. I remember playing with a set that my mom got me when I was a kid, but I didn't know what it was called, and neither did my mom. And when I describe it to people, everyone kept telling me it was Lego (Lego is a much better-known toy brand in this part of the worl…
In the U.S., Meccano is known as Erector.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#73i like to think along these lines too. sometimes it's paralyzing. one of the biggest mind blowing facts is that all this complexity started at a point in time: big bang. no one explicitly programmed it. all of it came from a soup of elementary particles 13.8b yrs ago.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#74This is one of my all time favorite blog posts. Why? Because it strikes at something that is both true, and a huge trap for smart people. Specifically, people who are experts in one discipline will often imagine that something in some other discipline is "pretty straight forward." And yet, my experience is that it never is. But that doesn't stop smart people from promising something that turns out to be waaaaaay harder to do than they imagined it could be.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#75The 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.
Maybe some thin wood underneath to level it and a wall anchor? Or would it look to crappy still? Trying to imagine if the wall is uneven or tilting?
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#76The 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.
This is why shims are incredibly useful.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#77Reality 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.
Yeah that's why all models are wrong and everything ultimtately comes down to intution like supreme court's I know it when I see it.
It's just that intuition doesn't scale and a lot of common cases can be handled with models, rules, definitions etc. People continue to be confused that just adding more rules eventually solves reality but it never has anywhere for anything so continuing to believe it will is wild
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
> 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…
The discretization of those tokens can be manipulated to get any result you want. If it meaningfully benefits the AI to have a more fine-grained discretization, then you can do that. AI only compresses as much as we want it to. I understand your sentiment, but the logical conclusion of what you’re saying is that no form of compression is ever valuable. That’s just not a defensible argument.
All information gets compressed. Even your own perception of reality gets compressed.
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#79[flagged]
Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
#80Earlier 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?
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 bes…
>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.
I don't know exactly why but I never really understood this argument. Might be some kind of control thing? Because for me it's pretty simple, it's basically free to give access to reality. Just add "sensory organs" as it were. I can argue you can make them perceive reality even better than we (humans) do, just enlarge the audio/video spectrums. Bam...more reality. The whole point of the argument is we're missing information.
Again, I get the need for controlling the environment for what LLM/AI/AGI/whatever will be, but that will always cost more than giving them access to like...reality. Same reason I don't really believe in the whole simulation argument, it's just more expensive all around, loses resolution, let alone control. I don't doubt there will be some people that would indulge in neverending hedonism but not all people. You need to give up control for that.