[HN Gopher] Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
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Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
Author : jger15
Score : 228 points
Date : 2021-12-03 12:47 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (johnsalvatier.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (johnsalvatier.org)
| seeken wrote:
| So how do you trace the stair cuts?
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| exercise for the reader
| agustif wrote:
| On stairs, I remember watching about this one on Ancient Aliens
| or something like that, lol
|
| https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/myster...
| glenstein wrote:
| To me, one of the more interesting arguments against the universe
| as a simulation came from Sean Carroll. I'm paraphrasing, but he
| noted that any simulation would be limited and it's possible
| detail, because it has to use the resources of the real world,
| and therefore is likely to be less detailed than the real world.
| And the logic of simulated universes is that they, too, have
| simulated universes, and you keep on going, and you end up with
| much greater probability that you're in one of the simulations
| then that you're in reality.
|
| But, it would also follow, that the version of reality that you
| experience is not very rich in detail relative to whatever is
| "real."
|
| The author, John, says that blindness to detail can make you
| "intellectually stuck." So I would wonder if an implication of
| Sean Carroll's argument, an implication of the universe as a
| simulation, is that we would experience less detail and therefore
| be more prone to getting "stuck".
| ericmay wrote:
| Who is to say we are experiencing rich detail? How do we know
| we aren't stuck? Stuck on the planet? Stuck in this universe?
| Stuck in our minds?
|
| It's an interesting theory though but I'm not quite sure I buy
| the detail resolution argument as the one that defeats it,
| rather similar to Descartes in that you can't trust your senses
| it's hard to care about, especially with no proposed test
| (which wouldn't the test be part of the simulation too?). So
| you kind of run into the "well who created _that_ kind of
| marathon and I don't know of any philosophical conjectures that
| have those characteristics that have been solved. Could be
| wrong though.
| glenstein wrote:
| >Who is to say we are experiencing rich detail? How do we
| know we aren't stuck? Stuck on the planet? Stuck in this
| universe? Stuck in our minds?
|
| I largely agree with where you're at on this. What we
| experience as normal might be extremely low detail relative
| to some more detailed underlying reality.
|
| However, the flip side is that we know quite clearly what it
| is for a world to be less detailed than our own. So it seems
| like there's room to go "further down".
|
| I also don't necessarily think it's a decisive argument, but
| what's interesting to me is that argument in particular
| stresses detail, and what it has in common with this article
| leads to an implication that we're more likely to get "stuck"
| in a cognitive sense, so that there are shapes to our
| thinking that correspond to the level of detail we're able to
| experience.
| ericmay wrote:
| > However, the flip side is that we know quite clearly what
| it is for a world to be less detailed than our own.
|
| Do we? I'm not trying to do the Socratic Method here with
| endless questioning but how can I know or experience what
| less detail means? Don't I only have access to all of the
| detail I could have access to by definition?
| glenstein wrote:
| I take the notion of "resolution" to relate to things
| such as the range of visible color, complexity of shapes
| and sounds. If you agree with that assumption (and you
| don't have do) that details are of that nature, you can
| always conceive of less, but not necessarily more.
| ericmay wrote:
| I don't think visible color is a good example because we
| still detect the resolution of it through instruments.
| Complexity of shapes is an interesting one. Idk about
| sounds though - depends on what we mean by complexity
| here because while Bach is more complex than idk whatever
| people listen to these days I'd still put them at the
| same "resolution". Though I guess there's a lot of things
| to define as far as terms go.
|
| When I think about resolution I'm kind of imagining
| things that aren't measurable by us at all or possible to
| experience, because if we can measure them or experience
| them then they are part of our "resolution" sphere I'd
| think?
|
| It's definitely interesting to think about. I'd love to
| get your thoughts and those of others too.
| dsego wrote:
| This is a bit out there, but I've been binge watching people
| talking about their NDEs lately on youtube, and some mention
| that our reality feels less real, almost cartoonish, after
| having experienced the beyond.
| magneticspark wrote:
| And to add to the sibling reply by OneTimePetes, even if the
| simulation had to generate a nearly infinite amount of details,
| the simulation itself could have its internal time slowed down,
| and the beings inside the simulation would not be able to
| perceive it as such.
| glenstein wrote:
| The problem is with finding an argument as to why, as a
| matter of _principle_ , we would expect simulations to be
| accompanied by such fixes.
|
| If you buy into the bootstrapping premises (which I don't!)
| that simulations beget more simulations, and that this runs
| into limits of computing power, there are clear and
| consistent principles driving that runaway process.
|
| However, so far as I can tell, it's not clear that there
| would be any _principle_ leading us to conclude that there
| would be a standardization of simulations relating to image
| hashing or fiddling with the experience of time. Those types
| of fixes would fall into the category of idiosyncratic
| details that either would or wouldn 't hold in particular
| one-off scenarios, and don't generalize into any transcendant
| probabilistic implication that such experiences are most
| likely. That kind of generalization is what would be
| necessary for it to be responsive to the argument about
| simulations.
| dsego wrote:
| There is a fun little esoteric/new age youtube video* about
| reality glitches that explain how reality is (in loose terms)
| more "mathematical" in nature than "material" (as we mostly
| perceive it). These are the reasons mentioned:
|
| 1) speed of light is an absolute cosmic speed limit
|
| 2) wave/particle duality
|
| 3) conservation of energy - everything is eternal, nothing can
| be truly created or destroyed
|
| 4) quantum entanglement shows that reality is non-local
|
| 5) singularities at center of black holes where seemingly all
| physical laws break down
|
| [*] https://youtu.be/zcb_9j8KKdg
| coremoff wrote:
| I've only watched the the first five minutes of that video; I
| think he has some fundamental misconceptions that make it
| difficult to take much from what he's saying.
|
| e.g. for #2 wave/partical duality (which isn't necessarilly
| even a thing, depending on what foundation of QM you
| subscribe to) he says that everything is energy and that
| energy is light; this is not correct (the 2nd part)
|
| for #3 energy is not necessarily conserved over long time
| frames in our universe
|
| #4 depends on which foundation of QM you subscribe to, but
| doesn't necessarily require non-locality (AIUI, if your
| foundation results in this problem, then you must chose
| between locality or reality to explain things - reality in
| this context not really meaning what it might mean in common
| parlance)
|
| #5 singularities appear in black holes because the maths
| breaks down because we don't have a unified theory of
| QM+gravity; they aren't magical. Also the big bang wasn't a
| singularity in the way he seems to be implying, again AIUI
|
| I'm no expert, but I would suggest you review some more
| technical videos before reading too much into the link you
| posted (I suggest PBS Space Time / FermiLab / Sabine
| Hossenfelder)
| wruza wrote:
| Ugh nope. This video is not only too naive at the intro
| (could be just a watchbait), it further doesn't explain what
| it claims, neither is it consistent nor starting from any
| preexisting model. It starts from limited factoids and uses
| them as fundamentals to go to some crazy not-even-a-
| hypothesis. E.g. in GR the conservation of energy is an "it
| really depends" thing, not a universal law. And c is not a
| galactic speed you or your flashlight may "hit". To save a
| stranger some time on c-part to make their own idea of this
| video, it's right in the intro and then at 11:30+.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It seems almost touchingly naive to assume that a superuniverse
| would have similar limitations as this one. We don't know
| _anything_ about how different universes might be structured.
|
| That's not just because we can't access them, but because a
| superuniverse system assumes a coherent set of metalogic that
| makes certain universe features possible and other features
| impossible/unlikely
|
| Not only can we not access that, there's absolutely no
| justification for generalising from this universe to any
| metasystem in any way.
|
| _Especially_ if you accept the premise that this simulation
| has less detail than the original. Because then of course you
| don 't know what detail is missing, or what detail is possible.
|
| So that argument nicely destroys itself.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| So you have to start with say, a universe with _no_
| constraints at all. Impossible to imagine. What would then be
| the purpose of a simulation at all? There wouldn 't be any,
| because no constraints means everything is knowable
| instantaneously. A universe with no constraints means that
| nothing really ever happens.
|
| But supposing there were some reason to run one in a universe
| with no constraint (impossible, since even having a reason to
| run a simulation is itself a constraint), would the
| simulation have any constraints at all? I don't see a reason
| why. Infinite compute available to simulate everything all at
| once would be trivial.
|
| So we can then deduce that a universe in which a simulation
| is running has constraints. We do not know what these
| constraints are, but we can be certain they exist.
|
| Some of the constraints within the simulation, unbeknownst to
| the entities inside the simulation, are the constraints of
| the universe in which it is running, and not constraints
| imposed by the simulation itself. Which constraints are
| these? Well, it would stand to reason that these constraints
| would appear to be fundamental. Maybe in ours it's the speed
| of light demonstrating the compute limit of the simulation.
| Maybe our simulation exists to better understand their
| constraints, and so something much more difficult to
| understand is indicative of their constraints. Maybe those
| constraints are reason itself. Maybe the fact that the
| process of the universe unfolding is indicative of their
| constraints. Maybe something else, maybe I'm wrong and its
| something that doesn't appear fundamental at all, but it
| doesn't really matter. _Information leaks into your universe
| from the universe in which it exists._ No matter the nature
| of the "bare metal" universe in which your universe is
| running, there will always be some aspect of yours that is
| reflective of the higher level one, and there will always be
| a way to tell that you are in a simulation. All that is
| needed is to examine the details of how yours works, hand
| wavy and much harder than it sounds, but theoretically it is
| possible. You cannot create a simulation in which the
| entities inside cannot possibly know they're in one, and in
| which nothing at all can be known of the higher reality.
| randomsearch wrote:
| Hmm maybe, but also what about the argument that the most
| likely designers of a simulation such as ours would be those
| who inhabit a universe like ours? A good reason to simulate a
| universe would be to ask "what if?" questions, which would
| seem of greatest utility to those living in similar
| universes...
| htrp wrote:
| Or our universe may literally be a game of dwarf fortress
| running on commodity hardware.
|
| These are all similar to the epistemological arguments of
| unknowable truths. Interesting but ultimately fruitless.
| JackFr wrote:
| > what about the argument that the most likely designers of
| a simulation such as ours would be those who inhabit a
| universe like ours?
|
| So your argument is Genesis 1:27? "So God created human
| beings in his own image. In the image of God he created
| them"
|
| Big, if true.
| rocqua wrote:
| This always makes me think of the 'uncertainty principle' and
| quantized values in physics. As a layman, it seems to me like
| both of these combine to limit the amount of information needed
| to describe the state of the universe.
|
| I don't know enough about quantum mechanics to check if this
| makes sense. My wild imagination suggests that 'waveform
| collapse' could be modeled as the result of a simulation being
| forced to resolve a state of a specific particle for further
| calculations. I imagine it is hard to come up with a plausible
| 'simulation model' for this that includes features like
| probability wave interference and entanglement of particles.
|
| Such a model would be amazing for insight into quantum
| mechanics, and also have far-reaching consequence for
| metaphysics. It would strengthen the argument for us living in
| a simulation, if the peculiarities of quantum mechanics can be
| modeled as artifacts of a particularly efficient emulation.
| [deleted]
| OneTimePetes wrote:
| That is nonsense. We can do "unlimited" detail, by just-in-time
| generating details on observation and extrapolating from some
| mathematical deterministic constants tail. Not everything that
| can be seen, needs space- lots of it can be reproduced with
| formulas just in time on observation.
|
| The only observable thing would be a "detail snap" and the same
| "high-res" details were the same hash is produced. Which could
| be avoided by hashing in the observer, at some level of detail.
| glenstein wrote:
| Carrol calls it the "Resolution Conundrum" [0]. If you
| believe in the underlying logic that there is a kind of
| runaway effect, of simulations within simulations, etc, it's
| inevitably going to be the case that the most probable
| simulated universe is the one with the least available
| computing power. So whatever trickery you use to get around
| the problem of low resolution just substitutes one problem
| for another, and then the new thing runs up against limits of
| computing power. We would be most likely to experience the
| simulation that's most likely to generate noticeable
| artifacts as the simulation runs up against limits.
|
| 0: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/08/22/maybe
| -w...
| coremoff wrote:
| the thing that I don't understand is why people think that
| there would be a simulation of a universe; surely it would
| be more likely that this is a simulation of "you" (well me
| as obviously you lot aren't real) - vastly simpler and more
| plausible
| MayeulC wrote:
| It could also be that the most probable simulated universe
| is one in which it is very hard to simulate other
| universes.
|
| We do 2D simulations, games of life, etc. If our universe
| is simulated, why wouldn't the "parent" one be vastly more
| complex (more dimensions) and a much better place to run
| simulations?
|
| It could be highly hyperdimensional and contain
| unimaginable levels of detail, even "time" in our universe
| could be a construct (or multidimensional) in the parent
| universe.
| Retric wrote:
| No we can go deep but no where near unlimited zoom. Watch a
| video that shows a fractal zoom to say 10^20,000 and that
| feels like forever but it's nothing next to 10^(10^20,000)
| let alone anything actually large.
|
| Even seemingly simple problems run into surprising issues
| when you want arbitrary precision. What's the one's place
| digit of p^(p^(p^p)? I mean sure you could fake unlimited
| zoom by just picking arbitrary numbers like say 4, but that's
| no longer zoom.
| jcims wrote:
| Heisenberg discovered the simulation.
| bena wrote:
| Is it weird that I don't like his stairs? Also, I don't know many
| people that build wooden stairs with brackets. Usually, you get
| two pieces of suitably long and wide lumber, clamp them together,
| and cut them together. So it looks something like this
| (https://www.lowes.com/pd/Severe-Weather-4-Step-Pressure-
| Trea...). This solves most of his problems.
|
| Basically, I get his point, but I think he chose a really poor
| example to illustrate it. All I'm hearing from this guy is: "I've
| never actually had to build stairs."
| beervirus wrote:
| Cutting stringers instead of using brackets would implicate
| pretty much exactly the same set of details and problems.
| 4monthsaway wrote:
| Aha that was different than I expected
| Animats wrote:
| Making stuff to specified dimensions has a well understood
| workflow. Order of operations matters. That problem dominates
| machining. It's a big deal for carpentry, too. It's not hard.
| Most people figure it out before the second time they build
| something.
|
| (Although making anything stay at specified dimensions from Home
| Depot "fresh from the tree" lumber is difficult. That is why
| kiln-dried lumber exists.)
|
| Wooden boat tension joinery - now that's hard. You need the
| results of several centuries of puzzle-solving and dealing with
| the effects of water to do that well.
|
| There was some article a few years back on HN about two
| incompetents trying to build a cabin in the woods, with too
| little experience, too little planning, and too much drinking.
| Their worst mistake is that they didn't know that you build roof
| trusses at ground level. (Or just buy them prebuilt.) Then hoist
| completed trusses into place. They were trying to stick-build
| roof trusses up in the air at roof level. That did not end well.
|
| This stuff isn't rocket science. There are books easily
| available, and lots of people who've done it before.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I know a guy, just builds stairs. Every significant house builder
| in the area has him in, all the work he wants. Heard him say on
| the phone "I have so much work, If I don't want to do a job I
| don't have to do it. And I don't want to do that. Thanks!"
| newsbinator wrote:
| Sounds like he's not charging enough
| f154hfds wrote:
| I recently had to build some stringers for a deck. We had an
| original CAD with 11 steps (for a total of 12 including the top).
| When we produced the layout somehow we ended up laying out 10
| steps instead of 11 because I wanted a specific tread depth (~10
| inches). I figured why would one fewer step matter for anything
| structural? Well it turns out that 10% extra cut into my 2x12
| left about an inch less in the beam of wood which was enough for
| a 12' span to bounce as you walk up and down!
|
| I have learned that a universal unavoidable element to any model
| is that it oversimplifies the thing it is trying to explain.
| Sometimes that is OK and using the model we gain useful insight
| into a system. Other times the simplification of the model ruins
| its explanatory power. Academics can sometimes forget this I
| think in their eagerness to understand and explain things. Some
| models that have varying degrees of usefulness are the following:
| Newton's F=ma, supply and demand economics, Marxism vs
| capitalism, colonialism, post modernism, globalism vs
| nationalism, conservatism vs liberalism. We have to be very
| careful applying an overly simplistic model to complex phenomena.
| Sometimes our desire to understand something at a high level
| erodes our ability to understand it at all, especially when
| modeling human behavior where interactions fundamentally occur at
| the level of the individual.
|
| Colonialism in my mind is a good example of this. We have a model
| (a simplification of reality) that says this is a specific time
| period in human history in which people groups migrated between
| areas trampling on indigenous cultures in the process. The
| reality is that this has happened since the dawn of civilization
| and will continue, that some colonists at some times respected
| the native peoples and the movement was mutually beneficial. I
| believe colonialism as a model has limited usefulness and it's
| much more useful to look at specific movements of peoples and
| what happened as a result.
| javier10e6 wrote:
| To make matters worst, what you see with your open eyes, is not
| one image, is a collection of images with all kind of
| distortions, blur and other smudges that your brain "photoshop"
| away to produce an image that conforms to the flawed/bias
| criteria that your brains considers to be a good image. The same
| happens with your ears and your taste buds. Reality in our brains
| is pure poetry.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| If you want to know how much reality gots, build a house by
| yourself.
| strict9 wrote:
| This was a great read. Another way to appreciate the endless
| level of detail if you look hard enough is the Coastline
| Paradox[1], an idea expanded and articulated by Benoit
| Mandelbrot.
|
| Life has infinite levels of depth if you keep peeling back layers
| and look down a bit further. And when you think you know
| something, dig deeper and you realize you know less than you
| thought.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox
| adamrezich wrote:
| I have no formal education in physics or metaphysics or
| anything but it has long seemed obvious to me that reality is
| infinitely fractal in both the macro and micro. whenever a new
| particle or whatever is discovered, it seems like many people
| get excited that we're on the verge of understanding the
| elementary fundamental building blocks of reality or something,
| when I can't see any reason _not_ to believe that reality will
| continue to be fractal infinitely when "zooming in."
|
| if one can accept this, then one can accept that any
| perceptions about reality he may have can only be at best a
| "useful model," and such models should be constantly updated in
| response to new data and observations. of course, this means
| that there is quite a bit of incentive in deliberately shaping
| the models people use to perceive reality...
| mersenne wrote:
| If the universe is infinitely large (as we suspect it is),
| then it should also be infinitely small (even beyond our
| capacity to measure it). Otherwise, it's not really infinite.
| avhon1 wrote:
| The matter of whether the universe is or isn't infinite is
| definitely not a settled matter.
|
| > Because we cannot observe space beyond the edge of the
| observable universe, it is unknown whether the size of the
| universe in its totality is finite or infinite. Estimates
| suggest that the whole universe, if finite, must be more
| than 250 times larger than the observable universe. Some
| disputed estimates for the total size of the universe, if
| finite, reach as high as 10^10^10^122 megaparsecs, as
| implied by a suggested resolution of the No-Boundary
| Proposal. [1]
|
| Secondly, rays (the geometric construct that have a point
| origin and extend infinitely in one direction) _are_
| infinitely long, but any point on them is finitely far away
| from the end. Why couldn 't the universe be the same way --
| unbounded in one direction (of scale), but bounded in the
| other?
|
| [1]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe#Size_and_regions
| BWStearns wrote:
| Kind of a weird tangent but can anyone elaborate on this quote:
| "trap a drop of water between two other liquids and heat it, you
| can raise the temperature to at least 300 degC with nothing
| happening"
|
| I knew you could change boiling point with pressure but is this
| suggesting that doing something like having a layer of oil on top
| of an ambient pressure pot of water would prevent boiling? I
| tried googling for some elaboration but only found discussions of
| superheating water via pressure changes.
| setgree wrote:
| This is now the 12th time this has been posted on HN [0], and I
| see why, it is very insightful.
|
| But his other post, 'submission and dominance among friends,' had
| more impact on me. Connecting our behavior to our mammal
| relatives like he does is not exactly novel, but combined with
| his frankness about his own needs -- especially the profoundly
| uncool desire to be "on the submissive end of this kind of clear
| status play" -- the piece was revelatory for me. Perhaps you'll
| enjoy: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/submission-and-
| dominance-...
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=johnsalvatier.org
| _Microft wrote:
| Submitted a few times, discussed twice with a considerable number
| of comments.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020495 (2020; 115
| comments)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255 (2018; 296
| comments)
| uniqueuid wrote:
| I always use the title of this wonderful essay to explain how
| "AI" works. Deep neural architectures are so performant (in part)
| because they make use of all these minuscule details which our
| brains shield us from seeing.
| simion314 wrote:
| Can you provide an example because I do not understand. Say
| some small detail that humans did not see because it was so
| small and our brain ignored it. For me ANN represent a more
| complex, giant function that we "interpolated" with tons of
| data , give same problem to some smart people and sometimes
| they will gtive you the exact solution with a proof.
| teraflop wrote:
| The "colonizing the universe" diagram seems to be taken from this
| paper: https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/space-races-
| sett...
| bobthechef wrote:
| There is a tacit presupposition here that needs to be made
| explicit if we are not to betray it, namely, the distinction
| between properties and attributes. A property is something that
| follow from the essential nature of a thing. A mere attribute is
| something that isn't and could vary without contradicting the
| essential nature of a thing. So a property of triangles,
| following from Triangularity, is that its angles sum to 180
| degrees. But the color of a triangle is an attribute that does
| not follow from its Triangularity. It may be important in some
| context, but it must be understood as secondary (of course, in a
| secondary way, you could say that it does tell us that the thing
| in question is capable of having that attribute, but the
| attribute itself is not the consequence of its essential nature).
|
| A specialist can suffer from the law of instrument for analogous
| reasons. If you put an immunologist in charge of policy, he may
| reduce the common good to merely those things with immediate and
| obvious immunological relevance to him. Sure, freedom from
| infection is important to the common good, but it isn't the only
| thing and indeed optimizing for that in excess incurs an enormous
| cost to the common good.
|
| Our education system, sadly, does not prepare us in foundational
| ways to reason and understand properly and this lack of
| intellectual and moral discipline can manifest in fixations
| (undisciplined passions, like in this case fear, can produce
| these fixations).
| N1H1L wrote:
| In fact this is why self-driving cars are so hard! A complete
| newbie driver faces all of these tiny issues, which they _learn_
| to forget as they become practiced. There are so many subtleties
| in these scenarios, that it 's mind boggling.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| And if you think stairbuilding is complex, you should look into
| handrailing [0]
|
| The money quote from the article: "I've learned that the correct
| way to build a house is to design the handrail first, then design
| the stair, and the rest of the house will follow."
|
| Part of the reason you don't notice the complexity of everyday
| things is that humans have spent thousands of years perfecting
| the details and methods that let you take your stairs and
| handrails for granted. And, like, 90% of everything else.
|
| The McMaster-Carr catalog isn't >2" thick because they're trying
| to confuse you. It's that thick because everything they sell
| solves a different problem, that somebody worked out the details
| in years ago, and we live in a world where the experience and
| solutions embodied in every part gets mass produced and delivered
| the next day for the cost of mere money.
|
| And then there are manufactured handrail parts, which are a
| grotesque and simplified perversion of a properly carved handrail
| (discussed in the link). But at least regular people can afford a
| handrail for their stairs for safety too.
|
| [0] https://www.thisiscarpentry.com/2009/07/15/drawing-a-volute/
| dsr_ wrote:
| The no-code people imagine that we are on the verge of living
| in a world where that catalog's equivalent in software is just
| a few months away.
|
| If they were right, it still wouldn't solve the problem
| analysis problem, but it would certainly help out the parts
| problem. It would also help move software into a professional
| engineering phase.
| post-it wrote:
| That catalog is here, in the form of libraries.
|
| What no-code people miss is that by the time a piece of
| functionality is available as a no-code widget, it's been
| available as a library for years. No-code solutions will
| never replace developers. They instead free up developer
| time, allowing them to create more niche or more technically
| challenging things.
|
| Wix and other website builders have completely replaced
| developers who make static HTML pages, but those developers
| have moved on to making more complex things with React and
| canvas and WebSockets.
|
| Business requirements grow to match these advances. Twenty
| years ago, an independent store was ahead of its time if it
| had a website. Today, a store without online shopping - or at
| least an online catalog with stock information - is at risk.
| No-code solutions will never be enough, because competitors
| will use no-code and _also_ pay developers to code better
| functionality.
| Verdex wrote:
| I've got a phrase for when I see people trying to "abstract"
| over certain types of problems by writing absurdly
| complicated code that ultimately saves negative time.
|
| "Data abstraction is impossible."
|
| You can abstract an algorithm. Like, how you sort. Merge
| sort, bubble sort, etc. Normally it doesn't matter to the
| rest of the code, you just want a sorted list. You can
| abstract a type or an object. Hey, given some type T and some
| function T -> int, you can get an int.
|
| You CAN'T abstract a chunk of data which has semantically
| distinct members inside of it. If someone sends you a
| structure that has a field in it called "name", then you have
| no idea what that actually means. You have to get them to
| tell you what they mean by "name". The hard part being that
| inevitably "name" means one thing unless the "aux" field is
| set to a number that evenly divides the "misc" field at which
| point "name" has to be filtered by some arcane rules.
|
| This is why we have lists like "falsehoods programmers
| believe about time|names|etc". Time means different things
| for different applications. Names mean different things to
| different contexts and cultures. You have to find someone to
| tell you what all of the individual pieces of the object's
| internals means to them.
|
| no-code will probably see some success in niche domains where
| things have been fixed for years. Ultimately, many
| applications will need hand written code to handle all of the
| meaningful sub-components of the data being interacted with.
| phaedrus wrote:
| ...and the corollary to that is turning things _into_ data
| is often a much simpler alternative to abstraction.
|
| For example suppose you have a program with configuration.
| You might have a "ConfigurationProvider" and abstract that
| with an "IConfigurationProvider" and mock implementations
| of that interface for unit tests.
|
| Or you could simply define a Plain Old Data structure with
| fields for the configuration data. Then you can construct
| an instance of that data structure in different ways as
| appropriate.
|
| The key idea there is: "data" is something that's already
| automatically decoupled from where the data came from. For
| code you have to do work to achieve that decoupling, and it
| will always leak.
| jrumbut wrote:
| > "Data abstraction is impossible."
|
| That's an amazing point. It explains where the object
| oriented proponents of decades past went wrong in thinking
| there would be vendors for "Car" or "Employee" objects.
| twic wrote:
| No, because you can absolutely abstract over data _if it
| is encapsulated_ , which is the whole trick of objects,
|
| You can use a Point from any vendor, without caring if it
| has x and y, or r and theta, or some other representation
| inside, as long as it correctly implements the specified
| interface.
| jrumbut wrote:
| But very few interesting real world objects can be
| consistently described across different pieces of
| software like a Point can, which is where it ties into
| the article.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Photos, movies and music being valuable exceptions.
|
| Text files, including markup formats like HTML too.
| Verdex wrote:
| Yeah, very much this.
|
| Not to mention, if you want to serialize Point, then you
| _have_ to know what its internals look like and what they
| mean. There is no data abstraction.
|
| [Okay, so when you serialize Point, you can also
| serialize _all_ code that will ever do anything with
| point. However, we generally don 't do this (partially
| because of security issues). But it doesn't really help
| _that_ much because whatever the serialized code produces
| when run _has_ to be some datatype where do understand
| the semantic meanings behind its internals.]
| Verdex wrote:
| This feels like what you are describing is algorithmic or
| type abstraction. For your example, it's something like:
| Given some type Point which (I guess) interacts with some
| type Graph you should be able to run the Plot method. Or
| something. And in this case, yeah you can abstract, but
| it's not what I'm calling "data abstraction." [Maybe my
| name is just not quite right.]
|
| Data abstraction would be getting some arbitrary Point
| object and then being able to look into the internals and
| do the right thing. Whether it's x and y or r and theta.
|
| Now you might say, "that's just bad programming if you do
| that," but the point is that often times we don't have a
| choice in the matter because either of the constraints of
| the project OR because the "do the right thing" part
| interacts with non-code.
|
| So for example, if you want to send your Point over the
| network, then you either 1) Need to know the internals,
| what they mean, and how they work or 2) have to send
| along code for the remote device to execute to handle
| your custom internals. Case 2 is generally not done (and
| presents some security issues regardless).
|
| But this isn't just a technical issue. Names are
| notoriously difficult because data abstraction doesn't
| exist. How many first, middle, and last names does
| someone have? Is there a canonical ordering for the
| names? Does someone always have a name? What do the
| prefixes mean? What do the postfixes mean? These
| questions and more all have to do with what you're trying
| to use the name for AND what culture the name comes from.
| There is nothing you can do to abstract away the problem
| of names. And if you try you'll just end up with a lot of
| messy, complex code, that breaks all the time.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| You may be missing the main point of the parent (no pun
| intended). Their proposition is that in reality the
| problem is not how you define a point, but that a "point"
| means different things to different people and thus
| cannot be abstracted. I deeply agree with this
| observation. There are exceptions of course, but my
| experience is that this holds in the general case.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Are you abstracting over the data or over the behaviour?
| indymike wrote:
| > thinking there would be vendors for "Car" or "Employee"
| objects.
|
| For car object: Tesla, Ford, GM
|
| For employee object: Randstad, Kelly, Trueblue
|
| Much better implementation than the C++ one, too.
| majormajor wrote:
| Yeah, if we look at the real world "car" object, we've
| certainly over decades established _some_ common
| requirements that you could call interfaces: turn
| signals, headlights, a rough common size, etc. We 've
| abstracted it + restricted the interface (through laws
| and regulations) to the point that you can build a
| highway or an intersection by following well-understood
| principles.
|
| But if you want to do something more complicated... it
| breaks down. Imagine trying to write software to do
| things with a generic "Transmission" interface. All the
| complicated logic would still be the responsibility of
| the vendor so you would be out of luck trying to come up
| with something more granular than "check_status()" and
| "repair(parts: List<Object>)" as an interface. Which is
| so limited as to be pointless.
| ta988 wrote:
| This is why we have ontologies. Still at a early stage of
| data abstraction but it is getting there.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _" Data abstraction is impossible."_
|
| Data abstraction is hard and many people are no good at it,
| but it's not impossible; it can't be, because it's
| required.
|
| don't think of data abstraction as one and done, think of
| it as a process. Maintaining (as in, maintenance-ing rather
| than obeying) your data abstractions as you make
| modifications to code is the key to clean code, it's where
| the real refactoring takes place.
|
| if your brain works like mine does, it is paralyzing to
| work on code without data abstractions, like always
| thinking of a staircase as all of its component parts
| rather than as a staircase
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Well, they are going to be disapointed when they'll realize
| we haven't even figured out the catalog yet.
|
| Software is half a century old, we are still using flint to
| produce it. The only reason it looks fancy is because it
| makes more sparks, and a lot faster.
| Verdex wrote:
| We're just starting to get out of the alchemy stage right
| now. Wise men and magicians everywhere telling royalty that
| if they only pay them treasures that they will reveal the
| future and show them miracles. Meanwhile it turns out that
| NSS has a straight-forward vulnerability that everyone just
| somehow missed.
|
| If you look at the history of chemistry, mechanical
| engineering, or astronomy then you kind of get the
| impression that we're probably 150-300 years away from
| software development working the way everyone already
| imagines it working.
| rini17 wrote:
| I believe we miss solid common ontology - an agreement
| what individual pieces of data mean. Then individual
| pieces of software are either incompatible or
| inconsistent and must be constantly built anew, resulting
| in all kinds of bugs.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I swear my lord, this Python oil will do miracles with
| your data ailments.
| antod wrote:
| _> If you look at the history of chemistry, mechanical
| engineering, or astronomy then you kind of get the
| impression that we 're probably 150-300 years away from
| software development working the way everyone already
| imagines it working._
|
| If it is to happen, a serious plateauing of "progress"
| will need to happen all the way up the layers of the tech
| stack to the point where app developers or data engineers
| are now working with tools stable enough that previous
| generations would at least recognise let alone even be
| able to work with.
|
| Engineering maturity "nirvana" for software will happen
| not by us getting more experienced/better at it, but by
| "progress" stalling in all the tools we use.
|
| Software changes a lot basically because it is easy to
| change. And because we as an industry value constant work
| towards making it even easier to keep changing - eg
| cloud, containers, devops, agile etc etc
|
| In the physical world, things have stabilised and reached
| a kind of local optimum across the vast majority of
| areas. Sure there are still incremental improvements
| happening, and occasional revolutionary improvements in
| different areas. Mostly the main bits being radically
| changed are the bits that coincidentally touch computers
| downstream from the constant churn happening to software.
|
| Also another factor is when I think of physical
| engineering (and I used to work in civil/structural
| engineering in the 90s), for nearly all work going on,
| the scale of the problems being solved hasn't changed.
| Most building sites are the same size they were, most
| materials are the same, some regulations have changed,
| but ubiquitous CAD tools etc seems to be the major
| change.
|
| So maybe, when we can't make transistors smaller, and we
| can't make cpus faster, and can't increase memory or
| storage things will slow down. eg as each layer up the
| stack plateaus, each layer above it eventually changes
| from working on new capabilities to making what it
| already does more efficient, that will eventually (it
| will take a while) bubble all the way up. Progress slows
| down a lot and us end developers and engineers are
| working on a stable set of tools very much in a local (or
| even global) optimum. Also maybe when/if the worlds
| population stabilises (in decades/centuries/whenever),
| that might lead to an eventual limit on how much user
| data can be mined from people and the scale of the data
| we deal with might stabilise too even beyond the limit
| reached where we've stopped collecting more because of
| capacity limits talked about above.
|
| Heh, I started off trying to disagree with your quoted
| statement by saying I don't think it would ever stabilise
| like other disciplines. But by laying out one way it
| could happen, I think I may have ended up agreeing with
| you :)
| htrp wrote:
| You remind me of a quote I heard at a conference
| (paraphrased badly).
|
| The Data Revolution is like going from the bronze age to
| the iron age.
|
| It will get industrialized eventually, but that time
| frame will take much longer and will look completely
| different from what you expect.
| xwolfi wrote:
| Yeah when most people end up working cutting hair, driving
| cars, carrying bricks and so on... I feel this is going to
| remain a pipe dream to replace the people copy pasting stack
| overflow in creative ways (productive developers) any time
| soon.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _for the cost of mere money_
|
| mere money? talk about overlooking a piece of remarkable
| complexity
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Money is fungible. All dollars, regardless of how you, got
| them are interchangeable.
|
| Knowledge is not. Spending 20 years mastering piano will do
| little good if you need to build a staircase.
|
| Shit, spend a couple years learning how to build furniture
| and then go build a chicken coop. There's shockingly little
| overlap between those two skill sets! That's not a
| hypothetical. There's a lot of knowledge that your body
| learns that doesn't come into play doing carpentry.
| fsckboy wrote:
| _that_ money is fungible is part of the design of money,
| that complex /subtle consideration is one thing that went
| into the construction of a monetary system. We could use
| non-fungible money if it seemed better.
|
| the fungibility of money is similar to the idea that all
| the steps in a staircase should be the same height.
| carapace wrote:
| Giordano Bruno said that whatever has the most value and
| least cost of storage _becomes_ money.
| nawgz wrote:
| > mere money? talk about overlooking a piece of remarkable
| complexity
|
| Wrong framing. "Mere money" because we virtually all have
| money, there are many ways to make it, and the possession of
| it does not encapsulate any skillset or knowledge; exchanging
| it for access to artifacts generated with a massive knowledge
| repository is like trading sand for glass.
| prova_modena wrote:
| I spent a bit working at a custom stairbuilder. Handrails that
| smoothly curve in three dimensions, either to connect straight
| sections or along a curved stair, are called "tangent"
| handrails. Constructing these tangent handrails is challenging.
| It requires both geometrical rigor in devising the plans as
| well as an individual craftsperson with a very high level of
| manual/visual skill. While we would work out the curvature of
| the rail in CAD or paper plans, a huge amount of implementation
| detail was left to a traditional woodworker, such as carving
| the profile of the tangent rail to create transitions pleasing
| to the eye and touch. Additionally, the variable structure of
| wood grain meant that the choice and orientation of the wood
| stock often had to be done piece-by-piece, often with custom
| fixtures.
|
| I was a resident computer nerd there, so one of my projects was
| adapting a 5-axis CNC router to rough out these tangent rails.
| We were successful to some degree, but the fixturing and
| programming for individual tangent sections was very complex.
| It worked out that the CNC approach was only economical when
| the design of the stair required many multiples (rare in our
| case). Otherwise the skill and adaptability of individual
| craftsman was much more efficient, and the CNC was relegated to
| constructing jigs or 2D pieces.
|
| My training was in high-end artisan furniture making, and the
| design challenges I saw in custom stairs were way more complex
| than almost any other field of woodworking I am familiar with,
| including the more technically avant-garde furniture makers.
| The only clear exception is wooden boat building, which
| appropriately enough was the background of many of my coworkers
| at that company.
| jedimastert wrote:
| Stumpy Nubs Woodworking recently put out a video about making
| hand rails in a way very similar to how it would have been done
| when hand-molding planes were still in common use
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6ScjHsD4mI
| an9n wrote:
| I thought about this the other day, thinking about how (some)
| people look down on other people and pat themselves on the back
| for being more knowledgable, better educated, more sophisticated,
| having better taste, being better bred (I'm from the UK lol) etc
| etc. But then there is always someone above one, looking down on
| one with the same arrogant prejudices. Who are these people that
| look down on me as an ignorant, blundering oaf, and what would I
| need to learn to fit in?
|
| Not that even if I did know what I was missing I would make the
| effort, heh.
| jedimastert wrote:
| For some fun historical context, checkout Moxon's "Mechanick
| Exercises" or Nicholson's "Mechanic's Companion", which are both
| treatises on various tradecrafts (including carpentry and
| joinery, which is where stairs would come in) around the late
| 1600s and early 1800s, respectively. Those two books essentially
| serve as the foundation for the modern hand-tool woodworking
| movement.
|
| I mention this because "Lost Art Press" is currently on the front
| page, who are an independent woodworking book publisher near the
| front of this movement
| snowwrestler wrote:
| > I kept arguing because I thought I was right. I felt really
| annoyed with him and he was annoyed with me. In retrospect, I
| think I saw the fundamental difficulty in what we were doing and
| I don't think he appreciated it (look at the stairs picture and
| see if you can figure it out), he just heard 'let's draw some
| diagrams and compute the angle' and didn't think that was the
| solution, and if he had appreciated the thing that I saw I think
| he would have been more open to drawing some diagrams. But at the
| same time, he also understood that diagrams and math don't
| account for the shape of the wood, which I did not appreciate. If
| we had been able to get these points across, we could have come
| to consensus.
|
| If you want to understand the value of "soft skills" like
| communication, it's right here.
|
| Being able to understand that there are different points of view
| present, and finding the bridge between them, is a super power
| for facilitating teamwork. Like any other skill, some people have
| more natural talent, but training and practice can help almost
| anyone.
|
| Studying the humanities, which sometimes comes in for scorn among
| technical folks, can be a way to do this. Learning to read and
| write critically about literature and art really starts with
| learning to detect and think carefully about different points of
| view: among characters, and between the artist and various
| members of their audience.
| an9n wrote:
| > Being able to understand that there are different points of
| view present, and finding the bridge between them, is a super
| power for facilitating teamwork. Like any other skill, some
| people have more natural talent, but training and practice can
| help almost anyone.
|
| > Studying the humanities, which sometimes comes in for scorn
| among technical folks, can be a way to do this. Learning to
| read and write critically about literature and art really
| starts with learning to detect and think carefully about
| different points of view: among characters, and between the
| artist and various members of their audience.
|
| This strikes me as highly ironic given the incredible narrowing
| of permitted opinions on campuses over recent years. Try
| seriously challenging the doctrine and one is liable to be
| cancelled, reprimanded, chucked off a course - even physically
| attacked.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Please don't start flame-war topics on HN. This is way out of
| scope for the article. The GP was simply saying that when you
| study the humanities, you read a lot of different POVs, and
| those help you to understand that your way of thinking might
| not always be perfect, or the best, but that there are many
| angles to looking at a problem. Thanks!
|
| > Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic
| tangents.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments
| crateless wrote:
| > Please don't start flame-war topics on HN.
|
| This is a disingenuous attempt to dismiss a valid criticism
| by categorising it as a flame-war topic.
|
| The humanities today, in general, are by no means either
| tolerant or open (at least in the English speaking portion
| of the globe).
| [deleted]
| huetius wrote:
| It's probably a bigger argument than I can articulate in the
| time I have available at the moment, but I've long believed
| that this phenomenon, among many other crises, is driven by
| the rise to dominance of a constellation of philosophical
| worldviews which center around positivism (and which extends
| to various failed attempts to overcome it).
|
| The categories of thought which underpin a humanistic
| education are denied (a priori), except insofar as they are
| immediately useful to material well-being. The importance of
| contemplation of the truth is relativized downwards, and
| thought must justify itself in terms of action: social
| change, market value, "impact", etc., which is all another
| way of saying that truth is made an instrument power[0]. We
| are living the consequences.
|
| In this light, it becomes apparent that the crisis crosses
| contested political boundaries (although it is admittedly
| progressives who currently have the upper hand). The main
| beneficiaries are, as one might expect, the powerful.
|
| [0]: some may reply that truth has always been a socially
| constructed instrument if power, and that announcing it as
| such is simply a reduction in hypocrisy. This criticism must
| be reversed upon the critic: the proposition is itself a
| construct only believable in a social idiom which made it so.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > It's probably a bigger argument than I can articulate in
| the time I have available at the moment, but I've long
| believed that this phenomenon, among many other crises, is
| driven by the rise to dominance of a constellation of
| philosophical worldviews which center around positivism
| (and which extends to various failed attempts to overcome
| it).
|
| I don't think this is right at all. First, positivism is
| dead. Michael Polanyi killed it (I forget the name of the
| book at the moment).
|
| Second, when people complain about "the incredible
| narrowing of permitted opinions on campuses", they don't
| mean that only positivist voices are allowed. And those
| doing the narrowing aren't doing so from a positivist
| position at all. They're doin so from a position that
| regards positivism as an attempt by a power structure to
| assert dominance (and probably racist besides).
| huetius wrote:
| Let me clarify:
|
| I like Polanyi, but positivism is still very much alive.
| I mentioned in my post various failed attempts to surpass
| it, in which I would include Pragmatism, continuations of
| Marxism, the critical school (excluding some late works
| by Horkheimer), and postmodernism, all of which retain
| positivism's negations.
|
| EDIT: to supply some evidence, in Book III of _Science,
| Faith, and Society_ , Polanyi argues that unchecked
| Positivism would result in a society not fundamentally
| dissimilar from the Soviet society which had prompted him
| to write the book in the first place. I encourage you to
| read it and compare it against your experience, asking
| whether Polanyi secured victory, or whether crucial
| aspects of his thought went unheeded.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Three problems (at least) with positivism:
|
| 1. Polanyi's criticism: Human observers are not
| objective. They start with their own biases. That means
| that any observations of events cannot be 100% trusted as
| a source of truth.
|
| 2. Francis Schaeffer's criticism: Within the structure of
| positivism, there is no way to know that what you observe
| is actually data. It has no basis for saying that it
| should be data.
|
| 3. Greg Koukl's criticism: Since positivism is a set of
| statements in epistemology, and not either direct
| observation or true by pure logic, positivism says that
| you can't know that positivism is true. It is self-
| inconsistent.
|
| Positivism "alive" only by inertia. The position doesn't
| need to be "surpassed" by something, it only needs to be
| refuted in a way that can't really be answered - and it
| has been.
|
| Anyway, none of that was my main point. My main point was
| that it's not positivism that is driving the closing of
| minds and narrowing of discourse on campuses.
| majormajor wrote:
| > In this light, it becomes apparent that the crisis
| crosses contested political boundaries (although it is
| admittedly progressives who currently have the upper hand)
|
| Is it? At least in the US, I'm not sure what progressive
| political victories compare with, say, the long-lasting
| effects of the Trump administration, especially in the
| judicial area. More broadly, many progressive causes have
| been getting weaker in US politics for decades. How many of
| the places that enacted strong rent control decades ago
| would be able to do so today, for instance, vs those where
| it's been weakened?
| huetius wrote:
| Following the mod's advice above, I would like to avoid
| taking this into traditional flame war territory.
|
| Perhaps we might agree that progressivism as a political
| movement has not succeeded in separating economic from
| social liberalism?
| yoyar wrote:
| No single person understands everything about how a pencil is
| made.
| ilyagr wrote:
| In case somebody doesn't know the reference:
|
| https://mises.org/library/i-pencil
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