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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)

#91

Post by lelanthran »

natureiskino wrote: post #80
airstrike wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 realit…

> Because for me it's pretty simple, it's basically free to give access to reality. Just add "sensory organs" as it were.

I dunno what you mean by "free". The model is trained on text. To "give" the model sensory organs it would need to be trained on those sensory organs.

Current models can predict text, because that's what the weights represent. Models with sensory organs will need to be trained on the output of those sensory organs.

That sounds close to impossible in the foreseeable future.

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

#92

Post by lelanthran »

epihelix wrote: post #33
lelanthran wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

> How would you know? You have no external frame of reference; a virtual world of sensory signals would be identical from your perspective.

Okay, lets go with that :-)

I might be living in a virtual reality, correct, I have no way of knowing.

What I do know is that the reality I am in is many thousands of times higher in resolution than the reality of the LLM.

As an analogy, the LLM is seeing a downscaled 32x32 pixel image while I see the original 8k image. Whether there is a larger 1b^2 image that I cannot see is not relevant to the question of whether the LLM can see my reality or not - it can't.

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

#93

Post by tick_tock_tick »

epihelix wrote: post #34
mapcars wrote: post #20

Reality 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.

A lot of physics, at-least appears, to end up at quantization which actually really bothers me.

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

#94

Post by Modified3019 »

WastedCucumber wrote: post #7

The 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.

Hah, yeah same. I grew up in a house built with hand tools sometime around 1910 (family bought it from an old lady whose father built it), not a single corner was square (though things were generally good vertically by some miracle), but it wasn’t noticeable until whenever were doing major work.

Also learned that lath and plaster needs some special consideration when screwing/nailing things for securement, as the lath (wood strips) could split, causing a subsequent crack in the plaster. Basically for screws or bigger nails, it’s a good idea to drill a small hole first to lessen the pressure, or do a bigger hole and use a spring bolt anchor.

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

#95

Post by bartread »

WastedCucumber wrote: post #7

The 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.

Sounds about right. I approached this in a different way in my office.

The walls aren't straight, either vertically or horizontally, and they're not even consistently wonky along any given axis.

So I installed uprights vertically, using transparent polycarbonate spacers of different depths at the attachment points[0]. I then installed shelves on the uprights and aligned them horizontally.

The variation is only +/- 6mm or so (for around 12mm variation across the 2.5m x 2.44m wall) but, if I hadn't done this, my shelves wouldn't be level, and wouldn't even be consistently non-level, so would have been awkward to install along the full length of the wall, would all be misaligned with eachother, and would have looked incredibly janky.

[0] In hindsight I wish I'd gone for these in different colours rather than just plain transparent, to make more of a feature of them. The walls are white so I think orange, blue, red, and yellow would have worked well.

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

#96

Post by aswegs8 »

WastedCucumber wrote: post #7

The 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.

I have been getting a lot more into DIY and that's my experience myself. I keep running back to the store because there is some detail I haven't considered. Iteration time is so much slower than software... kinda bugs me how much you have to plan upfront and think through instead of just YAGNI and agile-ing your way through it.

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

#97

Post by tonyedgecombe »

mjmas wrote: post #88
atoav wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked as a camera guy on film sets, this was a typical occurrence. You level out the camera trypod with the magic eye on the tripod. The magic eye being a small amount of liquid with a single bubble inside, pointing always upward. Soon you realize that an surprising amount of walls are just not straight or level.

aka spirit level?

On that subject a laser level is indispensable for any work that needs to be straight. I don’t know how I managed without one before.

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

#98

Post by pclmulqdq »

vintagedave wrote: post #89
dwd wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Woodworking was part of my first 3 years of high school, but it was mainly about learning safety and tool usage and not planning, estimating, selecting or purchasing timber. These days I only want to go to the lumberyard once for a project. Learnt the hard way on my first project that you need to take the time to carefully select the timber - checking straightness, matching grain and also colour before I…

That's also a lesson about what people will sell you. First time I went to a lumberyard, I was (coincidentally) with a friend who did a lot of woodwork. I thought, well, I've just paid for a pack of wood, I'll get it. The worker there was completely happy with that. My friend stopped me, and inspected each piece. Sure enough, several had cracks at the ends, knots in poor places, and other things that, had I bought it…

They aren’t “knowingly selling you poor quality” as some sort of scam. They are selling you wood to the spec you asked for. If you want higher-grade wood, you either have to spend money getting lumber graded to a higher spec or spend the time going through piles of low-spec boards to find the good ones. Many engineered wood structures are designed to use “poor-quality” wood, and they prefer it because it’s cheaper than using less high-grade wood.

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

#99

Post by bonoboTP »

lelanthran wrote: post #91
natureiskino wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 realit…

> Because for me it's pretty simple, it's basically free to give access to reality. Just add "sensory organs" as it were. I dunno what you mean by "free". The model is trained on text. To "give" the model sensory organs it would need to be trained on those sensory organs. Current models can predict text, because that's what the weights represent. Models with sensory organs will need to be trained on the output of tho…

Vision and audio is already in use in multimodal LLMs. So it's possible in the past.

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

#100

Post by MezzoDelCammin »

playorizaya wrote: post #61
deepsun wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In ancient city of Rome, it was more expensive to rent a room in multi-story building if the landlords lived in it as well. It showed that landlord was brave enough that the building will not fall one day onto themselves.

[flagged]

at this point I'd wonder if the cat's name is "Princess Donut"
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