6 ms·

Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

367 points by vinhnx 4mo ago

Boom890 4mo ago
Good read
- james_ross 4mo ago
  a good read indeed! Makes me think about my use of coding agents differently, as the main thing they do is deal with a lot of details that matter to the execution but don't matter to me personally enough to figure them out. Would love to see this author's more recent take as this was written pre-LLMs taking over the world.....
  - sdenton4 4mo ago
    That sort of abstraction has always existed, it's just been a matter of hiring experts or labor from other humans. Reality still has a surprising amount of detail. You deal with it by engaging directly, delegating to someone else to engage with, or just brute force your way to a crooked staircase. When you hire someone to work on the stairs for you, you /hope/ they know what they're doing, especially if you don't have the skills yourself to judge their work. Same for an agent.
boron1006 4mo ago
This has always been the fun part of programming to me. I know most people hate it, but I really don’t mind being on-call (ok I hate being woken up) and fixing weird bugs that users run into. All these small edge cases that people run into because reality is odd. Of course I’m in scientific programming so that probably colors my view. It’s always a little disappointing to me when I think I’ve run into something unique but it ends up being user error or something.
- ngm7 4mo ago
  I echo this. The kind of entropy that real users bring has been refreshing to face as a founder. Being a founder has a lot of SRE like activities. Fortunately I used to actually like troubleshooting and hence love being a founder but I know a lot of people quit this path because of the "suprising amount of details" in reality!
Jtsummers 4mo ago
(2017) with a few significant past discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255 - Jan 19, 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020495 - Jan 11, 2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29429385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29429385 - Dec 3, 2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38407851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38407851 - Nov 24, 2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43087779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43087779 - Feb 21, 2025
WastedCucumber 4mo ago
The first time I built a freestanding bookshelf, I put a lot of effort into making the feet level and the back straight and at a right angle to the feet. Once I put it up against the wall I'd built it for, I realized I'd solved completely different problem than the problem I really had. I needed crooked bookshelf, since the wall was totally tilted. In the end I screwed some wall shelves in and called it good enough.
- hahahaa 4mo ago
  Maybe some thin wood underneath to level it and a wall anchor? Or would it look to crappy still? Trying to imagine if the wall is uneven or tilting?
- macNchz 4mo ago
  One of my first real DIY projects during a summer in college nearly 20 years ago was replacing the rotted out basement bulkhead doors on the ~120 year old house I grew up in. I took measurements of the old ones, bought some nice tongue-and-groove cedar and high-quality hardware, and built the new doors in the garage. When they were fully assembled, I carried them over to install on the old stone frame. I took off the old ones, put mine in their place...and they didn't fit properly at all. Momentarily baffled, I realized that, despite appearances, the old frame was actually not square, in fact it was a parallelogram. I'd measured the height and width and assumed it was square. The previous (experienced) carpenter who'd built the doors I was replacing had clearly noticed this, and simply allowed for the misalignment in his design. He built perfectly square-appearing doors that mounted to the not-square frame. I had to go back and rework mine considerably for them to fit without looking ridiculous. They're still there and holding up well, but I also still think of this lesson on a regular basis in my day to day life now.
  - jadbox 4mo ago
    I feel this in my soul. I thought I could replace a door in a day, but months of fiddling, I discovered by frame is not only a parallelogram but it literally shifts by over an inch between seasons. (~100yr old house 2nd floor)
cadamsdotcom 4mo ago
This sentence is the exact reason laying people off and replacing them with AI doesn’t work.
- kouru225 4mo ago
  The fact that machine learning can learn highly detailed patterns is the very reason why AI is so useful. So what you’re saying doesn’t really make much sense
  - lelanthran 4mo ago
    > The fact that machine learning can learn highly detailed patterns is the very reason why AI is so useful. AI doesn't deal with reality, it deals with tokens. This is why all those vibe-coded harnesses, little more than glue between various text IO interfaces, are several hundreds of thousands of source lines of code. It's why a SOTA model took 100kSLoK to write a C compiler to compile one specific project. It's why, when I asked for a simple markdown -> ansi escape codes converter (for terminal output) in Python, SOTA Claude and SOTA ChatGPT both give me +- 150 SLoC when my own LUT-based version came to under 10 lines of code + a LUT. Reality has a surprising amount of detail, but LLMs don't exist in reality, they exist in a virtual world made up off tokens.
    - bonoboTP 4mo ago
      Do you exist in reality? Or just in a virtual world made up of sensory signals? Do you have access to the Ding an sich any more than a (multimodal) LLM?
      - lelanthran 4mo ago
        > Do you exist in reality? Yes. > Or just in a virtual world made up of sensory signals? No, definitely reality. Things affect my thought whether I sense them or not.
        4mo ago
morpheos137 4mo ago
Based on what is the level of detail to reality suprising? To me suprising means mysteriously or improbably unexpected. Why should we expect reality to be simple. Note complex and simple are somewhat subjective. The human brain evolved to just sufficient baseline level be able to handle the level of complexity of reality. So why would it be unexpected that humans find realty complex when our brains are calibrated just enough to handle it.
cynicalsecurity 4mo ago
An ancient article that now looks even cheesier. It's so hard to make those goddamn stairs. So complex, such wisdom.
- debo_ 4mo ago
  Username checks out
- nwhnwh 4mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynicism_(contemporary)#Health_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynicism_(contemporary)#Health...
  - onemoresoop 4mo ago
    Spot on
    - nwhnwh 4mo ago
      Cheers
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
hobonation 4mo ago
Really generally shitty collision detection and detail. It's just that when you notice, it rolls back and adds resources until you think it's fine.
mapcars 4mo ago
Reality does not have amount of details, it is infinite in all directions. Its only that we perceived certain amount of details, some more some less. One can spend their whole life mastering a single aspect and there always will be room to improve.
- epihelix 4mo ago
  This is not my field, but are we sure that reality is not quantised at some level? Infinite is a very big claim.
  - esailija 4mo ago
    Yeah that's why all models are wrong and everything ultimtately comes down to intution like supreme court's I know it when I see it. It's just that intuition doesn't scale and a lot of common cases can be handled with models, rules, definitions etc. People continue to be confused that just adding more rules eventually solves reality but it never has anywhere for anything so continuing to believe it will is wild
  - tick_tock_tick 4mo ago
    A lot of physics, at-least appears, to end up at quantization which actually really bothers me.
  - mapcars 4mo ago
    I can't prove it in scientific ways, the thing is at some point scientists defined an atom as something indivisible, today we know they study sub atomic particles, and even finer things, waves or strings or whatever. In the same way 100 years from now our science will look primitive, physics will be few levels deeper, but there always be the next thing. Its like a pattern of nature. I'm saying this from a perspective of practicing powerful spiritual practices and having certain experiences. They actually make one experience infinitive nature of consciousness, and somehow realize this is the way everything is made.
- atoav 4mo ago
  The statement refers to human perception of reality.
farfatched 4mo ago
> If you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often. I think I'm drawn to programming because the fiddliness is tractable, and fixable. In which other domain can I: * introspect the relevant processes/state, step by step * snapshot/undo * fix niggles, once and for all, and for everyone; and get their fixes too * probe and test my inputs and outputs, checking for quality. Get notified if a part changes in a way that breaks me. And the only tool I need is a commodity general purpose PC. When I try woodwork, or even electronics, I'm struck by much friction is in even simple tasks: tools, parts, lead time, safety, space, physical effort, cost, ...
- dwd 4mo ago
  Unless you have endless budget, many things can be one-shot. You can't do a test run first, or roll back a cut if the length is too short. You can patch misplaced nail holes, or re-dig a hole (messing up filling a hole with concrete is another matter) and hope you don't kill a tree transplanting it, but the end result isn't clean. The best I could do with woodworking in the end to approximate programming was live with wasting some timber, leave a lot of margin on the main cuts and size all the pieces as a whole.
  - smokefoot 4mo ago
    Woodworking taught me a lot about planning and design. As a young person, I was like the authors brother. I just wanted to do the thing, not draw a diagram and figure out how much wood I need, or build a fixture to mark the stair lines. Woodworking (the more constructive, furniture-making kind), rewards a deliberate, controlled process and it savagely penalizes mistakes. Those lessons transfer well to other disciplines. I’d have been a much better student if I’d learned wood working in high school.
    - dwd 4mo ago
      Absolutely. Woodworking was part of my first 3 years of high school, but it was mainly about learning safety and tool usage and not planning, estimating, selecting or purchasing timber. These days I only want to go to the lumberyard once for a project. Learnt the hard way on my first project that you need to take the time to carefully select the timber - checking straightness, matching grain and also colour before I started. Major hassle and waste of time to have to go back to swap boards.
arzmir 4mo ago
Lovely article! Contemplating the details of a thing is really satisfying. At times I find myself sitting there and trying to decompose the astonishing amount of work, research, both evolutionary and revolutionary progress that has gone into reaching the current level of something. Buying myself a coffee and stare at the local ferry and acknowledge that someones life's work went into figuring out how to make the paint stick to metal. Naturally the other point also sticks.. I too often get stuck on the details. :P
nerdright 4mo ago
Such a great read. This sentence is particularly chilling: > you could be intellectually stuck right at this very moment, with the evidence right in front of your face and you just can’t see it.
- lioeters 4mo ago
  I agree, that conclusion made me reflect on my existence. What I think I know versus the infinite amount of detail I'm missing. It's good to be reminded that there's so much we don't know that we even don't know.
kfarr 4mo ago
Tell me about it, I maintain an open source project in the civil engineering space and it's ... detailed.
- aeve890 4mo ago
  You have my curiosity
didgetmaster 4mo ago
I think we have all written some code that looks bulletproof to us. We run a set of tests with all the inputs we can think of, and it passes with flying colors (after several iterations of course). Then we give it to someone else and it fails on their first or second attempt. They simply tried to use it in a way that we did not anticipate. It doesn't mean that we are dumb for not thinking of those possibilities; it just means that we did not think of every one of them.
- natureiskino 4mo ago
  >that looks bulletproof to us And it pretty much is most times. For us. But indeed I did run into the "why would they use it like that though" scenario, where it fails. So I have to patch that usecase. At which point I go all "ok now it's really done" until another fringe usecase pops up and so on and so forth. And I did think about how sure I was it was bulletproof, humbling moment.
gregorymichael 4mo ago
My favorite post on HN. Upvote it everytime. Use this phrase so often now.
mlsu 4mo ago
I have read this article already and "reality has a surprising amount of detail" has become a phrase for me. But, I read it again today because the writing is so good. This guy is a gifted writer.
- onemoresoop 4mo ago
  I liked it too. His other posts on his blog are interesting as well.
mparramon 4mo ago
Related, amazing read about Meccano teaching you reality-based work, in contrast with Lego: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/truth-in-inconvenience https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/truth-in-inconvenien...
- fhe 4mo ago
  I want to thank you for the following reasons: - that's an amazing, mind-opening essay; - I've been looking for this toy (Meccano) for my entire adult life. I remember playing with a set that my mom got me when I was a kid, but I didn't know what it was called, and neither did my mom. And when I describe it to people, everyone kept telling me it was Lego (Lego is a much better-known toy brand in this part of the world). I had pretty much given up on ever finding it, thinking it might have just been a niche toy that had ceased production. Words are not enough to describe my joy when I opened the link and saw images of Meccano pieces!
  - dcrazy 4mo ago
    In the U.S., Meccano is known as Erector.
    - boomskats 4mo ago
      I'm amazed it's not more popular with a name like that!
      - stevenalowe 4mo ago
        it's really embarrassing to fail at it
  - mparramon 3mo ago
    Very happy to have helped you with this :) Venkatesh Rao is an amazing writer as well, I invite you to read some other of his posts. One of my personal favourites: Text is All You Need. https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/text-is-all-you-need https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/text-is-all-you-need
benmccarthy 4mo ago
One of my favourite essays. xkcd has a good take too 1741-Work
- wasting_time 4mo ago
  Link for the lazy: https://xkcd.com/1741/ https://xkcd.com/1741/
rconti 4mo ago
This hits for to me because I'm currently adding on to my house. Or rather, paying professionals to add on to my house, because I actually want it to get finished. I visit every couple of days. It's REMARKABLE how fast things get done. One day, there were no walls. The next day, almost all of the walls were in place! ... and yet, at the same time, things take a long amount of time because reality has a surprising amount of detail. I haven't taken into account how much you have to do to frame a house. So incredible amounts of work get done, day after day, but 3/4 of them are things I had no idea needed to get done! Gazing up into the roof, the detail is incredible. The PSL beams, the brackets, the joists, the trusses, just.. EVERYTHING! I thought the structural engineer's plans had an incredible amount of detail on them, and they do, but they also don't really say anything about _how_ to build the thing. How to put up the walls, how to hold them together temporarily, how to lift beams into place. In what order things can and should be done. That all just takes experience.
smokefoot 4mo ago
Yes but what about AI? (Perhaps the most annoying words written in the last few years mostly on LinkedIn). But actually in the years since this was written, I do think the world has shifted. Doing things on a computer used to be really hard. Even just installing a framework or getting >python to call the right python on windows. Then install Django and get Django to work with nginx etc. It was just a lot of thankless, frustrating work to get from zero to 1%. Aside from AI, the tools and packages and culture of computing has gotten better. But AI means you just get all the trivial but difficult stuff for free. And I think a lot of people who would have given up now make it through to see something work and they’ll feel the thrill of building something. It’s just better and easier now.
mcswell 4mo ago
One thing he didn't mention is getting the first and last steps to be the same vertical distance as the others. Nothing will trip you up (literally!) so easily as a final step that is a different height than the other steps. I thought of this because this morning I was putting a small fence around some plants we want to protect from deer. The fence consisted of 20 sections (bought on Amazon), each about 24 inches wide. Our ground is like rock, and the fence was not that sturdy, so I had to pound a heavy spike into the ground to the depth of the fence posts, then pull the spike out and put each section's legs in, leaving room for the next section's leg to go into the same spike hole. I wanted to be sure I was putting each section in at the right position, lest I end up with a 12 inch gap and have to go back and adjust lots of sections. Long story short, I pretty much succeeded, although when it cools down I may adjust a few sections. But the problem was sort of like the stairs: I wanted an integer number of fence sections, each the same length, to exactly fit around the bushes---just like you want an integer number of vertical steps in a diagonal stair, each of the same (more or less standard) height.
- internet_points 4mo ago
  Now I'm trying to imagine a staircase with a non-integer number of steps
  - dxdm 4mo ago
    Trippy!
wxw 4mo ago
> Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality. > As you learn, notice which details actually change how you think. Lovely article. The older I get the more I appreciate this. One point worth making: in many cases, after learning to see & appreciate the details, you gain the power to ignore the details that don't matter to you. This can be quite freeing.
qsera 4mo ago
This is exactly why I stick to programming computers and building "things" using it.
lilerjee 4mo ago
This is one of basic reasons why current AI cannot solve many problems. No matter how many data centers are built, it is impossible to accommodate that level of detail.
bigbangcmbr 4mo ago
i like to think along these lines too. sometimes it's paralyzing. one of the biggest mind blowing facts is that all this complexity started at a point in time: big bang. no one explicitly programmed it. all of it came from a soup of elementary particles 13.8b yrs ago.
ChuckMcM 4mo ago
This is one of my all time favorite blog posts. Why? Because it strikes at something that is both true, and a huge trap for smart people. Specifically, people who are experts in one discipline will often imagine that something in some other discipline is "pretty straight forward." And yet, my experience is that it never is. But that doesn't stop smart people from promising something that turns out to be waaaaaay harder to do than they imagined it could be.
unjuno 4mo ago
[flagged]
MASNeo 4mo ago
With the complexity of the systems we build it’s humbling and refreshing at the same time to read this. Indeed we are quick to default to what we know. Yet the answer may lie well outside of our expertise. I often build things many consider impossible and find that exactly the attention to detail and seeking contrarian views has helped avoid the worst mistakes.
jlightfire 4mo ago
Hanging a curtain rail that is centered both vertically and horizontally between the window and the ceiling, and it is leveled (with a bubble level), while in a ladder. Mark and then drill. It is harder than it seems at first. Maybe I'm just too a computer guy.
- tedapeters 4mo ago
  Especially when ceiling drywall often is not perfectly straight (the line between wall and ceiling often has dips)
utopiah 4mo ago
As a prototypist I can share : - you genuinely learn once your assumptions about how a system works break, you realize it, try differently, validate, get a better model of that system - your interfaces must remain permissive while providing feedback, namely you provide wiggle room then only once it behaves roughly as expected do you tighten then up
gobdovan 4mo ago
I usually view it the opposite way from the article's perspective. There's surprisingly little detail we rely on, yet things work out somehow. There's the Popper observation that any model of reality has zero chance to be true, since our models are finite, yet we're trying to describe a fractal reality. It's amazing how few levels of decomposition we need to go through to get something useful, like the stairs in the article (3 decomposition steps, as compared to thousands). If I were to never interact with reality and rely on pure reason alone, I would expect nothing humans ever do to work. Abstraction and exploration are unreasonably effective.
- marcosdumay 4mo ago
  Well, there has been a lot of evolution forcing us to focus on the right kinds of detail.
  - danielmarkbruce 4mo ago
    It's actually market forces. Evolution has almost zero to do with it. It's the past few thousand years where the vast majority of useful abstractions/tools/puzzle pieces have been built that enable any one person to do a lot without knowing so much.
    - gobdovan 4mo ago
      Markets and evolution are both knowledge processes. I think you would enjoy Donald Campbell's essay on evolutionary epistemology from 'The Philosophy of Karl Popper'. Parent's comment is observing a prerequisite to markets, humans are the only animal with global markets and biological selection happened to produce the kind of creature that can stabilise around markets. It's also selection that produced the current form of markets themselves. The world could have been otherwise; our current markets are contingent selection products, not analytically necessary institutions, and not guaranteed to be the uniquely best mechanisms for producing abstractions and tools.
    - mike_hock 4mo ago
      Selection pressure in general. It's not market forces that decide military viability of one empire over another but it's not biological evolution either.
elfly 4mo ago
So how do you trace the boards? I am assuming that you put the board at the correct angle on the floor, let it go over the upper entry floor, use a ruler to extend the line of the wall over to the board, trace that, cut it, then reverse the process but this time the part you just cut can go on the floor which will produce the correct angle on the wall?
- glitchc 4mo ago
  You need an angle finder to measure the angles between all relevant surfaces. Then cut the wood according to that.
- tedapeters 4mo ago
  I use a cad program (like sketchup) to give me the cut points for the stringer (boards) on the horizontal (step 7 goes from 58.75" to 67.125"). You then use a carpenter square and they make little brass screws you can screw on at the correct rise and run. Then you replicate that triangle down the stringer, pull out a circular saw and start cutting (carefully)!
usernametaken29 4mo ago
This article is awesome. It should be required reading for all engineers but probably mostly ML researchers. I’ve encountered my fair share of geniuses that are oblivious to the fact that the world is indeed complex and has a near infinite amount of detail. Of course, they’ve been trained as engineers, so they think in models and abstractions, but reality is almost always more complex than what people at desks estimate it to be.
smalltorch 4mo ago
>Consider building some basement stairs for a moment. Stairs seem pretty simple at first, and at a high level they are simple, just two long, wide parallel boards (2” x 12” x 16’), some boards for the stairs and an angle bracket on each side to hold up each stair. But as you actually start building you’ll find there’s a surprising amount of nuance. I have to point out stairs aren't typically made like this. That's a really complicated way to do it. I really like this article though. Something that stuck out to me early in my career was a master trim carpenter who told me God is in the Details. Carpenters constantly battle physics and make dozens of little micro adjustments with the end result being something that is pleasing to the eye that will stand the test of time. Can't help but think that translates to anything in life no matter what you're doing. Mastering those micro adjustment, whatever your craft may be, takes things to a whole new level.
- zomiaen 4mo ago
  >I have to point out stairs aren't typically made like this. That's a really complicated way to do it. What do you mean? That's exactly how most residential stairs are built. Two to four stringers with risers and thread boards attached to them. Granted, they will draw a template on one board and copy it to the others to make the stringers quickly well before mounting anything.
  - smalltorch 4mo ago
    >angle bracket on each side to hold up each stair. You add a serious amount of un needed complexity by using brackets described. The rise is typically the only thing you need to know in order to calculate all other dimensions of the stairs. The main difference between how the author describes the construction is stringers get cut, this description skips that step. Things like tread depth, riser height can be modified too if needed.
ekjhgkejhgk 4mo ago
Reading this for the N-th time inspired in me the observation that one difference betweent software engineers and carpenters is that software engineers tend to spend most of their time dealing with things they've never seen before, or variations therefore (new bug, new OS, new framework, new programming langauge, etc etc) whereas carpenters tend to spend most of their time doing the things that they know how to do perfectly.
adi_pradhan 4mo ago
One of my favorite articles. I see people using this as an argument for why LLMs are fundamentally flawed, but that fails to realize that most humans don't get into the details. In fact, many don't have the vocabulary to be in the details. There is an argument to be made for using humans, but I think we need humans to be more capable, more curious, more adaptive. LLMs are far better than the average human, but they are fundamentally inferior to the motivated human working with an LLM to augment themselves at the frontier.
ekjhgkejhgk 4mo ago
I like this passage > Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you. The important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them. This all makes makes it difficult to imagine how you could be missing something important.
BatFastard 4mo ago
As someone who has spent years creating virtual environments, all I can say is "Its turtles all the way down" every detail contains more details.

367 points by vinhnx 4mo ago

Boom890 4mo ago

Good read

james_ross 4mo ago
a good read indeed! Makes me think about my use of coding agents differently, as the main thing they do is deal with a lot of details that matter to the execution but don't matter to me personally enough to figure them out. Would love to see this author's more recent take as this was written pre-LLMs taking over the world.....
- sdenton4 4mo ago
  That sort of abstraction has always existed, it's just been a matter of hiring experts or labor from other humans. Reality still has a surprising amount of detail. You deal with it by engaging directly, delegating to someone else to engage with, or just brute force your way to a crooked staircase. When you hire someone to work on the stairs for you, you /hope/ they know what they're doing, especially if you don't have the skills yourself to judge their work. Same for an agent.

boron1006 4mo ago

This has always been the fun part of programming to me. I know most people hate it, but I really don’t mind being on-call (ok I hate being woken up) and fixing weird bugs that users run into. All these small edge cases that people run into because reality is odd. Of course I’m in scientific programming so that probably colors my view. It’s always a little disappointing to me when I think I’ve run into something unique but it ends up being user error or something.

ngm7 4mo ago
I echo this. The kind of entropy that real users bring has been refreshing to face as a founder. Being a founder has a lot of SRE like activities. Fortunately I used to actually like troubleshooting and hence love being a founder but I know a lot of people quit this path because of the "suprising amount of details" in reality!

Jtsummers 4mo ago

(2017) with a few significant past discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255 - Jan 19, 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020495 - Jan 11, 2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29429385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29429385 - Dec 3, 2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38407851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38407851 - Nov 24, 2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43087779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43087779 - Feb 21, 2025

WastedCucumber 4mo ago

The first time I built a freestanding bookshelf, I put a lot of effort into making the feet level and the back straight and at a right angle to the feet. Once I put it up against the wall I'd built it for, I realized I'd solved completely different problem than the problem I really had. I needed crooked bookshelf, since the wall was totally tilted. In the end I screwed some wall shelves in and called it good enough.

hahahaa 4mo ago
Maybe some thin wood underneath to level it and a wall anchor? Or would it look to crappy still? Trying to imagine if the wall is uneven or tilting?
macNchz 4mo ago
One of my first real DIY projects during a summer in college nearly 20 years ago was replacing the rotted out basement bulkhead doors on the ~120 year old house I grew up in. I took measurements of the old ones, bought some nice tongue-and-groove cedar and high-quality hardware, and built the new doors in the garage. When they were fully assembled, I carried them over to install on the old stone frame. I took off the old ones, put mine in their place...and they didn't fit properly at all. Momentarily baffled, I realized that, despite appearances, the old frame was actually not square, in fact it was a parallelogram. I'd measured the height and width and assumed it was square. The previous (experienced) carpenter who'd built the doors I was replacing had clearly noticed this, and simply allowed for the misalignment in his design. He built perfectly square-appearing doors that mounted to the not-square frame. I had to go back and rework mine considerably for them to fit without looking ridiculous. They're still there and holding up well, but I also still think of this lesson on a regular basis in my day to day life now.
- jadbox 4mo ago
  I feel this in my soul. I thought I could replace a door in a day, but months of fiddling, I discovered by frame is not only a parallelogram but it literally shifts by over an inch between seasons. (~100yr old house 2nd floor)

cadamsdotcom 4mo ago

This sentence is the exact reason laying people off and replacing them with AI doesn’t work.

kouru225 4mo ago
The fact that machine learning can learn highly detailed patterns is the very reason why AI is so useful. So what you’re saying doesn’t really make much sense
- lelanthran 4mo ago
  > The fact that machine learning can learn highly detailed patterns is the very reason why AI is so useful. AI doesn't deal with reality, it deals with tokens. This is why all those vibe-coded harnesses, little more than glue between various text IO interfaces, are several hundreds of thousands of source lines of code. It's why a SOTA model took 100kSLoK to write a C compiler to compile one specific project. It's why, when I asked for a simple markdown -> ansi escape codes converter (for terminal output) in Python, SOTA Claude and SOTA ChatGPT both give me +- 150 SLoC when my own LUT-based version came to under 10 lines of code + a LUT. Reality has a surprising amount of detail, but LLMs don't exist in reality, they exist in a virtual world made up off tokens.
  - bonoboTP 4mo ago
    Do you exist in reality? Or just in a virtual world made up of sensory signals? Do you have access to the Ding an sich any more than a (multimodal) LLM?
    - lelanthran 4mo ago
      > Do you exist in reality? Yes. > Or just in a virtual world made up of sensory signals? No, definitely reality. Things affect my thought whether I sense them or not.
      - 4mo ago

morpheos137 4mo ago

Based on what is the level of detail to reality suprising? To me suprising means mysteriously or improbably unexpected. Why should we expect reality to be simple. Note complex and simple are somewhat subjective. The human brain evolved to just sufficient baseline level be able to handle the level of complexity of reality. So why would it be unexpected that humans find realty complex when our brains are calibrated just enough to handle it.

cynicalsecurity 4mo ago

An ancient article that now looks even cheesier. It's so hard to make those goddamn stairs. So complex, such wisdom.

debo_ 4mo ago
Username checks out
nwhnwh 4mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynicism_(contemporary)#Health_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynicism_(contemporary)#Health...
- onemoresoop 4mo ago
  Spot on
  - nwhnwh 4mo ago
    Cheers

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

hobonation 4mo ago

Really generally shitty collision detection and detail. It's just that when you notice, it rolls back and adds resources until you think it's fine.

mapcars 4mo ago

Reality does not have amount of details, it is infinite in all directions. Its only that we perceived certain amount of details, some more some less. One can spend their whole life mastering a single aspect and there always will be room to improve.

epihelix 4mo ago
This is not my field, but are we sure that reality is not quantised at some level? Infinite is a very big claim.
- esailija 4mo ago
  Yeah that's why all models are wrong and everything ultimtately comes down to intution like supreme court's I know it when I see it. It's just that intuition doesn't scale and a lot of common cases can be handled with models, rules, definitions etc. People continue to be confused that just adding more rules eventually solves reality but it never has anywhere for anything so continuing to believe it will is wild
- tick_tock_tick 4mo ago
  A lot of physics, at-least appears, to end up at quantization which actually really bothers me.
- mapcars 4mo ago
  I can't prove it in scientific ways, the thing is at some point scientists defined an atom as something indivisible, today we know they study sub atomic particles, and even finer things, waves or strings or whatever. In the same way 100 years from now our science will look primitive, physics will be few levels deeper, but there always be the next thing. Its like a pattern of nature. I'm saying this from a perspective of practicing powerful spiritual practices and having certain experiences. They actually make one experience infinitive nature of consciousness, and somehow realize this is the way everything is made.
atoav 4mo ago
The statement refers to human perception of reality.

farfatched 4mo ago

> If you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often. I think I'm drawn to programming because the fiddliness is tractable, and fixable. In which other domain can I: * introspect the relevant processes/state, step by step * snapshot/undo * fix niggles, once and for all, and for everyone; and get their fixes too * probe and test my inputs and outputs, checking for quality. Get notified if a part changes in a way that breaks me. And the only tool I need is a commodity general purpose PC. When I try woodwork, or even electronics, I'm struck by much friction is in even simple tasks: tools, parts, lead time, safety, space, physical effort, cost, ...

dwd 4mo ago
Unless you have endless budget, many things can be one-shot. You can't do a test run first, or roll back a cut if the length is too short. You can patch misplaced nail holes, or re-dig a hole (messing up filling a hole with concrete is another matter) and hope you don't kill a tree transplanting it, but the end result isn't clean. The best I could do with woodworking in the end to approximate programming was live with wasting some timber, leave a lot of margin on the main cuts and size all the pieces as a whole.
- smokefoot 4mo ago
  Woodworking taught me a lot about planning and design. As a young person, I was like the authors brother. I just wanted to do the thing, not draw a diagram and figure out how much wood I need, or build a fixture to mark the stair lines. Woodworking (the more constructive, furniture-making kind), rewards a deliberate, controlled process and it savagely penalizes mistakes. Those lessons transfer well to other disciplines. I’d have been a much better student if I’d learned wood working in high school.
  - dwd 4mo ago
    Absolutely. Woodworking was part of my first 3 years of high school, but it was mainly about learning safety and tool usage and not planning, estimating, selecting or purchasing timber. These days I only want to go to the lumberyard once for a project. Learnt the hard way on my first project that you need to take the time to carefully select the timber - checking straightness, matching grain and also colour before I started. Major hassle and waste of time to have to go back to swap boards.

arzmir 4mo ago

Lovely article! Contemplating the details of a thing is really satisfying. At times I find myself sitting there and trying to decompose the astonishing amount of work, research, both evolutionary and revolutionary progress that has gone into reaching the current level of something. Buying myself a coffee and stare at the local ferry and acknowledge that someones life's work went into figuring out how to make the paint stick to metal. Naturally the other point also sticks.. I too often get stuck on the details. :P

nerdright 4mo ago

Such a great read. This sentence is particularly chilling: > you could be intellectually stuck right at this very moment, with the evidence right in front of your face and you just can’t see it.

lioeters 4mo ago
I agree, that conclusion made me reflect on my existence. What I think I know versus the infinite amount of detail I'm missing. It's good to be reminded that there's so much we don't know that we even don't know.

kfarr 4mo ago

Tell me about it, I maintain an open source project in the civil engineering space and it's ... detailed.

aeve890 4mo ago
You have my curiosity

didgetmaster 4mo ago

I think we have all written some code that looks bulletproof to us. We run a set of tests with all the inputs we can think of, and it passes with flying colors (after several iterations of course). Then we give it to someone else and it fails on their first or second attempt. They simply tried to use it in a way that we did not anticipate. It doesn't mean that we are dumb for not thinking of those possibilities; it just means that we did not think of every one of them.

natureiskino 4mo ago
>that looks bulletproof to us And it pretty much is most times. For us. But indeed I did run into the "why would they use it like that though" scenario, where it fails. So I have to patch that usecase. At which point I go all "ok now it's really done" until another fringe usecase pops up and so on and so forth. And I did think about how sure I was it was bulletproof, humbling moment.

gregorymichael 4mo ago

My favorite post on HN. Upvote it everytime. Use this phrase so often now.

mlsu 4mo ago

I have read this article already and "reality has a surprising amount of detail" has become a phrase for me. But, I read it again today because the writing is so good. This guy is a gifted writer.

onemoresoop 4mo ago
I liked it too. His other posts on his blog are interesting as well.

mparramon 4mo ago

Related, amazing read about Meccano teaching you reality-based work, in contrast with Lego: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/truth-in-inconvenience https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/truth-in-inconvenien...

fhe 4mo ago
I want to thank you for the following reasons: - that's an amazing, mind-opening essay; - I've been looking for this toy (Meccano) for my entire adult life. I remember playing with a set that my mom got me when I was a kid, but I didn't know what it was called, and neither did my mom. And when I describe it to people, everyone kept telling me it was Lego (Lego is a much better-known toy brand in this part of the world). I had pretty much given up on ever finding it, thinking it might have just been a niche toy that had ceased production. Words are not enough to describe my joy when I opened the link and saw images of Meccano pieces!
- dcrazy 4mo ago
  In the U.S., Meccano is known as Erector.
  - boomskats 4mo ago
    I'm amazed it's not more popular with a name like that!
    - stevenalowe 4mo ago
      it's really embarrassing to fail at it
- mparramon 3mo ago
  Very happy to have helped you with this :) Venkatesh Rao is an amazing writer as well, I invite you to read some other of his posts. One of my personal favourites: Text is All You Need. https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/text-is-all-you-need https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/text-is-all-you-need

benmccarthy 4mo ago

One of my favourite essays. xkcd has a good take too 1741-Work

wasting_time 4mo ago
Link for the lazy: https://xkcd.com/1741/ https://xkcd.com/1741/

rconti 4mo ago

This hits for to me because I'm currently adding on to my house. Or rather, paying professionals to add on to my house, because I actually want it to get finished. I visit every couple of days. It's REMARKABLE how fast things get done. One day, there were no walls. The next day, almost all of the walls were in place! ... and yet, at the same time, things take a long amount of time because reality has a surprising amount of detail. I haven't taken into account how much you have to do to frame a house. So incredible amounts of work get done, day after day, but 3/4 of them are things I had no idea needed to get done! Gazing up into the roof, the detail is incredible. The PSL beams, the brackets, the joists, the trusses, just.. EVERYTHING! I thought the structural engineer's plans had an incredible amount of detail on them, and they do, but they also don't really say anything about _how_ to build the thing. How to put up the walls, how to hold them together temporarily, how to lift beams into place. In what order things can and should be done. That all just takes experience.

smokefoot 4mo ago

Yes but what about AI? (Perhaps the most annoying words written in the last few years mostly on LinkedIn). But actually in the years since this was written, I do think the world has shifted. Doing things on a computer used to be really hard. Even just installing a framework or getting >python to call the right python on windows. Then install Django and get Django to work with nginx etc. It was just a lot of thankless, frustrating work to get from zero to 1%. Aside from AI, the tools and packages and culture of computing has gotten better. But AI means you just get all the trivial but difficult stuff for free. And I think a lot of people who would have given up now make it through to see something work and they’ll feel the thrill of building something. It’s just better and easier now.

mcswell 4mo ago

One thing he didn't mention is getting the first and last steps to be the same vertical distance as the others. Nothing will trip you up (literally!) so easily as a final step that is a different height than the other steps. I thought of this because this morning I was putting a small fence around some plants we want to protect from deer. The fence consisted of 20 sections (bought on Amazon), each about 24 inches wide. Our ground is like rock, and the fence was not that sturdy, so I had to pound a heavy spike into the ground to the depth of the fence posts, then pull the spike out and put each section's legs in, leaving room for the next section's leg to go into the same spike hole. I wanted to be sure I was putting each section in at the right position, lest I end up with a 12 inch gap and have to go back and adjust lots of sections. Long story short, I pretty much succeeded, although when it cools down I may adjust a few sections. But the problem was sort of like the stairs: I wanted an integer number of fence sections, each the same length, to exactly fit around the bushes---just like you want an integer number of vertical steps in a diagonal stair, each of the same (more or less standard) height.

internet_points 4mo ago
Now I'm trying to imagine a staircase with a non-integer number of steps
- dxdm 4mo ago
  Trippy!

wxw 4mo ago

> Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality. > As you learn, notice which details actually change how you think. Lovely article. The older I get the more I appreciate this. One point worth making: in many cases, after learning to see & appreciate the details, you gain the power to ignore the details that don't matter to you. This can be quite freeing.

qsera 4mo ago

This is exactly why I stick to programming computers and building "things" using it.

lilerjee 4mo ago

This is one of basic reasons why current AI cannot solve many problems. No matter how many data centers are built, it is impossible to accommodate that level of detail.

bigbangcmbr 4mo ago

i like to think along these lines too. sometimes it's paralyzing. one of the biggest mind blowing facts is that all this complexity started at a point in time: big bang. no one explicitly programmed it. all of it came from a soup of elementary particles 13.8b yrs ago.

ChuckMcM 4mo ago

This is one of my all time favorite blog posts. Why? Because it strikes at something that is both true, and a huge trap for smart people. Specifically, people who are experts in one discipline will often imagine that something in some other discipline is "pretty straight forward." And yet, my experience is that it never is. But that doesn't stop smart people from promising something that turns out to be waaaaaay harder to do than they imagined it could be.

unjuno 4mo ago

[flagged]

MASNeo 4mo ago

With the complexity of the systems we build it’s humbling and refreshing at the same time to read this. Indeed we are quick to default to what we know. Yet the answer may lie well outside of our expertise. I often build things many consider impossible and find that exactly the attention to detail and seeking contrarian views has helped avoid the worst mistakes.

jlightfire 4mo ago

Hanging a curtain rail that is centered both vertically and horizontally between the window and the ceiling, and it is leveled (with a bubble level), while in a ladder. Mark and then drill. It is harder than it seems at first. Maybe I'm just too a computer guy.

tedapeters 4mo ago
Especially when ceiling drywall often is not perfectly straight (the line between wall and ceiling often has dips)

utopiah 4mo ago

As a prototypist I can share : - you genuinely learn once your assumptions about how a system works break, you realize it, try differently, validate, get a better model of that system - your interfaces must remain permissive while providing feedback, namely you provide wiggle room then only once it behaves roughly as expected do you tighten then up

gobdovan 4mo ago

I usually view it the opposite way from the article's perspective. There's surprisingly little detail we rely on, yet things work out somehow. There's the Popper observation that any model of reality has zero chance to be true, since our models are finite, yet we're trying to describe a fractal reality. It's amazing how few levels of decomposition we need to go through to get something useful, like the stairs in the article (3 decomposition steps, as compared to thousands). If I were to never interact with reality and rely on pure reason alone, I would expect nothing humans ever do to work. Abstraction and exploration are unreasonably effective.

marcosdumay 4mo ago
Well, there has been a lot of evolution forcing us to focus on the right kinds of detail.
- danielmarkbruce 4mo ago
  It's actually market forces. Evolution has almost zero to do with it. It's the past few thousand years where the vast majority of useful abstractions/tools/puzzle pieces have been built that enable any one person to do a lot without knowing so much.
  - gobdovan 4mo ago
    Markets and evolution are both knowledge processes. I think you would enjoy Donald Campbell's essay on evolutionary epistemology from 'The Philosophy of Karl Popper'. Parent's comment is observing a prerequisite to markets, humans are the only animal with global markets and biological selection happened to produce the kind of creature that can stabilise around markets. It's also selection that produced the current form of markets themselves. The world could have been otherwise; our current markets are contingent selection products, not analytically necessary institutions, and not guaranteed to be the uniquely best mechanisms for producing abstractions and tools.
  - mike_hock 4mo ago
    Selection pressure in general. It's not market forces that decide military viability of one empire over another but it's not biological evolution either.

elfly 4mo ago

So how do you trace the boards? I am assuming that you put the board at the correct angle on the floor, let it go over the upper entry floor, use a ruler to extend the line of the wall over to the board, trace that, cut it, then reverse the process but this time the part you just cut can go on the floor which will produce the correct angle on the wall?

glitchc 4mo ago
You need an angle finder to measure the angles between all relevant surfaces. Then cut the wood according to that.
tedapeters 4mo ago
I use a cad program (like sketchup) to give me the cut points for the stringer (boards) on the horizontal (step 7 goes from 58.75" to 67.125"). You then use a carpenter square and they make little brass screws you can screw on at the correct rise and run. Then you replicate that triangle down the stringer, pull out a circular saw and start cutting (carefully)!

usernametaken29 4mo ago

This article is awesome. It should be required reading for all engineers but probably mostly ML researchers. I’ve encountered my fair share of geniuses that are oblivious to the fact that the world is indeed complex and has a near infinite amount of detail. Of course, they’ve been trained as engineers, so they think in models and abstractions, but reality is almost always more complex than what people at desks estimate it to be.

smalltorch 4mo ago

>Consider building some basement stairs for a moment. Stairs seem pretty simple at first, and at a high level they are simple, just two long, wide parallel boards (2” x 12” x 16’), some boards for the stairs and an angle bracket on each side to hold up each stair. But as you actually start building you’ll find there’s a surprising amount of nuance. I have to point out stairs aren't typically made like this. That's a really complicated way to do it. I really like this article though. Something that stuck out to me early in my career was a master trim carpenter who told me God is in the Details. Carpenters constantly battle physics and make dozens of little micro adjustments with the end result being something that is pleasing to the eye that will stand the test of time. Can't help but think that translates to anything in life no matter what you're doing. Mastering those micro adjustment, whatever your craft may be, takes things to a whole new level.

zomiaen 4mo ago
>I have to point out stairs aren't typically made like this. That's a really complicated way to do it. What do you mean? That's exactly how most residential stairs are built. Two to four stringers with risers and thread boards attached to them. Granted, they will draw a template on one board and copy it to the others to make the stringers quickly well before mounting anything.
- smalltorch 4mo ago
  >angle bracket on each side to hold up each stair. You add a serious amount of un needed complexity by using brackets described. The rise is typically the only thing you need to know in order to calculate all other dimensions of the stairs. The main difference between how the author describes the construction is stringers get cut, this description skips that step. Things like tread depth, riser height can be modified too if needed.

ekjhgkejhgk 4mo ago

Reading this for the N-th time inspired in me the observation that one difference betweent software engineers and carpenters is that software engineers tend to spend most of their time dealing with things they've never seen before, or variations therefore (new bug, new OS, new framework, new programming langauge, etc etc) whereas carpenters tend to spend most of their time doing the things that they know how to do perfectly.

adi_pradhan 4mo ago

One of my favorite articles. I see people using this as an argument for why LLMs are fundamentally flawed, but that fails to realize that most humans don't get into the details. In fact, many don't have the vocabulary to be in the details. There is an argument to be made for using humans, but I think we need humans to be more capable, more curious, more adaptive. LLMs are far better than the average human, but they are fundamentally inferior to the motivated human working with an LLM to augment themselves at the frontier.

ekjhgkejhgk 4mo ago

I like this passage > Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you. The important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them. This all makes makes it difficult to imagine how you could be missing something important.

BatFastard 4mo ago

As someone who has spent years creating virtual environments, all I can say is "Its turtles all the way down" every detail contains more details.