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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)

#131

Post by ErroneousBosh »

VagabundoP wrote: post #125
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the answer we came up with. Guy in the flat downstairs must have been dicking about with supermassive dark matter.

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

#132

Post by vintagedave »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #98
vintagedave wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

The thing is, other packs of the same wood to the same spec were better. We were able to sort through and get one graded/rated the same, but without problems.

I know about wood quality and I have deliberately bought higher and lower grade wood. But even so, quality varies greatly.

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

#133

Post by danielmarkbruce »

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…

"We" doesn't mean what you think it means... You don't realize how much detail (and work) you are in fact relying on, but the 8 billion (we) know it in aggregate.

"We" (the 8 billion) have made some insanely great abstractions or puzzle pieces to work with. There is just an insane amount of work that goes into even elementary things to get the world to where it works this way.

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

#134

Post by danielmarkbruce »

marcosdumay wrote: post #124
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.

It's actually market forces. Evolution has almost zero to do with it. It's the past few thousand years where the vast majority of useful abstractions/tools/puzzle pieces have been built that enable any one person to do a lot without knowing so much.

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

#135

Post by pclmulqdq »

vintagedave wrote: post #132
pclmulqdq wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

The thing is, other packs of the same wood to the same spec were better. We were able to sort through and get one graded/rated the same, but without problems. I know about wood quality and I have deliberately bought higher and lower grade wood. But even so, quality varies greatly.

Yeah, that is correct. Sawmills often produce only one or two grades of wood and don’t do aggressive binning. That’s why the quality is so variable within the grade. There are also factors that affect the grade but don’t necessarily impact every application (eg warping and knots are sometimes ok), so the bins are coarse-grained.

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

#136

Post by jonathanlydall »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #120
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.

My father, (who by profession was a CA with MBA, but is exceptionally handy) has regularly reminded me that walls/floors and ceilings are pretty much never straight and level, and over here they're brick and mortar, not wood. This must be a well-known fact to all trades people who work on cupboards, tiling, door mounting, etc. But when you understand this, then you realize that everything is built to be forgiving of…

As I got a downvote I can only assume my tone came across as “how could you not know this?”, but my feeling when I wrote this was that it’s a bit of a funny and interesting anecdote the parent wrote and I’ve been similarly frustrated with how I easily make mistakes with seemingly simple tasks such as putting up a shelf, to which I have to laugh at myself about when thinking about it many years later.

I definitely prefer that with software it can be “perfect” and easily changed later if you find it’s not.

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

#137

Post by airstrike »

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…

There are two reasons.

First, reality is continuous whereas the digital world is discrete.

Second, data in the real world is many orders of magnitude more detailed than what we're able to model with today's computers.

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

#138

Post by natureiskino »

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…

>I dunno what you mean by "free".

Reality is free. You don't have to waste any resources to model it, you just need to capture it.

>The model is trained on text.

See in my previous reply:

>LLM/AI/AGI/whatever will be

LLMs don't even have a sense of time because they work differently to a human brain.

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

#139

Post by gobdovan »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #133
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…

"We" doesn't mean what you think it means... You don't realize how much detail (and work) you are in fact relying on, but the 8 billion (we) know it in aggregate. "We" (the 8 billion) have made some insanely great abstractions or puzzle pieces to work with. There is just an insane amount of work that goes into even elementary things to get the world to where it works this way.

Were 8 billion people all working toward more detail? Isn't civilization also the process by which detail is pruned, compressed and made into abstractions small enough for one mind to use?

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

#140

Post by Loughla »

glaslong wrote: post #37
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.

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…

Figure 8 fasteners for the win, baby. Let that table top grow an inch. I don't care.
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