Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

johnsalvatier.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 234 posts

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

#171

Post by zmgsabst »

richx wrote: post #49

This is what the DOGE guys don’t understand: even if it seems you can easily replace something, you will find out that the devil is in the detail.

Reality being more complicated than a model is precisely their point:

The vision of a technocratic bureaucracy isn’t workable given the complexity of life — so we need to distribute decisions to be made in context. We’re paying huge sums for a technocratic system that can’t account for the actual needs and which leads to suboptimal outcomes.

Dismantling the regulatory state and attendant bureaucracy creates room for better, localized, contextual systems to flourish.

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

#172

Post by rramadass »

tbrownaw wrote: post #160
rramadass wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The argument that culturally homogeneous teams perform better due to more efficient communication (more is "already understood" at the outset, so there's less need to communicate explicitly, and fewer misunderstandings) is also sound. False Equivalence. Efficient Communication is secondary to Different Whats and Whys which is what a diverse collection of people from different cultural backgrounds bring to the table…

> This is the reason "equal opportunities" should be guaranteed to all Oh silly me, I thought the reason was that it follows naturally from everyone having equal moral worth.

Yes, silly you; my comment was in the context of the parent/grandparent talking about "team composition" (presumably w.r.t. an objective/goal/job) and not a judgement on ethics/morals (different discussion).

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

#173

Post by luqtas »

tombert wrote: post #163
amarant wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simulating airdrag and turbulence the compute-intensive way: simulating all of the air inside the pinball machine! You've got a few tens of liters of gaseous molecules to keep track of, should be enough to slow down most computers I would guess! But I would be very surprised if any pinball software actually does that!

No one does it yet ! Someone should import OpenFOAM into Unreal and make this happen. I want my pinball experience to require a dedicated server to help it.

"just train a generative model to emulate the experience" /s

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

#174

Post by mrob »

tombert wrote: post #127

A bit tangential, but I have been playing the game "Pinball FX" a lot. I really like it (and especially its spin-off/expansion Pinball M), but it's surprisingly taxing on my computer. I mentioned this to a friend, and he was kind of confused, understandably so, and said "...it's pinball...why is that taxing?" It's not a dumb question, we have had virtual pinball games since the Atari 2600 at least, and even pretty fu…

Ball movement on a real pinball machine is three dimensional. The game is designed to keep the ball in contact with the playfield surface as much as possible, but in practice there are lots of imperfections and awkwardly shaped features that can make the ball bounce vertically if it hits them at the right angle. It can sometimes bounce violently enough to hit the glass. This is especially common when you have multiple balls in play. A 2D simulation isn't enough.

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

#175

Post by kelnos »

zmgsabst wrote: post #171
richx wrote: post #49

This is what the DOGE guys don’t understand: even if it seems you can easily replace something, you will find out that the devil is in the detail.

Reality being more complicated than a model is precisely their point: The vision of a technocratic bureaucracy isn’t workable given the complexity of life — so we need to distribute decisions to be made in context. We’re paying huge sums for a technocratic system that can’t account for the actual needs and which leads to suboptimal outcomes. Dismantling the regulatory state and attendant bureaucracy creates room for…

> Dismantling the regulatory state and attendant bureaucracy creates room for better, localized, contextual systems to flourish.

And I guess it doesn't matter how many people will be hurt during the churn...

But regardless, DOGE's goal isn't to make government better, it's to make government broken and cheap, so it will be easier to funnel money to Musk's (and other Trump cronies') companies instead.

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

#176

Post by kelnos »

investguy1 wrote: post #6
unsui wrote: post #4

This is what frustrates me to no end, re what's going on with DOGE and the indistriminant shutting off of legacy systems. As Joel Spolsky once commented, , all non-trivial abstractions are, to some degree, leaky. This is because reality itself is leaky. Or another way to put it, reality itself is non-trivially complex. And any sufficiently long-lived production system that works at scale necessarily has to accommodat…

In 1800, the government of the USA spent 2% of GDP. In 2020, the government of the USA spent 30% of GDP. In 2024, the government of France spent 57% of GDP. Are the people of 2024 France really getting 28x the value from their government as 1800 USA? It is not evil to ask these questions or to experiment with government, And more people should consider backing off from political-media consumption as it is clearly tox…

> It is not evil to ask these questions or to experiment with government

Asking these questions is fine -- good and necessary even. But the evil comes when one of your reckless experiments shuts down an agency that's providing medical care to HIV-positive pregnant women in Africa, and when their babies are born during the disruption, we find that they have contracted their mothers' HIV, because of that missing medical care.

This is just one example among many. It's not hyperbole to suggest that people will die because of what DOGE is doing.

> Are the people of 2024 France really getting 28x the value from their government as 1800 USA?

I think that's a very easy "yes".

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

#177

Post by fennecbutt »

My thoughts exactly when it comes to simulating the real world for games, etc. An accurate simulation is only good for science, otherwise there's boundless detail that we don't pay attention to in the real world. Part of that I think is that we can examine anything in front of us in detail, but trying to recall the exact pattern or shade of colour of something arbitrary like the footpath outside your favourite café is impossible. We just can't do it.

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

#178

Post by demaga »

dang wrote: post #44

Related. Others? Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38407851 - Nov 2023 (136 comments) Reality has a surprising amount of detail - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36309597 - June 2023 (1 comment) Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29429385 - Dec 2021 (118 comments) Reality has a surprising amount of detail (…

What happened to the post from a couple of days ago?

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

#179

Post by flippyhead »

fennecbutt wrote: post #177

My thoughts exactly when it comes to simulating the real world for games, etc. An accurate simulation is only good for science, otherwise there's boundless detail that we don't pay attention to in the real world. Part of that I think is that we can examine anything in front of us in detail, but trying to recall the exact pattern or shade of colour of something arbitrary like the footpath outside your favourite café i…

This is true, but I sometimes find myself, nonetheless, wishing in some game that I could stop, pull out a microscrope or something, and go muuuuch deeper.

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

#180

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

> But as you actually start building you’ll find there’s a surprising amount of nuance.

This has been my experience, building anything; especially shipping anything.

In my experience, shipping is orders of magnitude more involved than authoring.

There's ten million stupid little details, that pop up when least convenient. Experience has taught me to anticipate these details. Many times, they should be mitigated from the very start (security and localization are good examples).

That's why I tend to write every one of my projects -even "farting around" ones- as if they were shipping products.

Keeps me in practice.

Also, this is one of the areas where it really pays to have experienced engineers.

Post reply on HN