[HN Gopher] Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
___________________________________________________________________
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
Author : lis
Score : 358 points
Date : 2025-02-18 09:36 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (johnsalvatier.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (johnsalvatier.org)
| TZubiri wrote:
| The world is complex, yes
| coliveira wrote:
| The universe seems to have a fractal structure. At every scale we
| can look there is a huge amount of detail.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| One thing I find interesting is the apparent "End of
| Greatness". It seems like the fractal nature of reality has
| both an upper and lower bound?
|
| > The End of Greatness is an observational scale discovered at
| roughly 100 Mpc (roughly 300 million light-years) where the
| lumpiness seen in the large-scale structure of the universe is
| homogenized and isotropized in accordance with the cosmological
| principle. At this scale, no pseudo-random fractalness is
| apparent.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#End_of_Gre...
| metalman wrote:
| Its not just the(possible) fractal nature of the universes
| structure,it is that the composition of idividual portions
| varries, and those portions react differently to the forces
| bieng exerted on them. And then at the fine level, is it the
| same to accelerated by a gravitational force, as it is to be
| accelerated by a magnetic one, of course not. We have layers
| of complexity, and it is quite beyond any imagining or
| quantifying. Luckily our aproximations will get a sandwich
| made or soup,it might be better for pondering the universe,
| as it can be stired to make little swirly fractals.
| jandrese wrote:
| Possible, but since that scale is so far outside of human
| experience it is possible there is detail there that we are
| unable to perceive using our most modern techniques.
| go_elmo wrote:
| Maybe its not due to the universe but our perception of it?
| saxenauts wrote:
| why is our perception and the way it works different from the
| universe?
|
| with enough agency, and ignoring everything else in the world
| you realize that your perception is all there is, that you
| can ever be sure of.
|
| There is no universe, there is no quantum physics. Those are
| just models, your perception models them.
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| Surely, keeping a 1:1 match between our perception of the
| universe and the universe itself is a kind of order that
| would be constantly under threat by the inexorable move
| towards increasing entropy. The lack of match either now or
| in the future is what you would expect. Chaos is the expect
| state, order is the exception. Hence you should not expect
| for that match to exist by default
| bloomingkales wrote:
| You can be born with your perception. For example,
| opposite sexes generally attract and you don't really
| have to teach this. We're born to see things the same,
| but somehow we work to obstruct this by modding our
| perception. When one person mods their perception, they
| become god ( a creator). For example, you aren't the
| tallest one in the room but you see yourself as that. You
| create a reality, and this is something people are
| addicted to and causes all the harm in the world (someone
| is manipulating our shared perception with their lie).
|
| Reality is a repository that we must all be good
| maintainers of. Beware the false PR (delusions).
|
| Which brings me to the the author's article. Many
| creatures on earth, past and present, omit or ignore all
| the little details. They live a lie that is just as
| intricate as the details. Details matter if the details
| matter to _you_. Humans are world builders, and they will
| reshape the details to see what they want. So will a
| snake, its own tail can look like its food if necessary.
| codr7 wrote:
| Where's the proof that humans of opposite sex are
| intrinsically attracted to each other? I can't see it.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| Exactly. I got no clue who taught most of the billions of
| people this is the way.
| codr7 wrote:
| There is this thing called culture, don't know if you
| heard about it.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| I read recently an article on HN that basically entropy
| (and hence increase thereof) is just a statistical model
| of uncertainty of the things we don't know. As soon as
| our understanding (of e.g. positions and velocity of
| individual molecules) increases, that what we call
| entropy, decreases. At least my understanding.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| That presupposes a distinction between the universe and the
| observer. The idea that any such distinction is an illusion
| is both ancient and profound. (Perhaps even obvious, at least
| in the abstract.)
| glenstein wrote:
| I think it can be charitably interpreted to mean, for
| everyday purposes, however much you "zoom in" on something,
| there's meaningful details at lower and lower resolutions
| until you've exhausted your focus or ability to zoom.
| lotharcable wrote:
| The other problem is that all the details matter all the time.
|
| Like if you want to mathematically model what happens in a pool
| table hall when somebody strikes a ball with a great deal of
| force... by the time you get to the six or seventh bounce you
| are going to have to start to take into account the position
| and movement of people standing around the table watching it.
| The airflow, the vibration of them moving, the relative
| gravitational forces, etc. It all matters all the time.
|
| And the problem only gets worse the larger the scale and longer
| the timelines.
|
| Like if you want to manage a economy.
|
| It is tempting to want to look at "things from a high level"
| and imagine that all the details just kinda average themselves
| out. So it isn't necessary to figure out the behavior of each
| individual in a national economy. It should be possible to
| simply plot out the results of their decision making over time
| and extrapolate that into the future to come up with meaningful
| policy decisions and 5 year plans.
|
| The problem is that that doesn't work. Because all the details
| matter all the time.
|
| Also the very act of making policies causes changes in the
| behavior economy in wildly unpredictable manners. Every
| individual actor involved is going to change their behavior and
| decision making based on your decision making, which then
| changes the behavior and decision making of every other
| individual, etc etc. In a endless fractal involving billions of
| actors, since your national economy is not isolated from the
| forces of every other economy and visa versa.
|
| Also trying to make targets out of measurements and indicators
| tends to destroy the value of the measurements and indicators.
| Meaning that by setting policies you are destroying the
| information you are basing your decisions off of.
|
| So you can't collect enough information to make good decisions.
| The information you receive is already obsolete by the time you
| get it. And the act of trying to create rules and policies
| based on the information you do have tends to destroy what
| little value it has left.
| bobson381 wrote:
| You sound like you would really enjoy the book Seeing Like a
| State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
| Have failed.
|
| I wonder if a lot of this comes back to the
| enlightenment/science-y way of looking at the world that
| imagines that the way to understand stuff is to break it into
| subproblems, solve those, and build back up from there. It
| relies on a fundamental assumption that there are separate
| things instead of a big continuous process of happening. I
| recently read about a study where participants were asked to
| pick the best car for a set of needs, and were given 4
| variables per car in one case, and 16 variables per car in
| another. Then, each group was either distracted while
| pondering, or allowed to think through it
| directly/consciously. The conscious thought group did better
| than distracted group did when there were 4 variables, but
| worse when there were more. Intuition is great at the
| missable details.
| nativeit wrote:
| ...and that's all before you get into all the other logical
| fallacies that tend to compromise one's perspective. Anything
| that requires anticipating and/or interpreting the behaviors
| of other people, or that involves accounting for risks or
| probabilities--these are especially fraught as our own
| instincts and nature actively works to warp objective
| reality.
|
| In the context of policy making (or presidential fiat, as the
| case may be), there is always the risk of mistaking what
| people should do with what they will do. A pragmatic strategy
| for success will include systems that can help to thwart the
| worst impulses of our flawed reasoning, including things like
| dispassionate peer reviewed analyses (oops) that is
| untethered by the ambitions or ideologies of individual
| people or groups (oops), a diverse array of advisory opinions
| (oops), functional checks on monolithic authority (oops), and
| mechanisms for correcting prior mistakes (fingers crossed).
|
| I think this all contributes to the phenomenon that folks
| have (a bit erroneously) associated with the Dunning-Kruger
| effect--essentially the idea that people who haven't learned
| enough to know how much they _don't_ know are dangerously
| overconfident and naive. That said, I think there is a
| tendency to assume this about others that's probably
| fallacious in and of itself. In the case of current events, I
| don't believe the individuals involved actually _care_ enough
| to have even mounted the left peak of the Dunning-Kruger
| chart, but rather are fully uninformed and unconcerned with
| much of any implications outside of their own very narrow
| ideological ends (it's probably more accurate to apply
| Dunning-Kruger to the ideology itself, or maybe the broader
| coalition of partisan cohorts who share it, than it is the
| people wielding it).
| bee_rider wrote:
| What does it mean for the universe to have a fractal nature,
| other than that it looks more detailed the closer you look?
|
| I mean, I think it is very poetic to suppose the universe has
| some sort of underlying fractal structure. But... perhaps the
| universe just looks like it has a fractal structure because the
| finest details are pretty small relative to us. At the bottom,
| the atoms, electrons, and quarks are more like potentials
| anyway, right?
|
| They don't have solid surfaces anyway. Maybe we can plot the
| potential fields in a way that makes them look like fractals?
| But... my modern physics, fields and waves, and even my
| mathematical understanding of fractals are all a bit rusty (so,
| what am I even doing in this conversation? Oh well), but
| shouldn't the potential fields eventually be smooth at some
| point? And fractals are not very smooth.
|
| Therefore I conclude the universe doesn't have a fractal
| structure, it is just very small. But that isn't poetic at all.
| :(
| doug_durham wrote:
| How much of that is new detail versus repeated patterns? A good
| approximation of all human visual reality fits in a 5GB
| diffusion model.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Not true at all there's limits in terms of scale in both
| directions.
| efilife wrote:
| There is limits?
| Terr_ wrote:
| I'd be cautious about the word "fractal" misleading us into
| looking for a scale-spanning pattern that dictates both large
| and small details simultaneously.
|
| Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and fine features occur for
| different reasons than coarse features.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| > fine features occur for different reasons than coarse
| features
|
| Important point. This makes reality _even less tractable_
| than a fractal, by a solid margin!
| wruza wrote:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=gB9n2gHsHN4 (3B1B: Fractals are
| typically not self-similar)
| unsui wrote:
| This is what frustrates me to no end, re what's going on with
| DOGE and the indistriminant shutting off of legacy systems.
|
| As Joel Spolsky once commented, , all non-trivial abstractions
| are, to some degree, leaky.
|
| This is because reality itself is leaky. Or another way to put
| it, reality itself is non-trivially complex.
|
| And any sufficiently long-lived production system that works at
| scale necessarily has to accommodate that complexity, to some
| degree.
|
| Yes, some of these systems are sub-optimal, but nonetheless, they
| work, to the extent that they are production systems.
|
| And, as anyone who has worked on legacy production systems, that
| complexity is itself mired in complexity, often due to weird edge
| and corner cases that reflect the complexity of the world that
| the system is attuned to.
|
| And then, to come in with the mentality of a cocky intern with
| delusions of grandeur and simply shut off these systems
| indiscriminantly.....
|
| and yes, I am asserting that this is being done indiscriminantly.
|
| It is foolish on a scale I can't fathom, as an engineer who
| appreciates the complexity of systems beyond my level of
| comprehension. Organic systems that have grown to accomodate
| reality, warts and all.
|
| And to simply shut things off, indiscriminantly, is beyond
| foolish. It is reckless, and eventually, as the body count rises,
| evil.
| zanellato19 wrote:
| Yeah, Chesterton's Fence is simply not a principle that people
| like Elon pay attention to. Sometimes for the better, mostly
| for the worse, specially when taking over something that's
| already there.
| investguy1 wrote:
| In 1800, the government of the USA spent 2% of GDP.
|
| In 2020, the government of the USA spent 30% of GDP.
|
| In 2024, the government of France spent 57% of GDP.
|
| Are the people of 2024 France _really_ getting 28x the value
| from their government as 1800 USA?
|
| It is not evil to ask these questions or to experiment with
| government,
|
| And more people should consider backing off from political-
| media consumption as it is clearly toxic to the soul.
|
| The reality that counts most is the one around you, and I see
| _far_ too many people destroying their relationships with
| family, friends, and colleagues over national politics when
| there are much bigger fish to fry in one 's own garden.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| > there are much bigger fish to fry in one's own garden.
|
| Here's a pretty large fish to fry: the breakdown of
| democracy, and a shift towards autocracy and dictatorship.
|
| This is a fish that affects everyone's gardens, like it or
| not.
| radiospiel wrote:
| > Are the people of 2024 France really getting 28x the value
| from their government as 1800 USA?
|
| oh but certainly. Healthcare, social security, education, ...
| just to name a few
| bluGill wrote:
| The question was 28x though. Not just are you getting more
| value, but is the value 28 times more. This is not clear,
| and probably answerable. Health care is very different
| between now and 1800 (in 1800 your lifespan was measurably
| better if you didn't go to a doctor ever - this was before
| handwashing and antibiotics). Even if you compare today,
| France and the US have many differences in the current
| system and so you can argue things either way and we learn
| more about your bias than any truth (there are pros and
| cons of both systems so all conclusions). Both todays are
| very different from either in 1800, and we have no way of
| knowing how either would be different.
| gerardvivancos wrote:
| Asking the question with the provided data is too
| simplistic to even argue about.
|
| "Here's the non contextualized percentages, what do you
| think of the difference between this two percentages
| which are more than two centuries apart, and from
| different countries?"
| immibis wrote:
| Percentages don't really work like that. 56% of one
| number isn't 28 times 2% of a different number. And it's
| not even the right number. GDP measures rate of number
| flow, not rate of benefit flow, or amount of benefit.
|
| It's also noteworthy how people ask this question about
| the government but never ask it about private
| corporations.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| I think probably the slaves in 1800, whose experience of
| the government was its violent enforcement of their sub-
| human status would probably find the protection of their
| civil rights in 2024 France to be quite a bit more than
| 28x as valuable, yes.
|
| I think the women who couldn't independently own
| property, had no protections against marital rape, being
| beat by their husbands, or most any other form of abuse
| would agree that even the comparitively tepid protections
| offered by modern France are priceless in comparison.
|
| I think children forced to labor without pay, homosexuals
| forced into hiding, Native Americans kidnapped from their
| parents and forced into boarding schools, and any number
| of other now-protected classes would also agree.
|
| Sure, if the government only serves a small fraction of
| the population at the expense of all others, that small
| fraction can debateably get comparitively good value. But
| it sure sucks for literally everyone else.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| How much of that required a bigger state?
|
| The end of slavery was really due to slavery being
| uneconomic. That's why the Northern states didn't have
| slavery. It would have ended in the South as well, even
| without the Civil War (which was a kind of big state
| thing, of course).
|
| Children forced to labour without pay -- also an economic
| issue.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Even though US is more wealthy than Europe, the average
| European seems struggling much less than their US
| counterpart. Just have a look at poverty, homelessness,
| health figures, even of educated people.
|
| The latest votes, and your comment, only seem to indicate
| that US people on average find that to be fine enough,
| the price for a (for me weird) kind of freedom.
| bluGill wrote:
| Perception is not reality. People complain all the time.
| People will always spend the most they can get by with.
| There are people earning $million/year who have less
| spending money after paying their monthly bills (to spend
| on things like food) than others living below the poverty
| line. This is all about how they spend money, the person
| making $million/year is clearly rich, but if they are
| still having trouble making ends meet.
| jebarker wrote:
| > It is not evil to ask these questions or to experiment with
| government
|
| I don't think anyone has a problem with the question being
| asked. It's the non-scientific method of experimentation that
| is troubling people.
| kimixa wrote:
| And the clear bias in the presentation of numbers in the
| "question".
|
| What people called the "Government" provided rather
| different things 200 years ago, let alone issues with
| defining a comparable "GDP" in such different environments.
| jebarker wrote:
| Did you mean to reply to me? I don't see how this
| counters what I said. If you mean to imply that the
| questions use of statistics is a comparable problem to
| the current "government experiment" then I don't agree.
| kimixa wrote:
| No, I was intending to build upon what you said that the
| question likely _isn 't_ actually being asked in good
| faith, instead an attempt to "anchor" readers into the
| assumptions it makes rather than really examine the
| answer, and people may indeed then have issues with it.
|
| To really design experiments we really need to be asking
| _meaningful_ questions about _comparable_ metrics, after
| all.
| jebarker wrote:
| Ah, I see. Yes, I agree.
| zht wrote:
| yes? is this a serious question?
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| > In 2020, the government of the USA spent 30% of GDP.
|
| Interesting that you specifically chose a covid year. In 2024
| spending was 23%. The 50 year average of spending a
| percentage of GDP is 21%.[1]
|
| Yet again, anyone who believes that we have some crazy out of
| line spending right now is in a media/propaganda echo
| chamber.
|
| And if anyone believes that hacking apart our country under
| the guise of "cutting spending" again is falling for the same
| playbook. What is being done is not at all driven by cutting
| spending, that's just the justification bring put forward -
| any amount of looking into what's being done, vs what's is
| claimed is being done makes that obvious.
|
| The echo chamber that had been created is out of control at
| this pointas somehow a significant number of people believe
| what is being said.
|
| [1]https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60843/html#:~:text=In%20to
| ta...
| daedrdev wrote:
| France has a massive welfare state and pension system (which
| is causing a crisis as they cant afford it in the long run).
| People probably are getting 28x more from the government than
| before those existed.
| codr7 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they're paying for it though.
| jspash wrote:
| Yes, everyone pays taxes into the system. But don't think
| for a moment that when musk et.al. are done with their
| purge that your tax rate will magicaly plummet to 2%.
| It's going to either stay the same or go up. Unless you
| are in the 1%. In which case, you can start your
| celebration now.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| That question isn't being asked, though. And if you think the
| DOGE is being transparent with this reform you are either
| naive or misinformed.
| fumar wrote:
| What are you comparing from 1800? You listed zero qualifiers?
| EGreg wrote:
| Poverty dropped tremendously in the 20th century, perhaps
| that has to do with government spending?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare%27s_effect_on_poverty
|
| There are diminishing returns, though
| peterfirefly wrote:
| Or vastly increased productivity -- that also had
| increasingly less to do with land ownership? Life used to
| suck if you didn't own land (or were one of the lucky few
| who could work as a merchant, a craftsman, a priest, a
| government official, etc). Effectively all of Europe had
| too little land for all its recorded history.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Are the people of 2024 France really getting 28x the value
| from their government as 1800 USA?
|
| Very likely, yes.
|
| Who was the last person close to you that died after buying
| poisoned food?
| bbddg wrote:
| Thanks for your input "investguy1"
| vlunkr wrote:
| I'm sure there are optimizations to be made, but DOGE is
| acting like an insufferable greenie dev who wants to slash
| and burn without understanding the system or having acquired
| any wisdom about maintaining and refactoring complex systems.
| myrmidon wrote:
| I'll bite. Lets break the highest number down, Fermi-style.
|
| => 30% social services
|
| => 10% military and education
|
| => 10% healthcare
|
| Leaves 10% for infrastructure (road/rail), governmental
| services (police, regulation of trade, traffic,
| construction), damage-control for innovations like leaded
| gas, CFCs, asbestos. And of course overhead to run the whole
| thing.
|
| I'd honestly say thats not really a bad deal. Are there gonna
| be inefficiencies in the whole apparatus? For sure! But
| getting rid of those services, and trying to do this
| personally with the taxes you saved strikes me as completely
| infeasible.
|
| edit: forgot research (CERN, ITER, etc.), which would be
| particularly tricky to fund privately.
|
| PS: I was initially skeptical myself, and expected double
| digit percentages of unclear worth. But actually breaking
| this down gave me strong Monthy Python ("what have the romans
| ever done for us") vibes, and now I think that your point is
| _much_ worse than it looks first glance (still don 't
| understand why it would get flagged, though).
| GuB-42 wrote:
| It is not the right question to ask. 28x is a number that
| doesn't make sense.
|
| For example, you are in a restaurant, you can drink tap water
| for free, or sparkling water for $3, is sparkling water
| infinitely better than tap water? Infinity doesn't exist in
| the real world, but the real world has plenty of people
| drinking $3 sparkling water, which tells us that the
| reasoning is broken.
|
| A more sensible reasoning would be: would you get better
| value by paying 55% (57%-2%=55%) of your income to "upgrade"
| from a 1800 US government to a 2024 France government, or you
| are better off doing something else with that money.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| > And more people should consider backing off from political-
| media consumption as it is clearly toxic to the soul.
|
| Destroying the government services that allow disabled people
| to get healthcare and other basic needs is toxic to my
| literal, physical body.
|
| You're talking like this is all a genteel philosophical
| disagreement. People are going to _die._
| kelnos wrote:
| > _It is not evil to ask these questions or to experiment
| with government_
|
| Asking these questions is fine -- good and necessary even.
| But the evil comes when one of your reckless experiments
| shuts down an agency that's providing medical care to HIV-
| positive pregnant women in Africa, and when their babies are
| born during the disruption, we find that they have contracted
| their mothers' HIV, because of that missing medical care.
|
| This is just one example among many. It's not hyperbole to
| suggest that people will die because of what DOGE is doing.
|
| > _Are the people of 2024 France really getting 28x the value
| from their government as 1800 USA?_
|
| I think that's a very easy "yes".
| paulddraper wrote:
| > Organic systems that have grown to accomodate reality
|
| No argument.
|
| But is that reality public service? Or something else?
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| This is such a good post. I'm sad the blog hasn't been updated in
| years.
| djsavvy wrote:
| One of my favorite blog posts of all time.
| firebirdn99 wrote:
| its a pretty great realization to come along. We are all
| stardust, but complicated bits and blobs of atoms and
| molecules.
| calimoro78 wrote:
| a.k.a "Humans are unsurprisingly such simpletons when forming
| their mental model of reality, and always oversimplify."
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| There's the reasonable amount of oversimplification necessary
| to just get through life, then there's actively trying to
| oversimplify because it makes life "easier".
|
| I judge people very harshly based on whether they accept
| reality as complex or rail against it. I am not proud that I do
| it, but it seems like it has value.
|
| I feel like strong yearnings for simplicity (and willingness to
| ignore messy reality) correlates with people who are unpleasant
| to have in my life. So many "simplicity-oriented" people are
| happy to burden others with "the details" but are unwilling to
| actually "pay" others to bear that burden. They're pretty vile
| people.
|
| Edit: The people who recognize the value in offloading
| complexity and do "pay" (often handsomely) and are the best
| Customers to have. I've had some really rewarding financial and
| personal relationships with people who recognize their
| offloading complexity is a service you provide.
| samwise135 wrote:
| Reading Ian McGilchrist's "Master and his Emissary" has been
| incredibly eye opening on this theme.
|
| Oversimplification and getting upset with the world when it
| doesn't fit your model of it is definitely a poor character
| trait --- which is nevertheless unfortunately trained and
| rewarded in our schools and much of our professional work.
|
| The world is what it is and there are some helpful
| abstractions for navigating it, but don't be upset when your
| model fails as it always will.
| bobson381 wrote:
| I was hoping this would get mentioned! I heard a podcast
| with him and was enthralled. Are his interpretations and
| outlook on this considered "valid" by the scientific
| community? I've been intrigued but curious about how
| seriously he's taken.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Indeed, often when we humans are upset about something, we
| later understand things better. Then comes that aha moment
| in which we see we were jumping to conclusions.
| majkinetor wrote:
| ~ i feel like strong yearnings for simplicity (and
| willingness to ignore messy reality) correlates with people
| who are unpleasant to have in my life.
|
| Wow man, I like this so much. I feel it strongly
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38407851 - Nov 2023 (136
| comments)
|
| _Reality has a surprising amount of detail_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36309597 - June 2023 (1
| comment)
|
| _Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29429385 - Dec 2021 (118
| comments)
|
| _Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28006256 - July 2021 (1
| comment)
|
| _Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020495 - Jan 2020 (115
| comments)
|
| _Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255 - Jan 2018 (294
| comments)
| ramon156 wrote:
| Its a yearly tradition!
| wbakst wrote:
| it's quite a good read, i'm not surprised it's been posted so
| many times!
| rashkov wrote:
| I've seen it posted multiple times but only just read it for
| the first time. There's value in repetition, and as it turns
| out I enjoyed the content quite a bit!
| demaga wrote:
| What happened to the post from a couple of days ago?
| dang wrote:
| Which post do you have in mind?
| haburka wrote:
| Imagine being a lumberjack and wood literally changed its
| properties every few years due to updates. They would be so
| pissed.
|
| Or if you came into a construction job and the guy who was
| building stairs did not understand gravity, and was just using an
| AI to guide him.
|
| Finally you're working on a house and whenever you set up your
| drywall, it just does nothing. Turns out you were setting up
| drywall on the other side of the house. Common mistake.
|
| Programming isn't like carpentry - it's closer to magical
| carpentry.
| pphysch wrote:
| I attended a woo-woo university course, where the instructor
| invited a interpretative dancer to give a lesson.
|
| The dancer bright out some paper, pencils, and almonds, and had
| everyone spend half an hour silently writing about their single
| almond. As it turns out, it's easier than it sounds; time passed
| quick and I (and most others) never felt bored. There's always
| more room for observation and analysis.
|
| It struck me as a critical life lesson about the power of
| perception and attention. Every moment is infinite, and therefore
| it's a fool's task to try and learn/experience "everything".
| cbracketdash wrote:
| I think there is a fine balance to this. I agree that going
| through life by experiencing as much as possible is futile. But
| on the other hand, spending all your time in thought is also
| problematic since your ideas never clash with reality.
|
| E.g. see the "Open Door Policy" from Hamming's research talk:
| https://gwern.net/doc/science/1986-hamming#open-door-policy
| _def wrote:
| Sounds like the woo-woo paid off
| pphysch wrote:
| Yes, I mean it affectionately.
| codr7 wrote:
| Reminds me of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea :)
| nicklaf wrote:
| To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild
| flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And
| eternity in an hour.
|
| --William Blake, _Auguries of Innocence_
| richx wrote:
| This is what the DOGE guys don't understand: even if it seems you
| can easily replace something, you will find out that the devil is
| in the detail.
| yapyap wrote:
| They don't care.
|
| They don't care about 'saving money', they're just messing
| about to see if they can. To move the goalpost of what is
| acceptable. To goosestep the United States back into a Russia-
| aligned nation that lets rich people pluck the poors bald like
| chickens.
| BlackjackCF wrote:
| The cruelty is the point.
| dartos wrote:
| > To move the goalpost of what is acceptable
|
| Not just that. They're gish galloping the courts and the
| news.
|
| So many things, some dumb, some dangerous, some
| contradictory.
|
| The goal is to make it impossible to o keep track of what's
| going on.
| tomrod wrote:
| On reading the article before the comments, I literally was
| remembering Musk's initial descriptions of The Boring Company
| and how they were wildly forgetting or glossing over key
| details that would mean the difference between exciting leap
| forward to terrifying death trap.
|
| I find your comment to be the same idea, but on something folks
| have foisted upon them and are forced to experience.
| dartos wrote:
| Ignoring details has been very lucrative for Musk.
|
| Remember when he said self driving is coming next year...
| every year... since 2017
| majkinetor wrote:
| Indeed, Musk is the first and only man to ever do that.
| dartos wrote:
| Far from it!
|
| But he is by far the most successful one.
|
| At the very least the loudest successful one.
| lolinder wrote:
| Can we please not DOGEify every comment thread? I know that
| it's on a lot of minds all the time, but we have a whole spot
| on the front page effectively reserved for DOGE 24/7, and I'd
| like to see _literally anything else_ in the other 29 slots.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Agreed. People are unhealthily obsessed with DOGE here. And
| on top of that, basically every DOGE thread turns into a
| flame war. It's extremely deleterious for the site to have
| everything collapse into DOGE talk.
| theshackleford wrote:
| If my countries institutions were being dismantled by chuds
| via dubious and unprecedented means I'd be pretty obsessed.
| cma wrote:
| Thiel was part of ycombinator for a time, current head of
| yc worked for Palantir and has been working on DOGE-related
| Curtis Yarvin type stuff, so it is likely to come up here a
| lot.
| tomrod wrote:
| It's timely, current, and surprisingly related. I see no
| issue here. See my sister comment as to why.
| cbracketdash wrote:
| I agree its quite annoying. But it only comes up because of
| the _massive_ change it will cause across the whole country
| and it 's important to remain prepared for implications.
| lolinder wrote:
| A large percentage of HN's population doesn't live in the
| US, and many of those of us who do have other ways of
| keeping track of what's going on. Threads about DOGE on HN
| are not useful, they're almost always just flame wars.
| Those who feel enlightened by them can join the daily
| thread that inevitably pops up and leave the rest of us to
| talk about other things.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| In fact there are much worse things going on in the world
| than the hollowing of US' institutions. Let's just root
| for those people in need.
| cbracketdash wrote:
| I apologize for my naievty: I guess I live in a bubble
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Don't think you are being naive, no apologies are needed.
| Still that whole situation puzzles me a lot. USA chooses.
| Clear outcomem, no surprises. Pro life, pro guns, anti
| immigrants, anti different, anti regulation. USA
| complains. What info am i missing...?
| amrodst wrote:
| Removing something critical and seeing what happens is a
| methodology used by Musk in all his companies: remove LIDAR
| from self driving car, remove flame trench from spaceship
| launch pad, etc. Results may vary.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| "Results may vary" is not an acceptable methodology for the
| US Government, when millions of lives are potentially at
| stake.
|
| Ed: among the ways millions of lives could be lost: losing
| control of our nuclear arsenal or nuclear materials due to
| haphazardly firing people responsible for maintaining them.
| Bungling the response to the next pandemic, due to
| haphazardly firing people, cutting science funding and
| deleting inconvenient data. Starvation and disease from
| ceasing aid around the world. There's also the wars likely to
| result from the collapse of trust in the US as a security
| partner, but I suppose it's not correct to blame that on DOGE
| per se, even if it's an extension of the same principle.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| This seems circular, since your opinion, views, thoughts,
| etc., are what the opposing factions are rejecting ( or de-
| legitimizing) in the first place.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| People disagree with my opinion, therefore it's circular?
| Interesting logic.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Did you read the remainder of the comment?
|
| It seems pretty clear to me at least why it would lead to
| circular arguments.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| At this point, I've presented a handful of fairly
| straightforward hypotheses about cause and effect. They
| could be wrong, but it's on you to show that they're
| actually self-referential. There is no amount or kind of
| other people's opinions that will make them so.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Your opinions do not automatically turn into credible
| "hypotheses"...?
|
| There is no such mechanism.
|
| If there was then the vast majority of political debates
| on HN wouldn't even exist.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Who said a hypothesis is automatically credible? Not me.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| If they're not credible... then why would any one
| care...?
|
| Readers are just going to assume it's random noise, or at
| least indistinguishable from noise, from a rando on the
| internet.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| That's equally true of all internet comments. None of us
| here on HN have or are claiming automatic credibility. We
| just make arguments that make sense to us. Feel free to
| close the tab if you don't find any value in this
| activity.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| So then what makes your opinions "hypotheses"?
|
| Sufficient chimpanzees with keyboards, or an LLM, can
| also type out every comment you've ever written,
| including the last few.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hypothesis
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I clearly don't think your opinions match the definition
| found in merriam webster... or else I wouldn't have
| asked.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| You don't think his comment is "an assumption put forward
| for the purposes of discussion"? That seems a fairly low
| and generic bar for a comment to reach...
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Sometimes people (e.g. US voters) will only learn by
| running into a wall. How all exactly will turn out is hard
| to tell and frankly maybe we better don't know. I'm tending
| to the conclusion there's no way around the movement of the
| big picture, the shifting of geo-political order in the
| world.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Certainly, global trust in the US is already gone. That's
| locked in for the foreseeable future.
| elcritch wrote:
| > Bungling the response to the next pandemic, due to
| haphazardly firing people, cutting science funding and
| deleting inconvenient data.
|
| That's possible, however, it's possible it'll give a chance
| to remove autocrats who have suppressed the scientific
| method in favor of their prevailing opinions or
| preferences.
|
| There will be a painful period but it could rejuvenate the
| systems.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| But consider, what if we rejuvenated our health
| infrastructure in a way that _isn 't_ blazingly
| incompetent? Suppose you learned enough about the systems
| currently being smashed to specifically fire the
| "autocrats" and leave the competent people? Are you
| seeing where the importance of detail comes in?
| shawndumas wrote:
| second system syndrome
| angst_ridden wrote:
| Never ask ol' Chesterfield about his fence.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Ahem, "blow some my way"! For fence-related matters
| Chesterton is the person to ask.
| timewizard wrote:
| This is what the critics fail to understand: this all should be
| documented because it's public work. There should be no "secret
| sauce" in the bureaucracy nor should the process be so abstract
| and complex that the hidden details are the most pertinent
| ones.
|
| Government should not involve arcane wizardry nor should
| imputed mastery of it be held as an excuse to prevent it's
| modification to meet the will of the voters.
| genewitch wrote:
| It also should not be so complicated that it's impossible to
| audit.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Reality being more complicated than a model is precisely their
| point:
|
| The vision of a technocratic bureaucracy isn't workable given
| the complexity of life -- so we need to distribute decisions to
| be made in context. We're paying huge sums for a technocratic
| system that can't account for the actual needs and which leads
| to suboptimal outcomes.
|
| Dismantling the regulatory state and attendant bureaucracy
| creates room for better, localized, contextual systems to
| flourish.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Dismantling the regulatory state and attendant bureaucracy
| creates room for better, localized, contextual systems to
| flourish._
|
| And I guess it doesn't matter how many people will be hurt
| during the churn...
|
| But regardless, DOGE's goal isn't to make government better,
| it's to make government broken and cheap, so it will be
| easier to funnel money to Musk's (and other Trump cronies')
| companies instead.
| snikeris wrote:
| > If you wish to not get stuck, seek to perceive what you have
| not yet perceived
|
| This may seem like impractical advice. How does one increase the
| scope of perception? Personally, I've found that a meditation
| practice leads to this.
| thenobsta wrote:
| Meditation has totally helped me widen my scope and soften my
| awareness. I've found these two exercises also help me get out
| of my default mode of perception.
|
| Image Streaming[1] is a fun little exercise that has helped me
| expand my perception of things or problems. I try to do it in a
| very high dynamic range way -- where I zoom out of a scene
| describe it in detail and then zoom in a describe it in detail.
|
| There is also a fun improv exercise where you walk around
| looking at objects and calling it the wrong name. It sort of
| gets you our of default mode and you start seeing things
| 'differently' (a touch more vivid). I think the exercise is
| described in Impro by Keith Johnstone.
|
| [1]: https://winwenger.com/resources/cps-techniques/image-
| streami...
| thenobsta wrote:
| Found a link to a description of the exercise.
|
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/01/23/impro-by-keith-
| johnsto...
| bwfan123 wrote:
| Mathematician David Bessis describes similar exercises in his
| book [ref] - wherein he explores a room blindfolded to awaken
| other senses, or visualize the places he has been to.
|
| [ref] https://www.amazon.com/Mathematica-Secret-World-
| Intuition-Cu...
| tippytippytango wrote:
| Don't ignore any question is the strategy I've found. The
| problem is that some questions fall just below the conscious
| threshold. Meditation seems to help dredge up the questions and
| take them seriously.
| andhuman wrote:
| For me meditation makes me better at, let's call it meta-
| thinking. Being aware of what I'm thinking, instead of just
| thinking.
| patcon wrote:
| I always think of it as learning to see hidden dimensions, and
| once seen, investigate deeper or just imagine transformations
| of that dimension -- extrapolation, inversion, etc. Once found,
| you can drag around these hidden dimensions from one domain or
| one instance to the next.
|
| Like sometimes I seem to be in alignment with someone, but
| things feel off. I once realized the "off" feeling was because
| I was running toward something I believed in, and they're
| running away from another thing that scared them. It's only
| circumstantial we were intellectually walking in the same
| direction, so I tread thoughtfully in collaboration with this
| person. It's attractive force vs repulsive.
|
| Once I knew to look for this "away vs toward" dimension, I see
| it often :)
| bwfan123 wrote:
| very nicely articulated.. so, you are suggesting to be
| "sensitive" to "feelings" - such the one of being "off" -
| since feelings primarily provoke thought. Another feeling
| that i have is one of "inconsistency" - again it feels like
| something is off, and you are suggesting to pursue this
| feeling rather than to brush it aside.
| _def wrote:
| Talk to another human
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| The way I did it was by deliberately going against my normal
| impulses. The rule was "whatever you would normally do, do the
| opposite of that". If you would stay home, go out. If you would
| eat a steak, eat spaghetti instead. If you would get drunk,
| stay sober. If you would stay sober, get drunk. Basically, as
| long as it's not something that's likely to do irrevocable
| harm, _do things that don 't seem like good ideas_ and just see
| what happens.
|
| The limits on our experiences are usually self-imposed by the
| fact that we tend to make specific choices limited to specific
| contexts. The experiences you have are the experiences that
| derive from what you think is a good idea. So doing things you
| think are bad ideas tends to result in a lot of new
| experiences.
| bwfan123 wrote:
| Physicist Bohm has written about this. That, the beginning of
| new perception is in mindful listening or mindful awareness..
| But most of us are stuck in our thought-rut preventing this.
| Perception itself carves out categories almost unconsciously
| leading to the thought-rut we are in. ie, Bootstrapping the
| perception of new detail in everyday life is very hard.
| handedness wrote:
| Previous discussions:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=johnsalvatier.org
| henjodottech wrote:
| Thought this would reference reality being encoded in 10^120
| bits.
| karparov wrote:
| And this is one of the main utilitarian arguments for diversity
| in teams. If everybody has the same socio-cultural background,
| it's harder to leave the frame.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| It's a sound argument.
|
| The argument that culturally homogeneous teams perform better
| due to more efficient communication (more is "already
| understood" at the outset, so there's less need to communicate
| explicitly, and fewer misunderstandings) is also sound.
|
| So from a purely team-performance-maximising perspective, the
| question is: Which coefficient is higher? (More generally: What
| level of mixture is optimal?)
| sfink wrote:
| My suspicion is that this is not answerable in general.
|
| To a first approximation: whichever of the two your political
| leanings make you more comfortable with.
|
| To a second approximation: if your task is efficiency at a
| constrained task, homogeneity. If your task requires
| exploration and/or creativity, heterogeneity.
|
| To a third approximation: the 2nd approximation argument,
| except the demands of nearly all tasks change over time.
|
| Then you factor in the environment, including your
| management's competence at eliciting the value of various
| team members, etc.
|
| And don't forget risk. Optimizing for a high level of
| performance in any dimension makes things brittle in all
| other dimensions.
| rramadass wrote:
| > The argument that culturally homogeneous teams perform
| better due to more efficient communication (more is "already
| understood" at the outset, so there's less need to
| communicate explicitly, and fewer misunderstandings) is also
| sound.
|
| False Equivalence.
|
| _Efficient Communication_ is secondary to _Different Whats
| and Whys_ which is what a diverse collection of people from
| different cultural backgrounds bring to the table. A single
| idea communicated however imperfectly can change the world.
| This is the reason "equal opportunities" should be
| guaranteed to all even though "equal outcomes" cannot be
| guaranteed.
|
| So define a "suitable standard requirement" for a specific
| role and try and collect a diverse group of people who meet
| those criteria.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _This is the reason "equal opportunities" should be
| guaranteed to all_
|
| Oh silly me, I thought the reason was that it follows
| naturally from everyone having equal moral worth.
| rramadass wrote:
| Yes, silly you; my comment was in the context of the
| parent/grandparent talking about "team composition"
| (presumably w.r.t. an objective/goal/job) and not a
| judgement on ethics/morals (different discussion).
| procaryote wrote:
| > The argument that culturally homogeneous teams perform
| better due to more efficient communication (more is "already
| understood" at the outset, so there's less need to
| communicate explicitly, and fewer misunderstandings) is also
| sound.
|
| Did you just define Groupthink, but in positive sounding
| words?
| atq2119 wrote:
| There's no one size fits all answer to that.
|
| A team that develops a user interface benefits more from
| "generic" cultural diversity (gender, ethnicity, social
| class, etc.) than a team that builds a processor
| microarchitecture.
|
| But the latter team can still benefit from diversity: if it's
| all EEs, they'll probably do worse than a team that also has
| a mathematician, a physicist, a chemical engineer, a finance
| person, etc on it.
|
| On the other hand, the processor team's communication might
| be smoother with an all EE team of high "generic" diversity
| than it would be with all white guys but from very different
| academic backgrounds.
|
| If you have decent retention, the team will develop its own
| communication style anyway, so I suspect this factor doesn't
| matter as much.
| tikhonj wrote:
| One aspect seems pretty clear to me: it's much easier to
| learn how to communicate effectively as a team than it is to
| massively broaden your collective knowledge and experience.
|
| So, given a sound team culture and environment--great
| regardless of the style of team you have!--you can start with
| a diverse team and then collectively improve team cohesion
| and communication. You need some baseline level of effective
| leadership to do this, but it's absolutely doable, and I've
| seen it done.
| timewizard wrote:
| It seems like you want a diversity /of/ teams, not specifically
| /in/ teams, as human competition is the best known way to
| advance the scope of the frame in general.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| I wonder if this is one reason why AI seems to have scaling
| limits. If building stairs is decomposed into n-steps, and each
| of those steps is decomposed into n-steps, and you keep on
| decomposing for L levels, then each time you want an extra level
| of detail you need n-times the training data/training time.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| No it's rather obvious why. It's not a scaling issue otherwise
| humans wouldn't be able to exist. It's missing data. It's like
| trying to learn to swim by watching other swimmers only. You
| can keep watching more and more of this but there's limits.
|
| There are two things that enable us to do it. First we have
| prebuilt application specific brains. Our neural networks are
| geared towards specialized thinking related to human living
| without any training needed. LLMs are free form intelligences
| with no bias. To bring it back to the analogy, do you really
| need to teach a beaver to swim if it was always raised on land?
|
| Second text and visual data alone is not enough information to
| build a model of the world. As humans we have more data and we
| can control data. Meaning we see, hear, listen, and importantly
| we can place inputs into the data and observe differences in
| outputs.
|
| This is why alpha go is so powerful. It's able to get the input
| data and observe the output and learn. LLMs don't do this on an
| automated basis yet.
| tombert wrote:
| A bit tangential, but I have been playing the game "Pinball FX" a
| lot. I really like it (and especially its spin-off/expansion
| Pinball M), but it's surprisingly taxing on my computer.
|
| I mentioned this to a friend, and he was kind of confused,
| understandably so, and said "...it's pinball...why is that
| taxing?"
|
| It's not a dumb question, we have had virtual pinball games since
| the Atari 2600 at least, and even pretty fun stuff on the Amiga
| and DOS like Pinball Dreams and Epic Pinball, so why would a
| modern pinball game make my relatively beefy laptop struggle
| playing it?
|
| The answer is because virtual pinball occupies a strange kind of
| space in the world of video games, in that they're trying to
| emulate something that is entirely dependent on extremely precise
| and subtle physics. It's not like you can really have _too_
| accurate of physics; the better the physics, the closer it is to
| a "real" pinball machine, and generally speaking the more fun
| the game is.
|
| As such, I think you could honestly make a pinball game that
| taxes _any_ hardware. You 'll never be able to have "perfect"
| physics (as in physics that completely and totally imitate
| reality), you can only get asymptotically close to "perfect", and
| the closer you are, the more taxing the computation will end up
| being.
|
| It just made me think, this applies to nearly anything. We all
| work with abstractions, but if dive into the details of something
| and recurse, it's not like it ever ends.
| suby wrote:
| I don't actually know, but I'd wager a lot that it's the
| graphics rather than the physics which causes the game to be
| slow. Generally the expensive thing in video games is
| rendering. Computing the next world state is generally
| relatively cheap, especially if we're talking about a confined
| area with a very small number of rigid bodies (the ball,
| flippers, bumpers). A pinball game like Pinball FX that's
| rendering a 3d world with lighting, it'd just be shocking to me
| if the physics were to blame for the performance.
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah fair, it's tough to say; they're simulating a few non-
| obvious things too, like ball spin, but it's possible it's
| mostly graphics.
|
| I think my overall point still stands, but you might be
| right.
|
| ETA:
|
| I would like to point out that my dad was debating buying one
| of those virtual pinball tables, and so we played one at a
| mall, it was decidedly not fun. The physics were way too
| floaty, and didn't feel good at all. It looked like they were
| running it on some shitty Android and just mounted a big TV.
|
| That's why I thought that maybe it was the physics in
| PinballFX slowing things down.
| sjs382 wrote:
| Have you seen the virtual pinball tables that emulate depth
| by tracking your head? It's a great effect
| tombert wrote:
| I have not, that sounds pretty cool. That might make the
| machines more fun, or at least feel more realistic.
|
| I think having something more or less like a rumble
| feature would do a lot too. Even if you just had a
| solenoid that thumps when hitting a bumper would make it
| feel a lot more realistic.
| sjs382 wrote:
| This illustrates the concept pretty well.
| https://youtu.be/DoSLmAaRJ80?si=Mt94YNzBtLZzPDmh
| Sophira wrote:
| It sounds cool, but because you won't be getting
| different views from both eyes, I can imagine the brain
| is probably going to be fairly confused by it.
| ssfrr wrote:
| I remember back in 2008-ish Johnny Lee at CMU built a
| cool hack that tracked the user's head using a Wiimote as
| an infrared camera, and used it for this kind of effect.
|
| https://youtu.be/Jd3-eiid-Uw?t=147
|
| Turns out that head-tracking parallax is surprisingly
| effective even without stereo vision. I'd guess there's
| some component about the effect working best when your
| head motion is large relative to the distance between
| your eyes, and also best for objects far enough away from
| your eyes that you're not getting a lot of information
| from the stereo vision.
|
| I don't know exactly where those thresholds are, but I
| wouldn't be surprised if a pinball machine is in a regime
| where it works well.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| There are tons of working examples of head-tracked 3D,
| and in practice it's good enough to satisfy most viewers
| (as long as you can deal with the obvious limitation:
| only one viewer at a time)
| bostonpete wrote:
| Ball spin would be trivial to simulate. The only way I
| could see the physics getting at all expensive is if they
| went overboard with fluid dynamics
| amarant wrote:
| Simulating airdrag and turbulence the compute-intensive
| way: simulating all of the air inside the pinball
| machine! You've got a few tens of liters of gaseous
| molecules to keep track of, should be enough to slow down
| most computers I would guess!
|
| But I would be very surprised if any pinball software
| actually does that!
| tombert wrote:
| No one does it _yet_! Someone should import OpenFOAM into
| Unreal and make this happen. I want my pinball experience
| to require a dedicated server to help it.
| luqtas wrote:
| "just train a generative model to emulate the experience"
| /s
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| I bet it has nothing to do with the graphics or the physics
| and everything to do with the fact that you can't feel the
| ball. There's vibrations that can be felt when you play
| with a real pinball machine.
| tombert wrote:
| That's definitely part of it, but even when I play
| Pinball FX on my laptop with a keyboard, it still feels
| better than the one I tried at the mall.
|
| The one I felt at the mall kind of felt like I was
| playing on the moon. The ball felt really floaty and the
| way the ball bounced off the walls and bumpers just
| didn't feel or look right.
|
| Adding some kind of "thumper" feedback would have
| certainly helped the experience though.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| Especially with such a small number of rigid bodies to worry
| about. The literal only thing that has to collide with
| anything else is the pinball itself, unless we're talking
| about a pretty weird pinball machine.
| WJW wrote:
| Of course, but that rigid pinball has speeds in three
| directions, rotations along many axes, friction might
| change on different surfaces in the simulated machine, the
| ball can jump, bounce and slip depending on how it's
| rotating and if there is more than one ball in play then
| something like a bumper can "fully" hit one ball but merely
| graze another one. Pinball machines are a prime example of
| what the article talks about: a basic simulation is indeed
| quite simple. A _good_ simulation rapidly spirals down into
| the most obscure details.
| jjmarr wrote:
| Here's a gif on how a real pinball bumper works:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/mechanical_gifs/comments/aflmj7/how.
| ..
|
| It's not really a rigid body, it's a dynamic component that
| squeezes the ball.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Nah. This is easily emulated with an impulse force. The
| outcome a nanosecond after the ball leaves the bumper is
| just an impulse. Users can't tell the difference.
| kvdveer wrote:
| While that could be an acceptable simplification on the
| aforementioned Amiga, it breaks down when multiple balls
| are in play, if the friction between the top and bottom
| plate differ (introducing spin) or when the ball doesn't
| hit the bumper exactly straight on the y axis.
|
| Generally speaking, there are many ways you can simplify
| the game by sacrificing precison. This is exactly the
| kind of detail the original article is about. Ones
| simplified model of the world is always incomplete, and
| there are always surprising ways in which it will fall
| short.
| accrual wrote:
| Good story for getting a handle on the idea. It kind of
| reminded me of fractals and how we find some parallels between
| phenomena at every scale, e.g. galaxies and rotating water as
| it flows down your drain.
| mrob wrote:
| Ball movement on a real pinball machine is three dimensional.
| The game is designed to keep the ball in contact with the
| playfield surface as much as possible, but in practice there
| are lots of imperfections and awkwardly shaped features that
| can make the ball bounce vertically if it hits them at the
| right angle. It can sometimes bounce violently enough to hit
| the glass. This is especially common when you have multiple
| balls in play. A 2D simulation isn't enough.
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, exactly my point.
|
| There's always an infinite number of variables in a real
| pinball machine. Slight imperfections in the playfield
| surface making it not completely flat, slight imperfections
| in the shape of the ball so it's not a perfect sphere, slight
| imperfections in the shape of the bumper. I could keep going,
| but I think there's literally billions of potential variables
| that can modify the game.
|
| These might seem insignificant, and in some cases they are,
| but it's a chaos theory thing; small imperfections multiplied
| across enough of a timescale become pretty significant, and
| that's a large part of what makes real pinball so much fun.
|
| Of course there's plenty of things we can do to approximate
| reality; adding a bit of randomness to the experience
| probably provides enough chaos to give us something more or
| less like reality in a lot of cases, but that is just an
| optimization hack.
| quantum_state wrote:
| There is a limit of the tax on hardware set by the sensory
| resolutions of the game player since anything beyond is not
| perceivable.
| tombert wrote:
| Is that actually true? That might be true on a small enough
| time step but there's enough variation in every physical
| component of the machine that I think chaos theory would take
| over in a relatively short amount of time. The ball could fly
| across the machine in radically different ways even with
| seemingly the same inputs.
|
| Obviously there's are ways of spoofing even that, just adding
| some randomness probably helps a lot.
| lynguist wrote:
| > 'Spirit' thermometers, made using brandy and other liquors,
| were in common use in the early days of thermometry. They were
| even considered as a potential standard fluid for thermometers.
| It wasn't until the careful work of Swiss physicist Jean-Andre De
| Luc in the 18th century that physicists realized that alcohol
| thermometers are highly nonlinear and highly variable depending
| on concentration, which is in turn hard to measure.
|
| During Deluc's time in the 18th century Geneva was not part of
| Switzerland, thus Deluc was Genevan/Genevese, not Swiss.
|
| Geneva was an independent city republic with centuries of history
| until Napoleon (1798) when it was incorporated into France. After
| Napoleon during the Vienna Congress of 1815 - in the 19th century
| - Geneva joined Switzerland.
|
| Other people from Geneva of the same time period include Rodolphe
| Topffer, the first comic book artist, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
|
| We don't use today's political borders for historic figures.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| My thoughts exactly when it comes to simulating the real world
| for games, etc. An accurate simulation is only good for science,
| otherwise there's boundless detail that we don't pay attention to
| in the real world. Part of that I think is that we can examine
| anything in front of us in detail, but trying to recall the exact
| pattern or shade of colour of something arbitrary like the
| footpath outside your favourite cafe is impossible. We just can't
| do it.
| flippyhead wrote:
| This is true, but I sometimes find myself, nonetheless, wishing
| in some game that I could stop, pull out a microscrope or
| something, and go muuuuch deeper.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> But as you actually start building you'll find there's a
| surprising amount of nuance._
|
| This has been my experience, building _anything_ ; especially
| _shipping_ anything.
|
| In my experience, _shipping_ is orders of magnitude more involved
| than _authoring_.
|
| There's ten million stupid little details, that pop up when least
| convenient. Experience has taught me to anticipate these details.
| Many times, they should be mitigated from the very start
| (security and localization are good examples).
|
| That's why I tend to write every one of my projects -even
| "farting around" ones- as if they were shipping products.
|
| Keeps me in practice.
|
| Also, this is one of the areas where it _really pays_ to have
| experienced engineers.
| rnewme wrote:
| Thus might be a false memory, but didn't authors blog used to
| have a post on game development topic?
| raintrees wrote:
| This is also a good argument to me to continue working at being a
| generalist. The more disciplines I am aware of, even if not
| expert in, the faster I may come up with an "outside the box"
| solution that might work.
|
| Details observance, combined with the facility to abstract, is
| probably what makes me a programmer of the caliber I am. Not that
| I am great (far from it, when I see and compare others' work) but
| I have products being used by clients successfully, so good
| enough, I figure...
|
| Ah, another thought: Also conversations with others about a
| problem I am facing. My wife has an uncanny ability to suggest
| things that sometimes cause me to reconsider some of my
| assumptions, and have the blinding flash of insight that allows
| me to successfully navigate through whatever my current obstacle
| might be. And she does not try to keep up with my area of
| technical knowledge anymore, yet still so valuable!
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