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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)

#121

Post by adi_pradhan »

One of my favorite articles. I see people using this as an argument for why LLMs are fundamentally flawed, but that fails to realize that most humans don't get into the details. In fact, many don't have the vocabulary to be in the details.

There is an argument to be made for using humans, but I think we need humans to be more capable, more curious, more adaptive. LLMs are far better than the average human, but they are fundamentally inferior to the motivated human working with an LLM to augment themselves at the frontier.

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

#122

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

I like this passage

> Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you. The important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them. This all makes makes it difficult to imagine how you could be missing something important.

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

#123

Post by pkaeding »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #110
jadbox wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I lived in a flat in a 200-ish-year-old building when I was at uni. Lovely flat, handy for uni, handy for work, near the shops, near a park, flatmates were pretty okay, comfortable, airy, well-lit, and warm. Here's the thing we - a flat full of nerdy tech students - never figured out. The walls in two of the bedrooms (including mine) were perfectly plumb, all four walls straight. Bookshelves lined up nicely with the…

Have you ever been to The Mystery Spot[1]? It is a fun tourist trap with all sorts of conundrums like that.

[1]: https://www.mysteryspot.com/

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

#124

Post by marcosdumay »

gobdovan wrote: post #105

I usually view it the opposite way from the article's perspective. There's surprisingly little detail we rely on, yet things work out somehow. There's the Popper observation that any model of reality has zero chance to be true, since our models are finite, yet we're trying to describe a fractal reality. It's amazing how few levels of decomposition we need to go through to get something useful, like the stairs in the…

Well, there has been a lot of evolution forcing us to focus on the right kinds of detail.

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

#125

Post by VagabundoP »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #110
jadbox wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I lived in a flat in a 200-ish-year-old building when I was at uni. Lovely flat, handy for uni, handy for work, near the shops, near a park, flatmates were pretty okay, comfortable, airy, well-lit, and warm. Here's the thing we - a flat full of nerdy tech students - never figured out. The walls in two of the bedrooms (including mine) were perfectly plumb, all four walls straight. Bookshelves lined up nicely with the…

obviously a small space-time anomaly. Nothing to be alarmed about. Sapphire and Steel have been assigned.

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

#126

Post by zomiaen »

smalltorch wrote: post #118

>Consider building some basement stairs for a moment. Stairs seem pretty simple at first, and at a high level they are simple, just two long, wide parallel boards (2” x 12” x 16’), some boards for the stairs and an angle bracket on each side to hold up each stair. But as you actually start building you’ll find there’s a surprising amount of nuance. I have to point out stairs aren't typically made like this. That's a…

>I have to point out stairs aren't typically made like this. That's a really complicated way to do it.

What do you mean? That's exactly how most residential stairs are built. Two to four stringers with risers and thread boards attached to them.

Granted, they will draw a template on one board and copy it to the others to make the stringers quickly well before mounting anything.

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

#127

Post by [deleted] »

psd1 wrote: post #103
21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You lough, but the cork always plugs the bottle eventually. Cone shaped round doors with cork on the rim.

Leather with a drawstring, like a purse. Never needs oil, and my granny knots will keep the lock-picking lawyer out longer than your yale.

[deleted]

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

#129

Post by smalltorch »

zomiaen wrote: post #126
smalltorch wrote: post #118

>Consider building some basement stairs for a moment. Stairs seem pretty simple at first, and at a high level they are simple, just two long, wide parallel boards (2” x 12” x 16’), some boards for the stairs and an angle bracket on each side to hold up each stair. But as you actually start building you’ll find there’s a surprising amount of nuance. I have to point out stairs aren't typically made like this. That's a…

>I have to point out stairs aren't typically made like this. That's a really complicated way to do it. What do you mean? That's exactly how most residential stairs are built. Two to four stringers with risers and thread boards attached to them. Granted, they will draw a template on one board and copy it to the others to make the stringers quickly well before mounting anything.

>angle bracket on each side to hold up each stair.

You add a serious amount of un needed complexity by using brackets described.

The rise is typically the only thing you need to know in order to calculate all other dimensions of the stairs.

The main difference between how the author describes the construction is stringers get cut, this description skips that step.

Things like tread depth, riser height can be modified too if needed.

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

#130

Post by kibwen »

barrenko wrote: post #109
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…

You notice this when you start to learn drawing (at least I did) - it's not that you don't know how to draw, say a horse, it's that you have no idea what a horse really looks like. Ordinarily you just jump to a whole lot of conclusions.

The classic example is that nobody can remember the basic shape of a bicycle: https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on...
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