John Salvatier

> enable cheats in a game Great analogy. Life does not have cheats though. Things are changing fast but the limits of physics still apply and reality has a surprising amount of detail[1]. I find myself feeling the way you are feeling when I stop making things. When I'm making things it is very clear where the limits and frontiers have moved to, and that's where the fun is. I would say just start exploring and making things and you'll soon see that "you can do anything" is not true. There is still enormously fun work to be done and puzzles to be solved, with the help of AI or without it. [1] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-…

This rings true and reminds me of the classic blog post “Reality Has A Surprising Amount Of Detail”[0] that occasionally gets reposted here. Going back and forth on the detail in requirements and mapping it to the details of technical implementation (and then dealing with the endless emergent details of actually running the thing in production on real hardware on the real internet with real messy users actually using it) is 90% of what’s hard about professional software engineering. It’s also what separates professional engineering from things like the toy leetcode problems on a whiteboard that many of us love to hate. Those are hard in a different way, but LLMs can do them on its own better than humans now. Not so for the other stuff. [0] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-…

Any recommendations for writers or bloggers who write plainly/unpretentiously, but have really interesting ideas? First thought was maybe John Salvatier [1] or Adam Mastroianni [2]. [1] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-… [2] https://www.experimental-history.com/

Its because "reality has a surprising amount of detail". It is actually the rare occurrence where a simple solution solves a complex problem. I link an excellent article that has been posted on HN multiple times, that explains exactly this.[1] (not mine) [1] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-…

It reminds me of this rather classic post: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-… Science is not ideas: new conceptual schemes must be invented, confounding variables must be controlled, dead-ends explored. This process takes years. Engineering is not science: kinks must be worked out, confounding variables incorporated. This process also takes years. Technology is not engineering: the purely technical implementation must spread, become widespread and beat social inertia and its competition, network effects must be established. Investors and consumers must be convinced in the long term. It must survive social and political repercussions. This process takes yet more years.

I still don't understand your choice of words. It feels like you jumped into epistemology at the deep end and don't know how to swim in it. One article that pops up frequently around here is "Reality has a surprising amount of detail" http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-… I think you could profit from reading it. And I found "The Golem" a pretty good read too, if you want to go down that path: https://www.cambridge.org/ch/universitypress/subjects/general-science/…

This article strongly reminded me of "Reality has surprising amount of detail", an old HN favorite: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-… E: which was also noted by the top comment under the article

I don't know of any developer that thinks text rendering is "simple". Even some non-devs, due to using word-processors that completely "mess-up" everything the minute a single table is added, won't think that text rendering is simple. The best "simple-is-very-complicated" essay to read is "Reality has a surprising amount of detail" - http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-…

Relevant classic that's been on HN many times: Reality has a surprising amount of detail http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-…

This is now the 12th time this has been posted on HN [0], and I see why, it is very insightful. But his other post, 'submission and dominance among friends,' had more impact on me. Connecting our behavior to our mammal relatives like he does is not exactly novel, but combined with his frankness about his own needs -- especially the profoundly uncool desire to be "on the submissive end of this kind of clear status play" -- the piece was revelatory for me. Perhaps you'll enjoy: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/submission-and-dominance-among-frie… [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=johnsalvatier.org

An evergreen germane to this point: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-… I do grant writing for nonprofits, public agencies, and some research-based businesses, and we get a fair number of calls from smart people who started with the best of intentions and then after a number of hours of struggle decided to seek aid.

I personally completely agree with all the thoughts exposed in the post. Though mostly I was intrigued by the figure labeled "Some important details for colonizing the universe.": http://johnsalvatier.org/assets/colonizing-the-universe.png Unfortunately author used it just as an illustration without giving any details. The dust and heating related constraints are self explanatory, what surprised me most was the slowdown fission/fusion curves. Since everything else on the plot seems to make sense I presume they just depict that whatever amount of fuel you take with you the amount of extracted energy will decrease following such a path as you accelerate closer to c.

"Compare this to typical metalworking: Find the appropriate ore. Stick it in a fire. Depending on the metal, let it melt completely and pour it into a sand cast, or get it red-hot and then bang on it with a hammer." This reminds me of something I read about the "Great Leap Forward" in China, where my impression is authorities thought something like, yeah, metalworking is simple, let's get everyone making steel, and then the results were not good for much. So, sure, bread is something that doubtless took thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of years to develop, but that's no reason to take metalworking for granted. I keep being reminded of this post which I first saw on HN: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-… Except, come on, it's not surprising.

Doing any sort of work is a constant process of invention, as you solve all the little problems involved. This other post linked from the article is a good read: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-…

One of the links in the post was also a really great read, for those who skipped it. "Reality has a surprising amount of detail": http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-…

> We expect our machines to behave in predictable ways. I expect LLMs to produce randomly varying output. Maybe it's the thousands of hours I spent doing monte carlo simulations for my PhD. > This is one of the best arguments against using LLMs I've seen. > It reduces to the classic argument- at the point where you've described a problem and solution in sufficient detail to be confident in the results, you've invented a programming language. I'm not an LLM true believer, but I use codex for various small tasks and it often (not always) does a thoroughly decent job. Yesterday I gave it a pretty vague request to set up a new Home Assistant dashboard and it handled it just fine--I told it what I wanted to see but it figured out itself which helper variables it would need to set up to realize that vision and wrote all the config for it. I probably could have done it in 15 minutes if I was familiar with Home Assistant's yaml configuration schema and all, but I'm not so it probably would have taken me closer to an hour. Asking codex took me 30 seconds and it did just fine. I am skeptical that LLM's are going to kill all white collar jobs or whatever anytime soon. Not being able to truly learn things is an issue. Reality has a surprising amount of detail[1], and while codex does well at things like writing Home Assistant configs and setting up a Minecraft server, where there are thousands of examples online of how to do it, when I've asked it to do some more esoteric things…

You may say that as a joke, but looking back at my education, this is in part what I did later, after uni, when I thought about things to learn next. In my mind, I started explaining stuff in depth, and found the many many many holes in my apparently quite superficial school knowledge. I think this would be excellent as a once-in-a-while exercise to teach the complexity of it all, after we went the other way to abstract the hell out of everything to make it more palatable. A reality check, so to speak, and as a check for everyone about the many holes in their understanding. Basically, in support of something that has been posted here more than once, this blog post: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-… In the last few years I read a lot of easily digestible progression fantasy on RoyalRoad. One frequent theme is rebirth or isekai on another world, one that's usually much more primitive. Often the main character starts bringing earth technology ideas into the new world. And every single time it is obvious that the authors very, VERY severely the complexity and difficulty of even the smallest thing that we take for granted. My favorite blog post describing an extremely simple product, and how large and sophisticated its supply chain is: https://medium.com/@kevin_ashton/what-coke-contains-221d449929ef To me, this shows that some more awareness of how much complexity there is in things might be valuable. Being more aware of the…

It sounds like you don’t understand that engineering is compromises. As soon as you involve radiation, you have some severe compromises to make, and the choices of elements you can use are limited. Sodium is not chosen because of its dangers. Sodium was chosen despite the dangers, because the engineers very very carefully looked at other options and the other options were worse for the needs of their design. https://xkcd.com/793/ and http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-… seem relevant. The following is an explanation of the Chernobyl accident, which in part was due to using water as a coolant: Efforts to increase the power to the level originally planned for the test were frustrated by a combination of xenon poisoning, reduced coolant void and graphite cooldown. Many of the control rods were withdrawn to compensate for these effects, resulting in a violation of the minimum operating reactivity margin (ORM, see Positive void coefficient section in the information page on RBMK Reactors) by 01:00 – although the operators may not have known this. At 01:03, the reactor was stabilised at about 200 MWt and it was decided that the test would be carried out at this power level. Calculations performed after the accident showed that the ORM at 01:22:30 was equal to eight manual control rods. The minimum permissible ORM stipulated in the operating procedures was 15 rods. The test commenced at 01:23:04; the turbine stop valves were closed and…

Be fascinated with it. The normal advice is "do what you love", but quite often you can hate a lot of things. You can still be fascinated with something you hate. You can look up Pirsig's Brick - if a city is boring, look for a specific building, and write about the building, starting with the top left brick. Reality has a surprising amount of detail: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-… Most of those little details are quite interesting. The big picture may be interesting too. It's the stuff in between that's boring. Try to narrow down your scope until you find an interesting thing to start with. But besides boredom, it could be fear. We have a fight, flight, freeze response. The physiological response is exactly the same; it's the mental response that changes according to the situation. What this means is that we can just mentally swap out the flight response with fight. If you find yourself procrastinating, fight for your goals! Make that goal important, to yourself, your society, your values. Stand your ground and move forward.

Some cool insights in there that I have not had the ability to articulate myself but I have been feeling for maybe 5 or so years. The biggest hurtle is that a "frequent dev" isn't always the best at remembering the sum of everything needed and so it takes an "infrequent dev" to write the docs and outline the helper tools and environment setup and common gotchas. Which if done for a certain amount of time the "infrequent dev" will gain enough insight and mastery until they move into the "frequent dev" category. As a result they will become blind to the pitfalls. They become the blind "expert". This is why I'm completely fascinated with teaching and knowledge transfer and I feel like there is huge advances that can be done in this field. Here is the catcher, this isn't just limited to computers or programming! In fact it isn't even limited to spoken language. This "blindness" to detail applies to all of reality! If you want to read more checkout: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-…

> If the law is broken, fix it? The whole "spirit of the law" thing is what leads us to political attacks being made with laws. Reality doesn't work that way. In fact, the whole reason for the ballooning of regulations everywhere is an attempt to make things more about "the letter" than "the spirit". Reality is fucking complicated, as every programmer who ever tried to model or simulate anything from real life should know (and if one didn't have that experience, I recommend reading [0], recently discussed on HN). "Letter of law" is like code - in attempt to capture all the relevant details, it gets fractal in handling corner cases to corner cases. But, the best thing about humans is that our intelligence allows us to comprehend the intent behind something even without understanding all the relevant details and corner cases. This is what "spirit of law" exploits, and why it's a great tool at reducing complexity. Having everything run on "letter of law" is practically impossible today, and would definitely not be practically usable with laws in textual form. (This is, incidentally, why "smart contracts as laws" are stupid - computers can't understand intent, so you're enshrining some hard rules that will always be buggy and full of loopholes.) -- [0] - http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-…

Cross-post: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-… Let’s consider some of these details. Something I think people don’t consider is that there are a non-trivial number of land animal species that migrate across the border. They have no concept of nation-states, and for some, our xenophobic electorate is basically passing a death sentence. The wall would devastate several important ecosystems, especially in the Rio Grande Valley. Walls also need to be maintained, like any other piece of infrastructure. Have you ever visited the great state of Michigan? We can’t even handle roads. How will the federal government, which doesn’t have the best track record with maintaining infrastructure, deal with a 2,000+ mile-long wall? Another issue is surveillance. Who will watch the entire thing? Who will make sure someone isn’t chipping away at the other side with a spoon or trying to dig under it? You can’t watch thousands of miles of wall very easily. There are all kinds of issues with this (oh, funding is a big one too), and this just scratches the surface. If you Google “Trump border wall problems”, plenty of articles have already been written that go into much more detail.

You know there's a relevant XKCD... ... Right? Also this article: https://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of… I fear you might have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the world is really like, and what people are really like. After all, the system you describe would not be used for democratic voting, it would be the ultimate playing field in which to weaponize surveillance capitalism and fascist control over societies. If you can't see how that could be true, then you cannot have given much if any serious philosophical thought to technology, because all attempts to fit the messiness of the world into an abstraction and "throw away the trimmings" is a violence you do to the real lives of real people

Well, it is "reality has a surprising amount of detail"[1] all over again. Or rather a good specific example for it. [1] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-…

This article has been deeply influential for me: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-… I used to imagine for someone in construction a wall must be some really simple thing. But it's only simple after millennia of building walls. So I now have lots of grace and patience for humanity to figure out numbers in computers, whether integers or reals. Your explanation is possibly the same just in different words. It's a hard problem and probably needs a whole lifetime. But it's in no single person's economic interest to devote to it the time it needs (not to mention the diverse skills required; once one has a solution one has to pitch it to the world). And so it will happen over a hundred lifetimes.

I have not done much with concrete, but I have made lots of things out of many other materials over the years, and in general I have found that making things - and making them come out the way you want them - is never as simple as it looks. "Reality has a surprising amount of detail", it was once wisely written: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-… This project is not to my personal taste but I respect the work which went in to it, and I'm glad its creator got what he wanted.

> It's begging for disruption to something easier. This assumes the complexity is incidental rather than inherent. I think the problem is similar to how Reality has a surprising amount of detail[1]. AI will likely eventually make a dent in this, but I think as an artist you tend to want a lot of granular control over the final result, and 3D modeling+texturing+animation+rendering (which is still only a subset of what Blender does) really does have a whole lot of details you can, and want to, control. [1] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-…

Jonathan Blow's "Preventing the collapse of civilization" [1] makes a similar point. It is easy to assume that, if we can build EUV machines and space telescopes, then processing stainless steel and manufacturing PCBs is baby stuff, and is just waiting for the proper incentives to spring up again. Unfortunately that is not the case -- reality has a surprising amount of detail [2] and even medium-level technology takes know-how and skilled workers to execute properly. Both can be recovered and scaled back up if the will is there. And time -- ten or twenty years of persistent and intelligent effort should be plenty to MAGA :) 1. https://www.youtube.com/embed/pW-SOdj4Kkk 2. http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-…

Good freaking luck! The inconsistencies of the software world pale in comparison to trying to construct any real world building: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-…