_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
rnewme wrote 4 hours 17 min ago:
Thus might be a false memory, but didn't authors blog used to have a
post on game development topic?
ChrisMarshallNY wrote 4 hours 49 min ago:
> But as you actually start building youâll find thereâs 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.
fennecbutt wrote 5 hours 10 min ago:
My thoughts exactly when it comes to simulating the real world for
games, etc. An accurate simulation is only good for science, otherwise
there's boundless detail that we don't pay attention to in the real
world. Part of that I think is that we can examine anything in front of
us in detail, but trying to recall the exact pattern or shade of colour
of something arbitrary like the footpath outside your favourite café
is impossible. We just can't do it.
flippyhead wrote 4 hours 54 min ago:
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.
lynguist wrote 15 hours 18 min ago:
> âSpiritâ 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 wasnât
until the careful work of Swiss physicist Jean-André 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
Töpffer, the first comic book artist, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
We don't use today's political borders for historic figures.
tombert wrote 16 hours 46 min ago:
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.
quantum_state wrote 3 hours 58 min ago:
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 1 hour 2 min ago:
Is that actually true? That might be true on a small enough time
step but thereâs 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 thereâs are ways of spoofing even that, just adding
some randomness probably helps a lot.
mrob wrote 5 hours 52 min ago:
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 1 hour 5 min ago:
Yeah, exactly my point.
Thereâs 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 itâs not a perfect sphere, slight imperfections in the shape
of the bumper. I could keep going, but I think thereâs literally
billions of potential variables that can modify the game.
These might seem insignificant, and in some cases they are, but
itâs a chaos theory thing; small imperfections multiplied across
enough of a timescale become pretty significant, and thatâs a
large part of what makes real pinball so much fun.
Of course thereâs 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.
accrual wrote 10 hours 35 min ago:
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.
suby wrote 16 hours 24 min ago:
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.
jjmarr wrote 12 hours 42 min ago:
Here's a gif on how a real pinball bumper works: [1] It's not
really a rigid body, it's a dynamic component that squeezes the
ball.
URI [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/mechanical_gifs/comments/aflmj7/h...
ninetyninenine wrote 11 hours 40 min ago:
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 6 hours 48 min ago:
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.
rachofsunshine wrote 16 hours 13 min ago:
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.
tombert wrote 16 hours 22 min ago:
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.
ninetyninenine wrote 11 hours 38 min ago:
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 11 hours 5 min ago:
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.
bostonpete wrote 12 hours 50 min ago:
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 12 hours 3 min ago:
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 11 hours 3 min ago:
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 6 hours 2 min ago:
"just train a generative model to emulate the experience"
/s
sjs382 wrote 16 hours 11 min ago:
Have you seen the virtual pinball tables that emulate depth by
tracking your head? It's a great effect
Sophira wrote 9 hours 6 min ago:
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.
tombert wrote 16 hours 5 min ago:
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.
GMoromisato wrote 18 hours 55 min ago:
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 14 hours 34 min ago:
No itâs rather obvious why. Itâs not a scaling issue otherwise
humans wouldn't be able to exist. Itâs missing data. Itâs like
trying to learn to swim by watching other swimmers only. You can keep
watching more and more of this but thereâs 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. Itâs able to get the input
data and observe the output and learn. LLMs donât do this on an
automated basis yet.
karparov wrote 19 hours 18 min ago:
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.
timewizard wrote 7 hours 2 min ago:
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.
akoboldfrying wrote 14 hours 35 min ago:
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?)
tikhonj wrote 7 min ago:
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 environmentâgreat regardless
of the style of team you have!âyou 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.
atq2119 wrote 3 hours 24 min ago:
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.
procaryote wrote 4 hours 4 min ago:
> 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?
rramadass wrote 12 hours 47 min ago:
> 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 11 hours 9 min ago:
> 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 6 hours 2 min ago:
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).
sfink wrote 14 hours 21 min ago:
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.
henjodottech wrote 21 hours 29 min ago:
Thought this would reference reality being encoded in 10^120 bits.
handedness wrote 22 hours 59 min ago:
Previous discussions:
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=johnsalvatier.org
snikeris wrote 23 hours 6 min ago:
> 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, Iâve found that a meditation practice
leads to this.
bwfan123 wrote 1 hour 30 min ago:
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.
rachofsunshine wrote 16 hours 9 min ago:
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.
_def wrote 19 hours 14 min ago:
Talk to another human
patcon wrote 19 hours 36 min ago:
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 1 hour 13 min ago:
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.
tippytippytango wrote 22 hours 27 min ago:
Donât ignore any question is the strategy Iâve 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 8 hours 59 min ago:
For me meditation makes me better at, letâs call it
meta-thinking. Being aware of what Iâm thinking, instead of just
thinking.
thenobsta wrote 22 hours 41 min ago:
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]
URI [1]: https://winwenger.com/resources/cps-techniques/image-streami...
bwfan123 wrote 8 min ago:
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]
URI [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Mathematica-Secret-World-Intuition-...
thenobsta wrote 22 hours 38 min ago:
Found a link to a description of the exercise.
URI [1]: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/01/23/impro-by-keith-johns...
richx wrote 23 hours 23 min ago:
This is what the DOGE guys donât understand: even if it seems you can
easily replace something, you will find out that the devil is in the
detail.
zmgsabst wrote 6 hours 3 min ago:
Reality being more complicated than a model is precisely their point:
The vision of a technocratic bureaucracy isnât workable given the
complexity of life â so we need to distribute decisions to be made
in context. Weâre paying huge sums for a technocratic system that
canât 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 5 hours 24 min ago:
> 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.
timewizard wrote 6 hours 57 min ago:
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.
angst_ridden wrote 22 hours 20 min ago:
Never ask ol' Chesterfield about his fence.
rzzzt wrote 21 hours 34 min ago:
Ahem, "blow some my way"! For fence-related matters Chesterton is
the person to ask.
shawndumas wrote 22 hours 26 min ago:
second system syndrome
amrodst wrote 22 hours 42 min ago:
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 22 hours 26 min ago:
"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.
nuancebydefault wrote 20 hours 13 min ago:
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 15 hours 41 min ago:
Certainly, global trust in the US is already gone. That's
locked in for the foreseeable future.
MichaelZuo wrote 22 hours 18 min ago:
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 21 hours 59 min ago:
People disagree with my opinion, therefore it's circular?
Interesting logic.
MichaelZuo wrote 21 hours 46 min ago:
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 21 hours 7 min ago:
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 18 hours 25 min ago:
Your opinions do not automatically turn into credible
âhypothesesââ¦?
There is no such mechanism.
If there was then the vast majority of political debates
on HN wouldnât even exist.
andrewflnr wrote 17 hours 53 min ago:
Who said a hypothesis is automatically credible? Not
me.
MichaelZuo wrote 15 hours 37 min ago:
If theyâre not credible⦠then why would any one
care�
Readers are just going to assume itâs random noise,
or at least indistinguishable from noise, from a
rando on the internet.
andrewflnr wrote 15 hours 30 min ago:
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 13 hours 51 min ago:
So then what makes your opinions
âhypothesesâ?
Sufficient chimpanzees with keyboards, or an LLM,
can also type out every comment youâve ever
written, including the last few.
andrewflnr wrote 13 hours 43 min ago:
URI [1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictio...
MichaelZuo wrote 13 hours 2 min ago:
I clearly donât think your opinions match
the definition found in merriam webster⦠or
else I wouldnât have asked.
lolinder wrote 22 hours 53 min ago:
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.
cbracketdash wrote 21 hours 16 min ago:
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 21 hours 4 min ago:
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 20 hours 6 min ago:
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 19 hours 20 min ago:
I apologize for my naïevty: I guess I live in a bubble
tomrod wrote 22 hours 25 min ago:
It's timely, current, and surprisingly related. I see no issue
here. See my sister comment as to why.
bigstrat2003 wrote 22 hours 31 min ago:
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.
cma wrote 18 hours 40 min ago:
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.
theshackleford wrote 19 hours 7 min ago:
If my countries institutions were being dismantled by chuds via
dubious and unprecedented means Iâd be pretty obsessed.
tomrod wrote 23 hours 1 min ago:
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 22 hours 56 min ago:
Ignoring details has been very lucrative for Musk.
Remember when he said self driving is coming next year⦠every
year⦠since 2017
majkinetor wrote 22 hours 35 min ago:
Indeed, Musk is the first and only man to ever do that.
dartos wrote 22 hours 0 min ago:
Far from it!
But he is by far the most successful one.
At the very least the loudest successful one.
yapyap wrote 23 hours 15 min ago:
They donât care.
They donât care about âsaving moneyâ, theyâre 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.
dartos wrote 22 hours 55 min ago:
> To move the goalpost of what is acceptable
Not just that. Theyâre 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 whatâs going
on.
BlackjackCF wrote 23 hours 4 min ago:
The cruelty is the point.
pphysch wrote 23 hours 31 min ago:
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".
nicklaf wrote 13 hours 1 min ago:
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.
âWilliam Blake, Auguries of Innocence
codr7 wrote 18 hours 49 min ago:
Reminds me of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea :)
_def wrote 19 hours 12 min ago:
Sounds like the woo-woo paid off
cbracketdash wrote 21 hours 13 min ago:
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:
URI [1]: https://gwern.net/doc/science/1986-hamming#open-door-policy
haburka wrote 23 hours 35 min ago:
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 youâre 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 isnât like carpentry - itâs closer to magical
carpentry.
dang wrote 23 hours 38 min ago:
Related. Others?
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - [1] - Nov 2023 (136
comments)
Reality has a surprising amount of detail - [2] - June 2023 (1 comment)
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - [3] - Dec 2021 (118
comments)
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - [4] - July 2021 (1
comment)
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - [5] - Jan 2020 (115
comments)
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - [6] - Jan 2018 (294
comments)
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38407851
URI [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36309597
URI [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29429385
URI [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28006256
URI [5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020495
URI [6]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255
demaga wrote 4 hours 59 min ago:
What happened to the post from a couple of days ago?
wbakst wrote 22 hours 17 min ago:
it's quite a good read, i'm not surprised it's been posted so many
times!
rashkov wrote 15 hours 31 min ago:
Iâve seen it posted multiple times but only just read it for the
first time. Thereâs value in repetition, and as it turns out I
enjoyed the content quite a bit!
ramon156 wrote 23 hours 7 min ago:
Its a yearly tradition!
calimoro78 wrote 23 hours 42 min ago:
a.k.a "Humans are unsurprisingly such simpletons when forming their
mental model of reality, and always oversimplify."
EvanAnderson wrote 23 hours 28 min ago:
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.
majkinetor wrote 22 hours 16 min ago:
~ 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
samwise135 wrote 22 hours 40 min ago:
Reading Ian McGilchristâs âMaster and his Emissaryâ has been
incredibly eye opening on this theme.
Oversimplification and getting upset with the world when it
doesnât fit your model of it is definitely a poor character trait
â- 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 donât be upset when your model fails as it
always will.
nuancebydefault wrote 20 hours 21 min ago:
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.
bobson381 wrote 22 hours 8 min ago:
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.
djsavvy wrote 23 hours 57 min ago:
One of my favorite blog posts of all time.
firebirdn99 wrote 23 hours 42 min ago:
its a pretty great realization to come along. We are all stardust,
but complicated bits and blobs of atoms and molecules.
NotYourLawyer wrote 1 day ago:
This is such a good post. Iâm sad the blog hasnât been updated in
years.
unsui wrote 1 day ago:
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.
paulddraper wrote 23 hours 52 min ago:
> Organic systems that have grown to accomodate reality
No argument.
But is that reality public service? Or something else?
investguy1 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
kelnos wrote 5 hours 10 min ago:
> 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".
PhasmaFelis wrote 12 hours 37 min ago:
> 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.
GuB-42 wrote 22 hours 50 min ago:
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.
myrmidon wrote 23 hours 52 min ago:
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).
vlunkr wrote 1 day ago:
Iâm 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.
bbddg wrote 1 day ago:
Thanks for your input "investguy1"
marcosdumay wrote 1 day ago:
> 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?
EGreg wrote 1 day ago:
Poverty dropped tremendously in the 20th century, perhaps that has
to do with government spending? [1] There are diminishing returns,
though
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare%27s_effect_on_povert...
peterfirefly wrote 21 hours 51 min ago:
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.
fumar wrote 1 day ago:
What are you comparing from 1800? You listed zero qualifiers?
gchamonlive wrote 1 day ago:
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.
daedrdev wrote 1 day ago:
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 18 hours 48 min ago:
I'm pretty sure they're paying for it though.
jspash wrote 26 min ago:
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.
BoiledCabbage wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
URI [1]: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60843/html#:~:text=In%20to...
zht wrote 1 day ago:
yes? is this a serious question?
jebarker wrote 1 day ago:
> 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 23 hours 55 min ago:
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 20 hours 16 min ago:
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 19 hours 23 min ago:
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 19 hours 16 min ago:
Ah, I see. Yes, I agree.
radiospiel wrote 1 day ago:
> 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 1 day ago:
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.
BobaFloutist wrote 1 day ago:
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 21 hours 55 min ago:
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 19 hours 57 min ago:
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 19 hours 1 min ago:
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.
immibis wrote 1 day ago:
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.
gerardvivancos wrote 1 day ago:
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?"
Trasmatta wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
zanellato19 wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, Chestertonâs 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.
coliveira wrote 1 day ago:
The universe seems to have a fractal structure. At every scale we can
look there is a huge amount of detail.
Terr_ wrote 16 hours 46 min ago:
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.
wruza wrote 7 hours 46 min ago:
[1] (3B1B: Fractals are typically not self-similar)
URI [1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gB9n2gHsHN4
andrewflnr wrote 15 hours 6 min ago:
> fine features occur for different reasons than coarse features
Important point. This makes reality even less tractable than a
fractal, by a solid margin!
ninetyninenine wrote 19 hours 19 min ago:
Not true at all thereâs limits in terms of scale in both
directions.
efilife wrote 11 hours 6 min ago:
There is limits?
doug_durham wrote 19 hours 42 min ago:
How much of that is new detail versus repeated patterns? A good
approximation of all human visual reality fits in a 5GB diffusion
model.
bee_rider wrote 19 hours 49 min ago:
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 donât have solid surfaces anyway. Maybe we can plot the
potential fields in a way that makes them look like fractals? Butâ¦
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 shouldnât the potential
fields eventually be smooth at some point? And fractals are not very
smooth.
Therefore I conclude the universe doesnât have a fractal structure,
it is just very small. But that isnât poetic at all. :(
lotharcable wrote 23 hours 42 min ago:
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.
nativeit wrote 21 hours 56 min ago:
â¦and thatâs all before you get into all the other logical
fallacies that tend to compromise oneâs perspective. Anything
that requires anticipating and/or interpreting the behaviors of
other people, or that involves accounting for risks or
probabilitiesâthese 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
effectâessentially the idea that people who havenât learned
enough to know how much they donât know are dangerously
overconfident and naive. That said, I think there is a tendency to
assume this about others thatâs probably fallacious in and of
itself. In the case of current events, I donât 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 (itâs 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).
bobson381 wrote 23 hours 32 min ago:
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.
go_elmo wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe its not due to the universe but our perception of it?
chrisweekly wrote 23 hours 44 min ago:
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 21 hours 35 min ago:
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.
saxenauts wrote 1 day ago:
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 23 hours 46 min ago:
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
nuancebydefault wrote 20 hours 28 min ago:
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.
bloomingkales wrote 23 hours 40 min ago:
You can be born with your perception. For example, opposite
sexes generally attract and you donât really have to teach
this. Weâre 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 arenât 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 authorâs 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 18 hours 53 min ago:
Where's the proof that humans of opposite sex are
intrinsically attracted to each other? I can't see it.
bloomingkales wrote 17 hours 48 min ago:
Exactly. I got no clue who taught most of the billions of
people this is the way.
Trasmatta wrote 1 day ago:
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.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#End_of_Gre...
jandrese wrote 20 hours 52 min ago:
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.
metalman wrote 1 day ago:
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.
TZubiri wrote 1 day ago:
The world is complex, yes
DIR <- back to front page