[HN Gopher] Magic isn't real
___________________________________________________________________
Magic isn't real
Author : dvektor
Score : 69 points
Date : 2024-10-04 02:33 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pthorpe92.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (pthorpe92.dev)
| wruza wrote:
| One interesting thing of (accidentally) starting with assembly is
| that you mostly can't see magic at all, but instead you see
| learning magicians explaining computers in all sorts of funny
| ways.
|
| My first "pc" was a clone of zx spectrum and all I had was a
| built-in BASIC and then some assembler on a cassette. Both went
| with "books" on how to use them, together with all of the
| unlimited time you have when you're a kid.
|
| This transferred to my first PC and eventually I learned how FAT,
| DOS, BIOS work, how to make a TSR and fool around B8000/A0000,
| first steps with 386+. It also helped that my granddad was an
| impulse electronics engineer and taught me how actual gates work
| and how computers count, sum and select numbers. He also had
| access to multiple books on hardware. I knew it all down to the
| silicon.
|
| Other people had all sorts of magical ideas on how computers
| work. Special "hidden system areas", "graphics card does X",
| "computers multiply by addition", etc etc. It's a human thing
| that if we don't understand something, our mind tries to yadda
| yadda it.
|
| And the more you yadda yadda, the less chances it leaves that
| you'll actually learn it. I tend to fight with these half-baked
| autogenerated explanations and try to dig down to how it really
| works. For no particular reason, that's just what I like to do.
| It leaves a mark on how you work though.
| Nevermark wrote:
| > yadda yadda
|
| Like LLMs, we confabulate. We fill in knowledge holes, with
| imagined knowledge we don't really have.
| jeffparsons wrote:
| > Like LLMs, we confabulate.
|
| Thank you for describing LLM behaviour that way. It's a much
| better description than the more popular but less apt
| "hallucination".
| Nevermark wrote:
| I agree, hallucination is a completely different phenomena
| from inadvertently filling in knowledge gaps.
|
| Hallucinating to me, is not a one off effect, but a dynamic
| phenomena. When our sensory processing/interpreting
| continues iterating, but wanders away from, or separates
| from, actual sensory input.
|
| Dreams being a functional example. Drugs that cause our
| sensory systems to be disrupted or overwhelmed by unusual
| internal signals, being another example.
| Retric wrote:
| LLM's operate in discrete steps. So that "interpretation
| continues iterating" is a very good description of what's
| actually happening.
|
| There's a little uncertainty in the process, so sometimes
| it will pick the wrong symbol at the wrong time and the
| entire process just spirals into nonsense. But it's semi
| lucid nonsense like a dream or hallucination not line
| noise.
|
| The confidently stating the wrong thing bit is arguably a
| different though related problem. There's making up a
| citations that don't exist and there's inserting song
| lyrics where a citation should be.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Confabulation: Inadvertent pseudo-memory fill in, within
| a generally reasonable stable context representation.
|
| Hallucination: Context representation becomes unstable,
| resulting in open ended drifting and morphing into
| incoherence.
|
| The scale of error and recursion of error in the latter
| make the effects quite different.
|
| You could be right, perhaps sometimes the initial causes
| might not be so different. But I would be surprised if
| that was true, given there doesn't seem to be much of a
| middle ground between the wide differences in scale and
| downstream effect.
| Retric wrote:
| You could be right that it's a fundamental difference in
| what's going on, but each word is a new iteration/token
| and most errors are more than a single token.
|
| I'm assuming it's like a converging vs diverging series
| in how well the LLM recovers from problems. Where the
| boundary between the two states is arbitrarily small, but
| OpenAI etc has fine tuned the system so you generally see
| the converging / confabulation types of errors even if
| the difference is just a slight change in the scale of
| error.
| Nevermark wrote:
| > I'm assuming it's like a converging vs diverging series
| in how well the LLM recovers from problems.
|
| That's a really good point.
|
| Similar causes diverging in effect, a phase change or
| not, depending on whether a critical feedback threshold
| is hit or not. That could certainly be a factor.
|
| With increasing doses of some drugs, humans do progress
| from being just a bit wonky, to full on lost in space!
|
| But I think confabulation might be on a different
| continuum too. We fill in recalled memories with made up
| details all the time. Our memory storage is lossy,
| associative and overlapping. Our recall is always an
| imperfect combination of actual incidence memory filled
| out by similar memories.
|
| We must confabulate to recall. Statistically, sometimes
| we over confabulate.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| You're in good company with that thought. Many deep
| learning researchers and practitioners have suggested the
| same thing.
|
| Heck, even ChatGPT itself agrees:
| https://community.openai.com/t/hallucination-vs-
| confabulatio...
| dahart wrote:
| Hallucinate seems like a good word for image-producing
| neural nets (which is probably where it's use
| originated?). Confabulate might be a better word for
| talkative LLMs, and less good for images.
|
| I wonder if any neuroscientists or psychologists agree
| about humans and neural nets being similar this way. It's
| less than unlikely that the mechanisms are the same
| between people and LLMs saying not true things. Aside
| from there being a wide variety of reasons people
| fabricate untrue things, we already know the mechanisms
| for neural net hallucinations and confabulations. It's a
| non-self-aware machine designed to output tokens or
| pixels or whatever, it will turn the crank and spit out
| something with no concept of whether it's true or not at
| all times. People, on the other hand, are often using
| emotion to drive what they say (and often without knowing
| it). People will sometimes rationalize their
| confabulations, sometimes say untrue things based on
| belief, sometimes say things driven by fear or
| embarrassment, sometimes lie because they have ulterior
| motives. None of these things apply to neural nets, so
| the similarity between human and NN confabulations seems
| at best limited to superficial summaries, no?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| What the GP is explaining is actually the other way around.
| It's our brain leaving holes even though they are just
| explained on the text.
|
| And yeah ML models do that too.
| jl6 wrote:
| > Special "hidden system areas"
|
| I guess "hidden" can be a matter of perspective, from filenames
| beginning with a period, right through to things like the Intel
| Management Engine.
| vonunov wrote:
| This (roughly) came up in a chat just yesterday. Someone posted
| a screenshot of a web browser using a font face with no glyphs
| or something, or I assume this is what causes this display of
| the codepoints(1). Reminded me of the kind of amateur magic
| lessons I see regularly:
|
| So, people on the internet who feel like they are some kind of
| computer wizards will try to school each other online about how
| computers work. They will go on, like, Quora and ask weird
| questions like "what is one programming language every real
| hacker should know?" And someone will come along and write an
| incredibly definitive-sounding and confident essay about how a
| real hacker has to know the language of binary, because
| everything that's happening in a computer is all just binary,
| 1s and 0s. They heavily imply (at the least) that a real hacker
| regularly peruses binary values. Not like how you might use a
| hex editor. Rather, as if wannabe hackers read source, but real
| hackers read the raw binary. Some kind of M-x Butterfly shit.
| Assembly language is rarely mentioned.
|
| I don't blame them for it, it's just kind of funny. I can kind
| of imagine that the way low-level things are glossed over for
| the sake of explaining high-level things has reasonably left
| some people with the impression that binary is somehow
| expressive and that people who truly know computers are fluent
| in it. And I probably had stranger conceptions than that on my
| own journey.
|
| Anyway, this screenshot is what they must imagine a
| turbohacker's computer looks like all the time
|
| 1. https://i.vgy.me/qNU6J5.jpg
| shermantanktop wrote:
| So many frameworks and dev-oriented features are sold with the
| claim that domain X is super complicated and full of esoteric
| useless trivia, so instead someone has put a clean facade on that
| which simplifies everything and protects the hapless dev from
| having to learn. Which is nice, it's a tidy abstraction, we all
| have other things to do, now we go fast.
|
| Except...the dev has to learn the new API, which we can call
| domain Y, and which can become quite complicated and hard to map
| conceptually to domain X (e.g. React events vs browser rendering,
| or Java GC vs real memory).
|
| And when the cool facade doesn't quite work for some exotic use
| case, now what? The dev gets to learn the original domain X
| anyway, plus how X and Y interact. In the worst case they have
| rewrite all their Y-using code.
|
| Great abstractions are good magic; bad abstractions are evil
| magic. And yet good vs evil is often hard to tell apart when you
| pick up the problem.
| dartos wrote:
| The only areas I've ever seen that were truly super complicated
| were when synchronization is involved.
|
| It's so hard to wrap my head around how a CPU reorders
| instructions and I need to think very slowly and very carefully
| whenever I work with synchronization.
|
| Same with distributed systems. I implemented a toy version of
| raft forever ago, but just wrapping my head around it took a
| month, and I still think I don't really grasp it.
|
| Haven't even looked into paxos yet.
| xxs wrote:
| Sync is easy. Concurrency is hard. Partly b/c as humans we
| can't multitask.
|
| CPU reordering instructions (and speculative execution)
| should be not be hard to understand. It tries to do as much
| work as it could before it has to stall due to lack of data
| mst wrote:
| Corollary: Sufficiently well encapsulated magic is
| indistinguishable from technology.
| zavec wrote:
| Now I kind of want to read a story where it turns out the
| technology we use in our modern lives is actually very
| carefully hidden magic. Sort of like the opposite of (rot13 for
| book spoilers) gur fgrrefjbzna frevrf.
| anymouse123456 wrote:
| TFW the real wizards are the ones working in the strata just
| below the one I understand...
|
| After nearly 30 years of persistent excavation, I'm finally at
| bedrock with registers, some assembly and embedded C.
|
| Lifting my head up to find the mess we've created for graphical
| application development is admittedly disheartening, but also
| thrilling as there are ways to make it better.
| noelwelsh wrote:
| There is at least one more layer, which lies behind the
| abstraction boundary the ISA presents. E.g. x86-64 specifies
| only 16 general purpose registers, but the Zen 4 has 224. Even
| as far back as Pentium II the CPU had more registers than the
| ISA.
| josh-sematic wrote:
| You're not even close to hitting rock bottom on explanations
| of the layers below until you find yourself comparing
| proposed theories of quantum gravity :-)
| kevindamm wrote:
| It is around that point that you may be convinced that
| rocks are capable of conscious thought and the strange loop
| begins again at the top.
| hnfong wrote:
| I am a conscious thinking rock.
|
| (kinda)
| niemandhier wrote:
| Going the other direction, towards higher levels of abstraction
| tends to strip away the magic too!
|
| I recently write some robotics code using ROS, taking a step back
| I looked a the result and thought: Actually that is not much
| different conceptually from running K8s deployments coupled by
| Kafka.
| tehmillhouse wrote:
| When understanding a new "magic", there's this beautiful moment
| when you grok it, and the abstraction poofs away.
|
| It's when you take apart a mechanical clock and keep looking for
| the time-keeping part, until you figure out that there isn't a
| time-keeping part in there, it's just gears and a spring.
|
| It's when you learn about integrated circuits and full-adders,
| and keep trying to understand how a bunch of transistors can do
| Mathematics, until you figure out that there isn't a mathematics-
| doing part in there, it's just circuits and wires, arranged in a
| way that makes the voltages come out right.
|
| It's when your understanding of the top-down structure snaps
| together with the bottom-up mechanics of the building blocks.
| There's no space left for the ghost in the machine to haunt, and
| you go "Oh. huh". I live for that moment.
| Lerc wrote:
| That's the difference between technology magic and illusionist
| magic, When you see how the trick is done with illusions it's
| always a bit of a letdown because the answer is usually
| prosaic, the 'magic' vanishes and it becomes a trick.
|
| When you understand how a piece of technology works you get
| that beautiful moment.
| tialaramex wrote:
| I've never got that. I feel the same way in either case, if
| your trick was easy everybody would do it. Sleight of hand
| tricks for example, if you're good they're completely
| seamless, I could never hope to reproduce and yet I know
| exactly how it's done.
|
| Take that Penn & Teller trick where the live audience is just
| lying - that's a bit lazy, we're not supposed to have some
| great admiration for this trick they're just showing you it's
| an option to just have the live audience lie to the recorded
| audience and that "works". Whereas their transparent version
| of cups and balls is the opposite, you must be a sleight of
| hand master or this won't look like anything.
| gspencley wrote:
| My wife and I are part time magicians. In my experience,
| people who share your mindset become magicians.
|
| At the risk of just repeating exactly what the person
| you're replying to wrote: The reason that non-magicians
| often feel let down when they find out how a trick is
| executed, is that it often feels like an insult to their
| intelligence. Magic toys with and exploits your
| assumptions. As soon as you find out that those assumptions
| were incorrect, and that you were just lied to by a prop
| (for example), your experience and perception of that
| illusion goes from "OMG" to "oh, that's all?"
|
| What we want the methods to be is some grandiose Ocean's 11
| like "heist" with tons of sneaky maneuvers and difficult
| sleight of hand ... but MOST magic tricks, including the
| ones that Penn & Teller fool you with (not the ones where
| they tip the method) are not that.
|
| Penn & Teller have said themselves that (paraphrasing): "if
| the method is more interesting than the trick, the trick is
| not very good ... and that's when we show you the method.
| But the tricks we actually want to fool you with are just a
| bit of gaffer tape and a lie."
|
| The fact that you say that you appreciate magic tricks that
| involve a lot of sleight of hand, or require technical
| mastery, kind of supports what we're saying. Most magic
| tricks aren't that.
|
| To understand why, look at it from the point of view of a
| professional magician trying to pay the bills.
|
| I can do card manipulation. I have a card manipulation act
| that I perform. It is by far the most technically
| challenging routine that I do and it has literally taken me
| years to get to the point where I can execute it and
| perform it. It's closer to juggling than it is to what most
| magic is (though it's still magic because I'm producing
| playing cards and fans of playing cards at my fingertips in
| short sleeves).
|
| Now imagine that the majority of my act was that type of
| trick. I have bills to pay. I have crowds to entertain
| TODAY... and if I make just one mistake in a performance,
| the trick falls flat.
|
| Penn & Teller tip cups & balls because the methods employed
| in that trick are genuinely entertaining to watch.
|
| And the "let's have the audience lie"... I'm pretty sure
| you're referencing a segment in their 1990 TV special
| "Don't Try This at Home" where they had a large semi
| trailer truck run over Teller while surrounded by an
| audience who could see how it was done, which they tipped
| at the end. I wouldn't call that "lazy", I would call that
| using a medium to convey a message.
|
| Magic doesn't work on television. You need to see it in
| person to really appreciate that it wasn't done with
| stooges/actors and camera tricks. That's a thesis that they
| have carried with them over the years. No one would do that
| "trick" in any other venue than in a television special.
| You can't get a big truck up on stage... and if you're
| doing "instant stooge" type of work, where people on stage
| from the audience are in on it ... at the risk of getting
| philosophical, they didn't even experience a magic trick.
| So it's not so much that the method was "lazy" ... it's
| that it was completely ineffective, and thus not even a
| magic trick for a certain group of people. Which was the
| entire point of the segment.
| tialaramex wrote:
| You're correct about the TV special with the truck. I
| don't agree that magic doesn't work on TV. Regardless of
| whether it's a TV show or performed in front of me the
| nature of magic+ (as a performance) is that the performer
| gets to decide what to show and obviously they aren't
| going to leave only a single possibility open to explain
| what I saw, that's something Penn has talked about -
| there's only one way to do that trick in The Prestige so
| you would never do that trick.
|
| I've never seen Penn & Teller live, but I have seen
| Derren Brown both on TV and in person. Now, on TV one of
| the things which most impresses me is Derren's use of
| forces. There are a handful that even an amateur who
| knows what they're looking for can see in some of the TV
| shows and there are more places where it's obviously a
| force but I can't figure out how it's done. In person
| though, that experience is actually less fun, because of
| course the force doesn't work on me. So he's forced a
| theatre full of other people to do what he wanted, and
| they don't know how. It didn't work on me in the TV
| audience but that's fine, I'm not the target - when it
| doesn't work in a theatre full of people it's a bit
| disappointing. When I listened to a recording of "Thou
| shalt always kill" I knew from the outset what the last
| two lines would be but that still kinda works, again in
| person it wouldn't land the same.
|
| + If you claim _not_ to be a magician, that this is real,
| then it 's not up to you what is shown or not shown, if
| Millikan's drop experiment only worked with this custom
| made box and a specified oil recipe then it's just a
| trick. We do the experiment in whatever circumstances are
| available and it works because it's measuring a fact
| about our universe, it's not a trick.
| gspencley wrote:
| I think what you mean by "force" is what magicians call a
| "psychological force." This is when, through suggestion,
| the spectator will name or do something that the magician
| was trying to get them to name/do, while having it look
| like the spectator had a free choice, through no other
| means than applied suggestion. These do "work", but as
| you pointed out they are not sure fire. You get the best
| results when you can do it on a large group of people and
| you're upfront about the fact that it won't work for
| everyone.
|
| Although in Derren Brown's case, one of the things that
| makes him a genius in the world of magic is that he
| reversed that dynamic. One of the brilliant things about
| Derren Brown's "brand" of magic is that by blending stage
| hypnotism and parlour tricks, he does a lot of things
| where when you think you're watching a demonstration of
| stage hypnotism, it's actually a parlour trick that is
| dressed up to look like stage hypnotism.
|
| In other words, he might use a classic sleight of hand
| trick to do a "force" while finding a way to frame and
| present it as if he were using suggestion.
|
| But stage hypnotism and suggestion .. .that's not magic
| tricks. So if Derren Brown is employing a psychological
| force, or doing a demonstration of suggestion that will
| work for the majority of the audience but not all ...
| that's not a magic trick. By definition, it is not a
| trick.
|
| What magicians mean when they talk about "forces" are
| ways to make it look like the spectator, ANY spectator,
| had a free choice but it was engineered. A card force,
| for example, where you think you have a free choice of
| any playing card but the magician "forced" a specific
| card on you. Those are 100% guaranteed. They don't use
| suggestion, they use sleight of hand, and there is no
| person in the world that those don't work 100% of the
| time on unless the magician makes a mistake.
|
| Back to Derren Brown, although him and Teller are close
| personal friends and they don't hate each other by any
| means... P&T have been very outspoken about the fact that
| they consider some of what Derren does to be unethical,
| because he presents magic tricks as if they are displays
| of stage hypnotism or suggestion. Like most "mentalists"
| he has flirted with a line that many magicians will not
| cross. Where he claims that by reading body language, or
| using applied suggestion etc. that he can do or know
| certain things ... when the reality is those things are
| executed via traditional parlour trick methods are often
| just classic magic tricks that most magicians know and
| can do but are presented with a new/different layer of
| lies.
|
| So why doesn't magic work on TV ... well, you gave the
| answer by invoking Derren Brown. If he is doing these
| "forces" (which to clarify I think you mean psychological
| "forces") and they work 10 out of 10 times on television
| but they don't work on 100% of live audience members ..
| well then you know why magic is weak (at best) on TV ...
| because all we need to do is go ask 52 people to think of
| a playing card, and guess that they're thinking of the 7
| of Hearts (for example), and then just only air the one
| take where the guess was right.
|
| There is a YouTube creator named James Hoffman who is a
| coffee barista. And he was on an episode of Derren
| Brown's Trick or Treat (if I remember those details
| correctly). His story of being on that show is very
| illuminating. He talks about how he was shown 2 different
| tricks, the first one fried his brain, the second one was
| "meh." For whatever reason they aired the 2nd one that
| was "meh", but cut in the reaction to the first one where
| he was like "OMG OMG that was so amazing."
|
| Why would you trust what magicians tell you, when they
| say they don't do shit like that on television? This is
| why, as a huge fan of magic, I kind of hate televised /
| pre-recorded magic. I have no idea what they did during
| the editing process. Whereas live, there are so many more
| restrictions and the audience has a much clearer
| understanding and impression of what those restrictions
| are. But on tv... anything is possible through editing
| and vfx.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Derren used to have a TV show (I don't remember the name)
| where they actually show some times a live trick that was
| recorded for the show doesn't work. Because of course it
| can't always work. It's like those out-takes at the end
| of a Jackie Chan movie, two hours of this guy being
| flawless isn't real, here is the time he was a second too
| slow and ended up taking a kick to the head and his
| "enemies" all rush over to check he's OK.
|
| I understand the distinction you're making but I think
| it's so narrow that these overlap in practice, there will
| always be a psychological element to controlling the
| volunteer. They _could_ do anything and you don 't want
| that because that's definitely not part of the show.
|
| Derren has also done that "Only show the one where it
| worked" in a TV show but lampshaded it by also later
| showing the annoying hours of trying it and failing over
| and over. Again that's pretty interesting and it's a case
| where you _could_ just fix it, but where 's the fun in
| that? I think that was on a show about an actual scam
| pulled on gamblers, where you give somebody the false
| impression that you're picking winners reliably. That's
| not a trick, it's just a failure to consider the broader
| picture - every other participant knows you sometimes
| pick losers, but one "lucky" person does not and they're
| the victim.
| gspencley wrote:
| > I understand the distinction you're making but I think
| it's so narrow that these overlap in practice
|
| Entire books have been written about this, literally. So
| obviously we're taking short-cuts in a HN thread. Teller
| has said "all magic is a psychology experiment" so you're
| correct in that regard.
|
| The point that I'm trying to make is that magicians
| rarely take risks in live performances. It is a job and
| there is a lot at stake. Obviously anything can, and
| does, happen, but there is a very important reason that
| magicians (not me, but magicians as a whole) distinguish
| between "psychological forces" and "forces."
|
| It is that "forces" are considered to be sure fire... so
| near to 100% guaranteed that we consider them 100%
| guaranteed. Whereas "psychological forces" are well
| understood to be much less than 100% guaranteed.
|
| Do magicians ever use psychological forces in practice?
| Sure. If, when it fails, there is an "out." Where if you
| saw the same trick performed several times, it would play
| out slightly differently each time. For example, let's
| say that I ask you to think of a card, and then I take a
| 1 in 52 odds guess at what you're thinking just in case I
| hit. And maybe I will slightly improve my odds by
| guessing at commonly thought of playing cards. Most of
| the time it's not going to hit, and that's fine because
| there's a fall back. But it's done so that in the event
| that it hits we have what looks like a bonefide miracle.
| Magicians do that occasionally.
|
| But most of the time it's not that. Most of the time the
| magician is executing something that is considered to be
| close enough to 100% that no fallback ("outs" as we call
| them) is necessary.
|
| Now obviously you could have some jerk physically grab
| the deck out of your hands or say to you verbally "I want
| the 8 of spades" when you extend the cards to have them
| remove one. That can happen, sure, and an experienced
| performer will be able to navigate the situation and turn
| it around "you see the thing is, I could guess what card
| you were thinking of ... 68% of men between the age of 24
| and 35 name the 8 of spades ... we need a RANDOM card for
| this trick" etc. (And that example is valid, but
| traditional performer wisdom is once you've recovered get
| that jerk off the stage and move on as fast as possible
| because they've just proven themselves to be disruptive).
| jsmith45 wrote:
| See, I won't say magic can't work on television. It can
| work, but it does rely on a setting where the home
| audience can be reasonably sure the film crew is not in
| cahoots with the performer. This is uncommon, but in some
| limited scenarios like magic tricks on America's Got
| Talent, or say P&T's Fool Us there is little reason to
| cheat with video tricks, as those won't help with the
| judges/P&T at all, plus you risk having members of the
| studio audience call out the producers over such
| trickery.
|
| Things like TV specials on the other hand, yeah not so
| much.
| quesera wrote:
| I was _certain_ that you were going to conclude with a
| paragraph about LLMs.
| tehmillhouse wrote:
| I was _this close_ to concluding with a paragraph about
| Buddhism and the Self. Which is basically the same thing, but
| from the first-person perspective.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| I've recently done reading "Digital Design and Computer
| Architecture" by Harris and Harris, and the part about
| microarchitecture had this exact impression on me: "oh, so we
| just demux the opcode, enable/disable the necessary
| signals/paths and it all... just works out in the end, if the
| clock is fine. Huh. Well, in retrospect it's kinda obvious."
| asimovfan wrote:
| "The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the
| knowing." -- Isaac Asimov
| dvektor wrote:
| Keeping true to your username :)
|
| Man I'm not going to lie tho... I just could not make it
| through the foundation series
| AndyKelley wrote:
| I liked them. But I was pretty young when I read them, so
| pretty much any book had new insights and wisdom to offer
| me.
| ghssds wrote:
| While the Foundation series is what's best known nowadays,
| the Suzan Calvin and Elijah Bailay stuff, and more
| generally everything set before the Galactic Empire even
| exists in Asimov's fictional timeline is where Asimov is at
| his best.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| I went through an EE degree instead of a CS degree in undergrad
| specifically so I could peel back this magic and really
| understand what's going on, to some detail, down to the
| electromagnetism level. It is indeed a very freeing feeling to
| be resting atop so many layers of abstractions, with the
| understanding that if you ever had to, you could go down to any
| one of them and kind of feel your way around.
|
| I think for me the biggest magic-killing moment was when I
| realized that CPU clock cycles, timing trees, etc. were all
| just ways for us to shoehorn a fundamentally analog thing (how
| much voltage is in area X?) to a digital thing (does area X
| have enough voltage? yes? OK, call it a 1 and let's move on
| already!). Somehow to me that feels like the ultimate "leaky"
| abstraction, although of course decades and trillions of
| dollars have gone into making it ever more watertight for
| 99.99-several-more-9s% of the time. At least to the end user.
| Your mileage may vary if you're a TSMC researcher or something,
| of course.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I work with FPGAs and embedded systems occasionally, and you
| have no idea how amazingly watertight the
| phone/desktop/server CPU abstraction is in comparison to what
| you get the moment you do something slightly weird. A
| combination of the chips, the firmware, and the OS does so
| much work to give you the abstraction of "machine runs code
| and it just works."
| bena wrote:
| I've always felt the whole binary/digital thing was one of
| the most clever bits of compromise with the real world I've
| ever seen.
|
| You have this thing, you want to be able to translate its
| value into something useful. In this case, the amount of
| voltage in a circuit to a number. And you spend so much time
| trying to make sure the voltage level passed is rock solid,
| that your read is equally solid, etc. Until you realize that
| you'd have to invent so many more industries just to do this
| one thing that you just give up and say the only thing you
| can know with certainty is that there is or is not voltage
| passing through the circuit.
|
| Then you need to be able to translate "ON" and "OFF" into
| actual usable values. And eventually coming down to a base 2
| counting system so that 4 circuits gives you 16 distinct
| values seems obvious in hindsight, but had to be a revelation
| when they realized it.
| fragmede wrote:
| for me, it was latches and creating a CPU which instructions
| could be fed into. but it wasn't a "lost the magic" feeling,
| it was a "that's amazing!" feeling.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > It's when you take apart a mechanical clock and keep looking
| for the time-keeping part, until you figure out that there
| isn't a time-keeping part in there, it's just gears and a
| spring.
|
| The time-keeping part is arranging gears and a spring in a way
| that will, in fact, keep time.
|
| > It's when you learn about integrated circuits and full-
| adders, and keep trying to understand how a bunch of
| transistors can do Mathematics, until you figure out that there
| isn't a mathematics-doing part in there, it's just circuits and
| wires, arranged in a way that makes the voltages come out
| right.
|
| The mathematics-doing part in there is the arrangement of
| circuits and wires in ways that can actually do arithmetical
| operations on voltages.
|
| It's _not_ magic. But an adder, while never more than a bunch
| of circuits and wires, is still a mathematics-doing part.
| harperlee wrote:
| Well to be pedantic: the time-keeping part isn't the gears
| but a pendulum.
|
| The spring gives energy to the pendulum, but that can't
| effect more than in its amplitude: the period of a given
| pendulum is constant. Later springs demultiply the tick tack
| of the pendulum into desired units.
|
| The heart of the clock is that choke on energy though a
| period.
|
| Thats also why the famous phrase: clocks dont measure time
| but other clocks.
|
| (Please dont mind the grammar: writing on mobile)
| GrantMoyer wrote:
| Sufficiently understood magic is by definition technology.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| You will indeed find the _magic_ to be no such thing when you dig
| deep down in the abstactions. Each part makes sense and is
| comprehensible.
|
| However the magic is what emerges when the parts come together,
| the system becomes more than the sum of its parts.
|
| Think of a car or a cellphone, an llm, it feels magical what it
| does, while the elementary parts do not consist of magic.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| On the topic of how that implementation comptime in Go works:
| I've toyed with a similar idea for implementing constant
| folding/beta reduction -- generate a temporary file with the
| relevant subset of definitions, insert the constant
| expression/function call you'd like to evaluate and... compile
| and run this file. It may not be the most performant thing to do
| but at least you get the correct semantics _without_ writing a
| separate constexpr interpreter.
| zaphar wrote:
| Magic isn't real. But unnecessary magic can be annoying and
| sometimes doesn't pull it's weight.
| dvektor wrote:
| Indeed. If it magically works, it can magically break.
| bananaflag wrote:
| The only two examples of real "magic" I've encountered (would be
| interested in more):
|
| 1) You cannot do preemptive multitasking except by having a timer
| interrupt (okay, maybe one can also allow emulation).
|
| 2) Quantum key distribution (starting with BB84) depends
| crucially on the fact that the world is not classical.
|
| But in general I agree with the article, it's more or less why I
| did not become a programmer.
| mistercow wrote:
| Sometimes a remnant of the magic remains in the math, though,
| even after you understand why the math must work. The Burrows-
| Wheeler transform used in bzip2 is an example of this for me. I
| get why it works, but it just feels too damned _convenient,_
| almost as if this is one of the universe's APIs, and you don't
| get to look into the source code of this one to find out why such
| a simple maneuver is so effective on exactly the sort of data we
| like to compress.
| criddell wrote:
| I've always thought the Diffie-Hellman key exchange is pretty
| neat.
| mistercow wrote:
| My own mental picture of that makes it just feel very clever,
| rather than magical. If you imagine that addition is easy,
| but division is hard, it's pretty easy to see how you can
| build fast integer multiplication out of addition, and create
| hard to reverse operations like key exchange.
|
| Now replace "addition" with modular multiplication, and
| "division" with the logarithm, and you have the trick behind
| DH. Swap out addition for this weird operation that involves
| jumping around elliptic curves, and you have the trick behind
| ECDH (admittedly, the fact that that jumping around thing
| works as a group operation is still pretty magical).
|
| What I like about this way of thinking about it is that you
| can fully implement the key exchange in terms of integer
| addition, and the fact that it lets you pass around secrets
| in a world without "division oracles" seems pretty mundane.
| abdellah123 wrote:
| Birds aren't real
| highfrequency wrote:
| > I'm sure I'm not alone, in that each time you pull the curtain
| off a piece of 'magic', you have the same thought: Oooooh yeah. I
| mean, well duh.. how else would you do that? I can't believe I
| couldn't see it.
|
| This is the great paradox of good ideas. The best ideas are
| obvious, but only in retrospect. You would be very unlikely to
| encounter the idea by randomly fumbling around, yet it feels so
| simple and obvious (and often even easy to implement!) after
| someone else points it out and you mull it over. Usually it
| requires looking in a different dimension than the one you were
| focused on rather than looking further along familiar dimensions,
| which is our default behavior.
|
| In this way there's a parallel to modern machine learning, where
| backprop on gigantic models allows us to find very short paths in
| very high dimensions, rather than finding very long circuitous
| paths in low dimensions. It turns out this also solves the
| overfitting problem, in the same way that "retrospectively
| obvious" is a good filter for ideas.
| tayloramurphy wrote:
| Charles Petzold's book "Code" was the book that revealed the
| magic behind computers for me. While I don't fully understand
| everything that happens with a computer, there's a confidence
| that I _could_ if I needed to. It made tough problems feel
| solvable in a way I hadn 't felt in other disciplines.
| dvh wrote:
| In recent video about reverse game of life Alpha Phoenix hinted
| that sat solvers are magic: https://youtu.be/g8pjrVbdafY
| gradientsrneat wrote:
| One of the cool things about being a kid is I didn't know how tf
| anything works. So I thought long and hard about how things work
| and just randomly guessing. When it turns out later there's a
| clear answer, it's very satisfying. But knowledge can also weigh
| down and discourage curiosity.
| metalman wrote:
| interesting how a click bait title works just like magic and even
| more so gets people debating a so so premise in mystical terms
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