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Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
- raintrees 2y agoThis 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!
- TZubiri 2y agoThe world is complex, yes
- coliveira 2y agoThe universe seems to have a fractal structure. At every scale we can look there is a huge amount of detail.
- Trasmatta 2y agoOne 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_Greatness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#End_of_Gre...
- metalman 2y agoIts 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 2y agoPossible, 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 2y agoMaybe its not due to the universe but our perception of it?
- saxenauts 2y agowhy 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 2y agoSurely, 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 2y agoYou 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.
- lotharcable 2y agoThe 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 2y agoYou 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.
- bee_rider 2y agoWhat 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 2y agoHow much of that is new detail versus repeated patterns? A good approximation of all human visual reality fits in a 5GB diffusion model.
- ninetyninenine 2y agoNot true at all there’s limits in terms of scale in both directions.
- efilife 2y agoThere is limits?
- Terr_ 2y agoI'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 2y 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!
- wruza 2y agohttps://youtube.com/watch?v=gB9n2gHsHN4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=gB9n2gHsHN4 (3B1B: Fractals are typically not self-similar)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Terr_ 2y agoMy point isn't about outcome similarity, but shared causation. All possible different-looking snapshots of a Mandelbrot fractal may look extremely very different, but they come from the same mathematical cause. In contrast, the jagged molecules of my wood tabletop come from the nature of organic polymers and how biological systems are able to manufacture them, while the smooth scale of my tabletop comes because I made it that way with a belt sander.
- unsui 2y agoThis 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 2y agoYeah, 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 2y agoIn 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.
- NotYourLawyer 2y agoThis is such a good post. I’m sad the blog hasn’t been updated in years.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- djsavvy 2y agoOne of my favorite blog posts of all time.
- firebirdn99 2y agoits a pretty great realization to come along. We are all stardust, but complicated bits and blobs of atoms and molecules.
- calimoro78 2y agoa.k.a "Humans are unsurprisingly such simpletons when forming their mental model of reality, and always oversimplify."
- EvanAnderson 2y agoThere'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 2y agoReading 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 2y agoI 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 2y ago
- emorning3 2y ago[flagged]
- dang 2y agoRelated. Others? Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38407851 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 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 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 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255 - Jan 2018 (294 comments)
- ramon156 2y agoIts a yearly tradition!
- wbakst 2y agoit's quite a good read, i'm not surprised it's been posted so many times!
- rashkov 2y agoI’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 2y agoWhat happened to the post from a couple of days ago?
- dang 2y agoWhich post do you have in mind?
- haburka 2y agoImagine 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 2y agoI 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 2y agoI 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 https://gwern.net/doc/science/1986-hamming#open-door-policy
- _def 2y agoSounds like the woo-woo paid off
- pphysch 2y agoYes, I mean it affectionately.
- codr7 2y agoReminds me of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea :)
- nicklaf 2y agoTo 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 2y agoThis 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 2y agoThey 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 2y agoThe cruelty is the point.
- dartos 2y ago> 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.
- knightfall21 2y ago[flagged]
- exe34 2y agoyou don't have to ask people for their intentions, you just have to watch what they do. look at how many government organisations that were investigating the Musk empire got Dodged: https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/2025.02.13_fact_sheet_re_musk_investigations.pdf https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/2025.02....
- knightfall21 2y ago[flagged]
- snikeris 2y 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, I’ve found that a meditation practice leads to this.
- bwfan123 2y agoPhysicist 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.
- thenobsta 2y agoMeditation 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-streaming/ https://winwenger.com/resources/cps-techniques/image-streami...
- bwfan123 2y agoMathematician 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-Curiosity/dp/0300270887 https://www.amazon.com/Mathematica-Secret-World-Intuition-Cu...
- thenobsta 2y agoFound a link to a description of the exercise. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/01/23/impro-by-keith-johnstone/#:~:text=Chapter%201%2C%20Notes,students%20typically%20experience. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/01/23/impro-by-keith-johnsto...
- handedness 2y agoPrevious discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=johnsalvatier.org https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=johnsalvatier.org
- henjodottech 2y agoThought this would reference reality being encoded in 10^120 bits.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- karparov 2y agoAnd 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 2y agoIt'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?)
- atq2119 2y agoThere'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 2y agoOne 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.
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- GMoromisato 2y agoI 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 2y agoNo 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 2y agoA 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.
- ranscendental50 2y ago[dead]
- suby 2y agoI 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 2y agoYeah 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.
- lynguist 2y ago> ‘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-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.
- fennecbutt 2y agoMy 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 2y agoThis 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 2y ago> 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 2y agoThus might be a false memory, but didn't authors blog used to have a post on game development topic?