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.
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.
You notice this when you start to learn drawing (at least I did) - it's not that you don't know how to draw, say a horse, it's that you have no idea what a horse really looks like. Ordinarily you just jump to a whole lot of conclusions.
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)
I lived in a flat in a 200-ish-year-old building when I was at uni. Lovely flat, handy for uni, handy for work, near the shops, near a park, flatmates were pretty okay, comfortable, airy, well-lit, and warm.
Here's the thing we - a flat full of nerdy tech students - never figured out.
The walls in two of the bedrooms (including mine) were perfectly plumb, all four walls straight. Bookshelves lined up nicely with the walls. The floor was flat and level.
A related thing that took me a while to accept when I started woodworking is that wood moves, a lot.
If you built the bookshelf in wood, it will be expanding, contracting and shifting over time with temperature and humidity variation throughout the day and season. And asymmetrically depending on the grain.
The straight right angles won't stay that way, and it's better to design such that they change in complementary ways, rather than remain perfect.
Sounds about right. I approached this in a different way in my office.
The walls aren't straight, either vertically or horizontally, and they're not even consistently wonky along any given axis.
So I installed uprights vertically, using transparent polycarbonate spacers of different depths at the attachment points[0]. I then installed shelves on the uprights and aligned them horizontally.
The variation is only +/- 6mm or so (for around 12mm variation across the 2.5m x 2.44m wall) but, if I hadn't done this, my shelves wouldn't be level, and wouldn't even be consistently non-level, so would have been awkward to install along the full length of the wall, would all be misaligned with eachother, and would have looked incredibly janky.
[0] In hindsight I wish I'd gone for these in different colours rather than just plain transparent, to make more of a feature of them. The walls are white so I think orange, blue, red, and yellow would have worked well.
My father, (who by profession was a CA with MBA, but is exceptionally handy) has regularly reminded me that walls/floors and ceilings are pretty much never straight and level, and over here they're brick and mortar, not wood.
This must be a well-known fact to all trades people who work on cupboards, tiling, door mounting, etc. But when you understand this, then you realize that everything is built to be forgiving of this reality.
E.g. prefabricated bedroom cupboards will always be fitted with fillers on each side and a kickboard for the bottom. This allows you to use feet/wedges underneath the cupboard to make it stand-up perfectly straight (which is not necessarily parallel with the floor and/or walls), but because of the fillers/kickboard being wide/tall enough and cut to fit the irregular/skew shape, you don't tend to notice.
Beading around wooden door frames is for the same reason, it hides the little gap that is invariably at points around it, either due to the hole in the wall being skew and/or slightly arched.
As I got a downvote I can only assume my tone came across as “how could you not know this?”, but my feeling when I wrote this was that it’s a bit of a funny and interesting anecdote the parent wrote and I’ve been similarly frustrated with how I easily make mistakes with seemingly simple tasks such as putting up a shelf, to which I have to laugh at myself about when thinking about it many years later.
I definitely prefer that with software it can be “perfect” and easily changed later if you find it’s not.
Hah, yeah same. I grew up in a house built with hand tools sometime around 1910 (family bought it from an old lady whose father built it), not a single corner was square (though things were generally good vertically by some miracle), but it wasn’t noticeable until whenever were doing major work.
Also learned that lath and plaster needs some special consideration when screwing/nailing things for securement, as the lath (wood strips) could split, causing a subsequent crack in the plaster. Basically for screws or bigger nails, it’s a good idea to drill a small hole first to lessen the pressure, or do a bigger hole and use a spring bolt anchor.
I once measured a 80s-communally-built event space with a laser meter (it was useful to have digital floor maps for event planning). No measurement was a perfectly round number. No angle was perfectly right. Nothing really lined up. Except… there was this one set of stairs leading up to the stage. It was perfect. Every step was exactly the same in all dimensions, to the millimeter. It was perfectly level. I always wondered who this stair craftsman was, who prided themselves on doing such professional work among the presumed chaos. :-)
Coincidentally just had this realization last night. Leaned a piece of furniture against the wall, realized the ~perfectly straight/level edge didn't lean smoothly against the wall -- the wall is not perfectly straight!! :-O
I recognized this submission from its title but did not remember what it was about. For some reason this anecdote reminded me. Yes now I know it's about the man who built staircases with his father.
I have been getting a lot more into DIY and that's my experience myself. I keep running back to the store because there is some detail I haven't considered. Iteration time is so much slower than software... kinda bugs me how much you have to plan upfront and think through instead of just YAGNI and agile-ing your way through it.
When I worked as a camera guy on film sets, this was a typical occurrence. You level out the camera trypod with the magic eye on the tripod. The magic eye being a small amount of liquid with a single bubble inside, pointing always upward.
Soon you realize that an surprising amount of walls are just not straight or level.
This is what molding is for. A lot of people view it as "ornate" or old fashioned, but it served a functional purpose originally and then people started making it fancier.
I put up a notice board in my kitchen when I moved into a new place, and it looked squint even though my level said it was straight. I flipped the spirit level end-for-end, still straight - if the level was off and the workpiece was straight, then flipping it would make it read wrong.
Nope. Level was okay. Checked the wall, wall is plumb. Wait a sec - the wallpaper is not straight.
So the notice board went on lined up with the wallpaper, not reality.
The other one was fitting a six metre aluminium pole with a two metre aerial on top to a brand new multi-million pound building. The brackets and pole were absolutely straight and plumb. Got back down off the cherry picker, walked back across the yard to the van, pole looks really squint.
After much upping and downing and to-ing and fro-ing, it became clear that I needed to pack the aerial pole mounting to lean it over by a couple of degrees so it didn't look wrong!
The pole was straight, the multi-million pound brand new high end amazing building was distinctly on the piss with not one truly plumb vertical component anywhere.
> 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, ...
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.
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.
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.
That's also a lesson about what people will sell you. First time I went to a lumberyard, I was (coincidentally) with a friend who did a lot of woodwork. I thought, well, I've just paid for a pack of wood, I'll get it. The worker there was completely happy with that. My friend stopped me, and inspected each piece.
Sure enough, several had cracks at the ends, knots in poor places, and other things that, had I bought it, would have caused me trouble.
I can be a naive person in that I assume good faith. I would never knowingly sell something poor quality to someone else. I had assumed because I was being sold it, it was okay.
They aren’t “knowingly selling you poor quality” as some sort of scam. They are selling you wood to the spec you asked for. If you want higher-grade wood, you either have to spend money getting lumber graded to a higher spec or spend the time going through piles of low-spec boards to find the good ones. Many engineered wood structures are designed to use “poor-quality” wood, and they prefer it because it’s cheaper than using less high-grade wood.
The thing is, other packs of the same wood to the same spec were better. We were able to sort through and get one graded/rated the same, but without problems.
I know about wood quality and I have deliberately bought higher and lower grade wood. But even so, quality varies greatly.
Yeah, that is correct. Sawmills often produce only one or two grades of wood and don’t do aggressive binning. That’s why the quality is so variable within the grade. There are also factors that affect the grade but don’t necessarily impact every application (eg warping and knots are sometimes ok), so the bins are coarse-grained.
The fiddliness isn't necessarily fixable though, at least in business code. The code has to represent the real-world, and if the real-world is fiddly then the code must be fiddly too. The only way to 'fix' this is to restrict your code's representation of the world to some non-fiddly sub-set, but this isn't always possible.
I think this is a very common sentiment among a lot of people, including me.
And also that’s why AI tools create mix reactions. A couple of months ago a post went viral which was really insightful on what I was originally drawn to cs.
>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.
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.
"We" doesn't mean what you think it means... You don't realize how much detail (and work) you are in fact relying on, but the 8 billion (we) know it in aggregate.
"We" (the 8 billion) have made some insanely great abstractions or puzzle pieces to work with. There is just an insane amount of work that goes into even elementary things to get the world to where it works this way.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Right but the 'surprising level of detail' can often exhibit itself as exactly not a pattern. There are many jobs where you employ a human not because of the rote/pattern based work, but their ability to handle all the edge cases that are just frequent enough to need them, but not frequent enough for AI to be able to handle. That is the events that in this example would require the AI to ask the human to make some decision for them.
> 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.
The discretization of those tokens can be manipulated to get any result you want. If it meaningfully benefits the AI to have a more fine-grained discretization, then you can do that. AI only compresses as much as we want it to. I understand your sentiment, but the logical conclusion of what you’re saying is that no form of compression is ever valuable. That’s just not a defensible argument.
All information gets compressed. Even your own perception of reality gets compressed.
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?
How would you know? You have no external frame of reference; a virtual world of sensory signals would be identical from your perspective. (I agree that "reality" is the most parsimonious explanation by far, btw, but that's never been the point of the simulation thought experiment.)
I think the more interesting corollary of this article is that if we're living in a simulation, it's an impossibly, improbably detailed one. I really want some compute time on the HPC that's running it.
> How would you know? You have no external frame of reference; a virtual world of sensory signals would be identical from your perspective.
Okay, lets go with that :-)
I might be living in a virtual reality, correct, I have no way of knowing.
What I do know is that the reality I am in is many thousands of times higher in resolution than the reality of the LLM.
As an analogy, the LLM is seeing a downscaled 32x32 pixel image while I see the original 8k image. Whether there is a larger 1b^2 image that I cannot see is not relevant to the question of whether the LLM can see my reality or not - it can't.
Reality is by definition our physical reality, which is about an infinite number of levels more detailed than the, you know, _virtual_ digital world computers exist in.
Whatever world we construct for LLMs, no matter how detailed we make it, will always be a blocky projection of the real domain onto a virtual one.
It follows then that any insight gained in the virtual world is at best a rough approximation which can be quite useful at times but also utterly faulty on occasion.
How often it is useful vs. wrong is (partially) a function of how complete the real-to-virtual approximation for a given domain.
Certain domains, given their limited degrees of freedom, can be quite accurately modeled, such as a subway map.
But many domains cannot, and it's important to be aware of that inherent limitation in digital models including but not limited to LLM """reasoning"""
>Whatever world we construct for LLMs, no matter how detailed we make it, will always be a blocky projection of the real domain onto a virtual one.
I don't know exactly why but I never really understood this argument. Might be some kind of control thing? Because for me it's pretty simple, it's basically free to give access to reality. Just add "sensory organs" as it were. I can argue you can make them perceive reality even better than we (humans) do, just enlarge the audio/video spectrums. Bam...more reality. The whole point of the argument is we're missing information.
Again, I get the need for controlling the environment for what LLM/AI/AGI/whatever will be, but that will always cost more than giving them access to like...reality. Same reason I don't really believe in the whole simulation argument, it's just more expensive all around, loses resolution, let alone control. I don't doubt there will be some people that would indulge in neverending hedonism but not all people. You need to give up control for that.
> Because for me it's pretty simple, it's basically free to give access to reality. Just add "sensory organs" as it were.
I dunno what you mean by "free". The model is trained on text. To "give" the model sensory organs it would need to be trained on those sensory organs.
Current models can predict text, because that's what the weights represent. Models with sensory organs will need to be trained on the output of those sensory organs.
That sounds close to impossible in the foreseeable future.
In the spirit of the article, what detail in the decision making of layoffs might you be missing?
I expect there's a lot of detail that I'm unaware of relating to running a company (planning; risk; legal; ...) that might make a decision foolish to me, but make sense if given more context.
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.
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
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?
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
- 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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.....
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.
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.
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.
You notice this when you start to learn drawing (at least I did) - it's not that you don't know how to draw, say a horse, it's that you have no idea what a horse really looks like. Ordinarily you just jump to a whole lot of conclusions.
The classic example is that nobody can remember the basic shape of a bicycle: https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on...
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)
That’s why most doors come prehung in a jamb. Just add shims and then cover them with trim.
I lived in a flat in a 200-ish-year-old building when I was at uni. Lovely flat, handy for uni, handy for work, near the shops, near a park, flatmates were pretty okay, comfortable, airy, well-lit, and warm.
Here's the thing we - a flat full of nerdy tech students - never figured out.
The walls in two of the bedrooms (including mine) were perfectly plumb, all four walls straight. Bookshelves lined up nicely with the walls. The floor was flat and level.
But the room was 10cm narrower at the ceiling.
Have you ever been to The Mystery Spot[1]? It is a fun tourist trap with all sorts of conundrums like that.
[1]: https://www.mysteryspot.com/
obviously a small space-time anomaly. Nothing to be alarmed about. Sapphire and Steel have been assigned.
This is the answer we came up with. Guy in the flat downstairs must have been dicking about with supermassive dark matter.
I wonder if this could all be solved if doors are triangles instead of quadrilaterals.
Or round, like the hobbits do
You lough, but the cork always plugs the bottle eventually. Cone shaped round doors with cork on the rim.
Leather with a drawstring, like a purse. Never needs oil, and my granny knots will keep the lock-picking lawyer out longer than your yale.
You guys have doors?
Check if it's the hinges that are yielding.
they can lean at all sort of weird angles too, experienced finish carpenter are worth their weight in gold
A related thing that took me a while to accept when I started woodworking is that wood moves, a lot.
If you built the bookshelf in wood, it will be expanding, contracting and shifting over time with temperature and humidity variation throughout the day and season. And asymmetrically depending on the grain.
The straight right angles won't stay that way, and it's better to design such that they change in complementary ways, rather than remain perfect.
Sounds about right. I approached this in a different way in my office.
The walls aren't straight, either vertically or horizontally, and they're not even consistently wonky along any given axis.
So I installed uprights vertically, using transparent polycarbonate spacers of different depths at the attachment points[0]. I then installed shelves on the uprights and aligned them horizontally.
The variation is only +/- 6mm or so (for around 12mm variation across the 2.5m x 2.44m wall) but, if I hadn't done this, my shelves wouldn't be level, and wouldn't even be consistently non-level, so would have been awkward to install along the full length of the wall, would all be misaligned with eachother, and would have looked incredibly janky.
[0] In hindsight I wish I'd gone for these in different colours rather than just plain transparent, to make more of a feature of them. The walls are white so I think orange, blue, red, and yellow would have worked well.
Someone once told me when I was putting something exactly level in a crooked old house: you want it level with the house, not the universe.
My father, (who by profession was a CA with MBA, but is exceptionally handy) has regularly reminded me that walls/floors and ceilings are pretty much never straight and level, and over here they're brick and mortar, not wood.
This must be a well-known fact to all trades people who work on cupboards, tiling, door mounting, etc. But when you understand this, then you realize that everything is built to be forgiving of this reality.
E.g. prefabricated bedroom cupboards will always be fitted with fillers on each side and a kickboard for the bottom. This allows you to use feet/wedges underneath the cupboard to make it stand-up perfectly straight (which is not necessarily parallel with the floor and/or walls), but because of the fillers/kickboard being wide/tall enough and cut to fit the irregular/skew shape, you don't tend to notice.
Beading around wooden door frames is for the same reason, it hides the little gap that is invariably at points around it, either due to the hole in the wall being skew and/or slightly arched.
As I got a downvote I can only assume my tone came across as “how could you not know this?”, but my feeling when I wrote this was that it’s a bit of a funny and interesting anecdote the parent wrote and I’ve been similarly frustrated with how I easily make mistakes with seemingly simple tasks such as putting up a shelf, to which I have to laugh at myself about when thinking about it many years later.
I definitely prefer that with software it can be “perfect” and easily changed later if you find it’s not.
Hah, yeah same. I grew up in a house built with hand tools sometime around 1910 (family bought it from an old lady whose father built it), not a single corner was square (though things were generally good vertically by some miracle), but it wasn’t noticeable until whenever were doing major work.
Also learned that lath and plaster needs some special consideration when screwing/nailing things for securement, as the lath (wood strips) could split, causing a subsequent crack in the plaster. Basically for screws or bigger nails, it’s a good idea to drill a small hole first to lessen the pressure, or do a bigger hole and use a spring bolt anchor.
I once measured a 80s-communally-built event space with a laser meter (it was useful to have digital floor maps for event planning). No measurement was a perfectly round number. No angle was perfectly right. Nothing really lined up. Except… there was this one set of stairs leading up to the stage. It was perfect. Every step was exactly the same in all dimensions, to the millimeter. It was perfectly level. I always wondered who this stair craftsman was, who prided themselves on doing such professional work among the presumed chaos. :-)
Coincidentally just had this realization last night. Leaned a piece of furniture against the wall, realized the ~perfectly straight/level edge didn't lean smoothly against the wall -- the wall is not perfectly straight!! :-O
I recognized this submission from its title but did not remember what it was about. For some reason this anecdote reminded me. Yes now I know it's about the man who built staircases with his father.
I can never look at staircases the same.
I have been getting a lot more into DIY and that's my experience myself. I keep running back to the store because there is some detail I haven't considered. Iteration time is so much slower than software... kinda bugs me how much you have to plan upfront and think through instead of just YAGNI and agile-ing your way through it.
When I worked as a camera guy on film sets, this was a typical occurrence. You level out the camera trypod with the magic eye on the tripod. The magic eye being a small amount of liquid with a single bubble inside, pointing always upward.
Soon you realize that an surprising amount of walls are just not straight or level.
aka spirit level?
On that subject a laser level is indispensable for any work that needs to be straight. I don’t know how I managed without one before.
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?
This is what molding is for. A lot of people view it as "ornate" or old fashioned, but it served a functional purpose originally and then people started making it fancier.
This is why shims are incredibly useful.
"Never trust the carpenter"
I've done this twice.
I put up a notice board in my kitchen when I moved into a new place, and it looked squint even though my level said it was straight. I flipped the spirit level end-for-end, still straight - if the level was off and the workpiece was straight, then flipping it would make it read wrong.
Nope. Level was okay. Checked the wall, wall is plumb. Wait a sec - the wallpaper is not straight.
So the notice board went on lined up with the wallpaper, not reality.
The other one was fitting a six metre aluminium pole with a two metre aerial on top to a brand new multi-million pound building. The brackets and pole were absolutely straight and plumb. Got back down off the cherry picker, walked back across the yard to the van, pole looks really squint.
After much upping and downing and to-ing and fro-ing, it became clear that I needed to pack the aerial pole mounting to lean it over by a couple of degrees so it didn't look wrong!
The pole was straight, the multi-million pound brand new high end amazing building was distinctly on the piss with not one truly plumb vertical component anywhere.
> 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, ...
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.
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.
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.
That's also a lesson about what people will sell you. First time I went to a lumberyard, I was (coincidentally) with a friend who did a lot of woodwork. I thought, well, I've just paid for a pack of wood, I'll get it. The worker there was completely happy with that. My friend stopped me, and inspected each piece.
Sure enough, several had cracks at the ends, knots in poor places, and other things that, had I bought it, would have caused me trouble.
I can be a naive person in that I assume good faith. I would never knowingly sell something poor quality to someone else. I had assumed because I was being sold it, it was okay.
They aren’t “knowingly selling you poor quality” as some sort of scam. They are selling you wood to the spec you asked for. If you want higher-grade wood, you either have to spend money getting lumber graded to a higher spec or spend the time going through piles of low-spec boards to find the good ones. Many engineered wood structures are designed to use “poor-quality” wood, and they prefer it because it’s cheaper than using less high-grade wood.
The thing is, other packs of the same wood to the same spec were better. We were able to sort through and get one graded/rated the same, but without problems.
I know about wood quality and I have deliberately bought higher and lower grade wood. But even so, quality varies greatly.
Yeah, that is correct. Sawmills often produce only one or two grades of wood and don’t do aggressive binning. That’s why the quality is so variable within the grade. There are also factors that affect the grade but don’t necessarily impact every application (eg warping and knots are sometimes ok), so the bins are coarse-grained.
The fiddliness isn't necessarily fixable though, at least in business code. The code has to represent the real-world, and if the real-world is fiddly then the code must be fiddly too. The only way to 'fix' this is to restrict your code's representation of the world to some non-fiddly sub-set, but this isn't always possible.
Until the next OS update...
With wood you are up against nature. With software you are up against corporations and comities.
> With wood you are up against nature.
You're up against your wood vendor. Anyone familiar with Home Depot "fresh from the tree" lumber has discovered this.
I think this is a very common sentiment among a lot of people, including me.
And also that’s why AI tools create mix reactions. A couple of months ago a post went viral which was really insightful on what I was originally drawn to cs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46881264
>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.
>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.
>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.
(2017) with a few significant past discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255 - Jan 19, 2018
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020495 - Jan 11, 2020
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29429385 - Dec 3, 2021
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38407851 - Nov 24, 2023
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43087779 - Feb 21, 2025
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.
"We" doesn't mean what you think it means... You don't realize how much detail (and work) you are in fact relying on, but the 8 billion (we) know it in aggregate.
"We" (the 8 billion) have made some insanely great abstractions or puzzle pieces to work with. There is just an insane amount of work that goes into even elementary things to get the world to where it works this way.
Well, there has been a lot of evolution forcing us to focus on the right kinds of detail.
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.
Related, amazing read about Meccano teaching you reality-based work, in contrast with Lego:
https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/truth-in-inconvenien...
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!
In the U.S., Meccano is known as Erector.
I'm amazed it's not more popular with a name like that!
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.
I liked it too. His other posts on his blog are interesting as well.
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.
Now I'm trying to imagine a staircase with a non-integer number of steps
Trippy!
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
This sentence is the exact reason laying people off and replacing them with AI doesn’t work.
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
Right but the 'surprising level of detail' can often exhibit itself as exactly not a pattern. There are many jobs where you employ a human not because of the rote/pattern based work, but their ability to handle all the edge cases that are just frequent enough to need them, but not frequent enough for AI to be able to handle. That is the events that in this example would require the AI to ask the human to make some decision for them.
> 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.
The discretization of those tokens can be manipulated to get any result you want. If it meaningfully benefits the AI to have a more fine-grained discretization, then you can do that. AI only compresses as much as we want it to. I understand your sentiment, but the logical conclusion of what you’re saying is that no form of compression is ever valuable. That’s just not a defensible argument.
All information gets compressed. Even your own perception of reality gets compressed.
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?
> 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.
How would you know? You have no external frame of reference; a virtual world of sensory signals would be identical from your perspective. (I agree that "reality" is the most parsimonious explanation by far, btw, but that's never been the point of the simulation thought experiment.)
I think the more interesting corollary of this article is that if we're living in a simulation, it's an impossibly, improbably detailed one. I really want some compute time on the HPC that's running it.
> How would you know? You have no external frame of reference; a virtual world of sensory signals would be identical from your perspective.
Okay, lets go with that :-)
I might be living in a virtual reality, correct, I have no way of knowing.
What I do know is that the reality I am in is many thousands of times higher in resolution than the reality of the LLM.
As an analogy, the LLM is seeing a downscaled 32x32 pixel image while I see the original 8k image. Whether there is a larger 1b^2 image that I cannot see is not relevant to the question of whether the LLM can see my reality or not - it can't.
Things affect LLMs besides tokens, like ECC errors or cosmic rays? …
Come on, now. That's irrelevant.
Reality is by definition our physical reality, which is about an infinite number of levels more detailed than the, you know, _virtual_ digital world computers exist in.
Whatever world we construct for LLMs, no matter how detailed we make it, will always be a blocky projection of the real domain onto a virtual one.
It follows then that any insight gained in the virtual world is at best a rough approximation which can be quite useful at times but also utterly faulty on occasion.
How often it is useful vs. wrong is (partially) a function of how complete the real-to-virtual approximation for a given domain.
Certain domains, given their limited degrees of freedom, can be quite accurately modeled, such as a subway map.
But many domains cannot, and it's important to be aware of that inherent limitation in digital models including but not limited to LLM """reasoning"""
>Whatever world we construct for LLMs, no matter how detailed we make it, will always be a blocky projection of the real domain onto a virtual one.
I don't know exactly why but I never really understood this argument. Might be some kind of control thing? Because for me it's pretty simple, it's basically free to give access to reality. Just add "sensory organs" as it were. I can argue you can make them perceive reality even better than we (humans) do, just enlarge the audio/video spectrums. Bam...more reality. The whole point of the argument is we're missing information.
Again, I get the need for controlling the environment for what LLM/AI/AGI/whatever will be, but that will always cost more than giving them access to like...reality. Same reason I don't really believe in the whole simulation argument, it's just more expensive all around, loses resolution, let alone control. I don't doubt there will be some people that would indulge in neverending hedonism but not all people. You need to give up control for that.
There are two reasons.
First, reality is continuous whereas the digital world is discrete.
Second, data in the real world is many orders of magnitude more detailed than what we're able to model with today's computers.
> Because for me it's pretty simple, it's basically free to give access to reality. Just add "sensory organs" as it were.
I dunno what you mean by "free". The model is trained on text. To "give" the model sensory organs it would need to be trained on those sensory organs.
Current models can predict text, because that's what the weights represent. Models with sensory organs will need to be trained on the output of those sensory organs.
That sounds close to impossible in the foreseeable future.
>I dunno what you mean by "free".
Reality is free. You don't have to waste any resources to model it, you just need to capture it.
>The model is trained on text.
See in my previous reply:
>LLM/AI/AGI/whatever will be
LLMs don't even have a sense of time because they work differently to a human brain.
Vision and audio is already in use in multimodal LLMs. So it's possible in the past.
Who said anything about vision and audio?
In the spirit of the article, what detail in the decision making of layoffs might you be missing?
I expect there's a lot of detail that I'm unaware of relating to running a company (planning; risk; legal; ...) that might make a decision foolish to me, but make sense if given more context.
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.
This is not my field, but are we sure that reality is not quantised at some level?
Infinite is a very big claim.
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
A lot of physics, at-least appears, to end up at quantization which actually really bothers me.
The statement refers to human perception of reality.
Tell me about it, I maintain an open source project in the civil engineering space and it's ... detailed.
You have my curiosity
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?
You need an angle finder to measure the angles between all relevant surfaces. Then cut the wood according to that.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
My favorite post on HN. Upvote it everytime. Use this phrase so often now.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
This is exactly why I stick to programming computers and building "things" using it.
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.
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.
One of my favourite essays. xkcd has a good take too 1741-Work
Link for the lazy:
https://xkcd.com/1741/
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.
Good read
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.....
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.
An ancient article that now looks even cheesier. It's so hard to make those goddamn stairs. So complex, such wisdom.
Username checks out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynicism_(contemporary)#Health...
Spot on