A bit tangential, but I have been playing the game "Pinball FX" a lot. I really like it (and especially its spin-off/expansion Pinball M), but it's surprisingly taxing on my computer.
I mentioned this to a friend, and he was kind of confused, understandably so, and said "...it's pinball...why is that taxing?"
It's not a dumb question, we have had virtual pinball games since the Atari 2600 at least, and even pretty fun stuff on the Amiga and DOS like Pinball Dreams and Epic Pinball, so why would a modern pinball game make my relatively beefy laptop struggle playing it?
The answer is because virtual pinball occupies a strange kind of space in the world of video games, in that they're trying to emulate something that is entirely dependent on extremely precise and subtle physics. It's not like you can really have too accurate of physics; the better the physics, the closer it is to a "real" pinball machine, and generally speaking the more fun the game is.
As such, I think you could honestly make a pinball game that taxes any hardware. You'll never be able to have "perfect" physics (as in physics that completely and totally imitate reality), you can only get asymptotically close to "perfect", and the closer you are, the more taxing the computation will end up being.
It just made me think, this applies to nearly anything. We all work with abstractions, but if dive into the details of something and recurse, it's not like it ever ends.
I don't actually know, but I'd wager a lot that it's the graphics rather than the physics which causes the game to be slow. Generally the expensive thing in video games is rendering. Computing the next world state is generally relatively cheap, especially if we're talking about a confined area with a very small number of rigid bodies (the ball, flippers, bumpers). A pinball game like Pinball FX that's rendering a 3d world with lighting, it'd just be shocking to me if the physics were to blame for the performance.
Nah. This is easily emulated with an impulse force. The outcome a nanosecond after the ball leaves the bumper is just an impulse. Users can't tell the difference.
While that could be an acceptable simplification on the aforementioned Amiga, it breaks down when multiple balls are in play, if the friction between the top and bottom plate differ (introducing spin) or when the ball doesn't hit the bumper exactly straight on the y axis.
Generally speaking, there are many ways you can simplify the game by sacrificing precison. This is exactly the kind of detail the original article is about. Ones simplified model of the world is always incomplete, and there are always surprising ways in which it will fall short.
Especially with such a small number of rigid bodies to worry about. The literal only thing that has to collide with anything else is the pinball itself, unless we're talking about a pretty weird pinball machine.
Yeah fair, it's tough to say; they're simulating a few non-obvious things too, like ball spin, but it's possible it's mostly graphics.
I think my overall point still stands, but you might be right.
ETA:
I would like to point out that my dad was debating buying one of those virtual pinball tables, and so we played one at a mall, it was decidedly not fun. The physics were way too floaty, and didn't feel good at all. It looked like they were running it on some shitty Android and just mounted a big TV.
That's why I thought that maybe it was the physics in PinballFX slowing things down.
I bet it has nothing to do with the graphics or the physics and everything to do with the fact that you can't feel the ball. There's vibrations that can be felt when you play with a real pinball machine.
That's definitely part of it, but even when I play Pinball FX on my laptop with a keyboard, it still feels better than the one I tried at the mall.
The one I felt at the mall kind of felt like I was playing on the moon. The ball felt really floaty and the way the ball bounced off the walls and bumpers just didn't feel or look right.
Adding some kind of "thumper" feedback would have certainly helped the experience though.
Simulating airdrag and turbulence the compute-intensive way: simulating all of the air inside the pinball machine! You've got a few tens of liters of gaseous molecules to keep track of, should be enough to slow down most computers I would guess!
But I would be very surprised if any pinball software actually does that!
No one does it yet! Someone should import OpenFOAM into Unreal and make this happen. I want my pinball experience to require a dedicated server to help it.
It sounds cool, but because you won't be getting different views from both eyes, I can imagine the brain is probably going to be fairly confused by it.
I have not, that sounds pretty cool. That might make the machines more fun, or at least feel more realistic.
I think having something more or less like a rumble feature would do a lot too. Even if you just had a solenoid that thumps when hitting a bumper would make it feel a lot more realistic.
Ball movement on a real pinball machine is three dimensional. The game is designed to keep the ball in contact with the playfield surface as much as possible, but in practice there are lots of imperfections and awkwardly shaped features that can make the ball bounce vertically if it hits them at the right angle. It can sometimes bounce violently enough to hit the glass. This is especially common when you have multiple balls in play. A 2D simulation isn't enough.
There’s always an infinite number of variables in a real pinball machine. Slight imperfections in the playfield surface making it not completely flat, slight imperfections in the shape of the ball so it’s not a perfect sphere, slight imperfections in the shape of the bumper. I could keep going, but I think there’s literally billions of potential variables that can modify the game.
These might seem insignificant, and in some cases they are, but it’s a chaos theory thing; small imperfections multiplied across enough of a timescale become pretty significant, and that’s a large part of what makes real pinball so much fun.
Of course there’s plenty of things we can do to approximate reality; adding a bit of randomness to the experience probably provides enough chaos to give us something more or less like reality in a lot of cases, but that is just an optimization hack.
Is that actually true? That might be true on a small enough time step but there’s enough variation in every physical component of the machine that I think chaos theory would take over in a relatively short amount of time. The ball could fly across the machine in radically different ways even with seemingly the same inputs.
Obviously there’s are ways of spoofing even that, just adding some randomness probably helps a lot.
Good story for getting a handle on the idea. It kind of reminded me of fractals and how we find some parallels between phenomena at every scale, e.g. galaxies and rotating water as it flows down your drain.
I’ve seen it posted multiple times but only just read it for the first time. There’s value in repetition, and as it turns out I enjoyed the content quite a bit!
And this is one of the main utilitarian arguments for diversity in teams. If everybody has the same socio-cultural background, it's harder to leave the frame.
The argument that culturally homogeneous teams perform better due to more efficient communication (more is "already understood" at the outset, so there's less need to communicate explicitly, and fewer misunderstandings) is also sound.
So from a purely team-performance-maximising perspective, the question is: Which coefficient is higher? (More generally: What level of mixture is optimal?)
One aspect seems pretty clear to me: it's much easier to learn how to communicate effectively as a team than it is to massively broaden your collective knowledge and experience.
So, given a sound team culture and environment—great regardless of the style of team you have!—you can start with a diverse team and then collectively improve team cohesion and communication. You need some baseline level of effective leadership to do this, but it's absolutely doable, and I've seen it done.
My suspicion is that this is not answerable in general.
To a first approximation: whichever of the two your political leanings make you more comfortable with.
To a second approximation: if your task is efficiency at a constrained task, homogeneity. If your task requires exploration and/or creativity, heterogeneity.
To a third approximation: the 2nd approximation argument, except the demands of nearly all tasks change over time.
Then you factor in the environment, including your management's competence at eliciting the value of various team members, etc.
And don't forget risk. Optimizing for a high level of performance in any dimension makes things brittle in all other dimensions.
A team that develops a user interface benefits more from "generic" cultural diversity (gender, ethnicity, social class, etc.) than a team that builds a processor microarchitecture.
But the latter team can still benefit from diversity: if it's all EEs, they'll probably do worse than a team that also has a mathematician, a physicist, a chemical engineer, a finance person, etc on it.
On the other hand, the processor team's communication might be smoother with an all EE team of high "generic" diversity than it would be with all white guys but from very different academic backgrounds.
If you have decent retention, the team will develop its own communication style anyway, so I suspect this factor doesn't matter as much.
> The argument that culturally homogeneous teams perform better due to more efficient communication (more is "already understood" at the outset, so there's less need to communicate explicitly, and fewer misunderstandings) is also sound.
Did you just define Groupthink, but in positive sounding words?
> The argument that culturally homogeneous teams perform better due to more efficient communication (more is "already understood" at the outset, so there's less need to communicate explicitly, and fewer misunderstandings) is also sound.
False Equivalence.
Efficient Communication is secondary to Different Whats and Whys which is what a diverse collection of people from different cultural backgrounds bring to the table. A single idea communicated however imperfectly can change the world. This is the reason "equal opportunities" should be guaranteed to all even though "equal outcomes" cannot be guaranteed.
So define a "suitable standard requirement" for a specific role and try and collect a diverse group of people who meet those criteria.
Yes, silly you; my comment was in the context of the parent/grandparent talking about "team composition" (presumably w.r.t. an objective/goal/job) and not a judgement on ethics/morals (different discussion).
It seems like you want a diversity /of/ teams, not specifically /in/ teams, as human competition is the best known way to advance the scope of the frame in general.
I always think of it as learning to see hidden dimensions, and once seen, investigate deeper or just imagine transformations of that dimension -- extrapolation, inversion, etc. Once found, you can drag around these hidden dimensions from one domain or one instance to the next.
Like sometimes I seem to be in alignment with someone, but things feel off. I once realized the "off" feeling was because I was running toward something I believed in, and they're running away from another thing that scared them. It's only circumstantial we were intellectually walking in the same direction, so I tread thoughtfully in collaboration with this person. It's attractive force vs repulsive.
Once I knew to look for this "away vs toward" dimension, I see it often :)
very nicely articulated.. so, you are suggesting to be "sensitive" to "feelings" - such the one of being "off" - since feelings primarily provoke thought. Another feeling that i have is one of "inconsistency" - again it feels like something is off, and you are suggesting to pursue this feeling rather than to brush it aside.
Physicist Bohm has written about this. That, the beginning of new perception is in mindful listening or mindful awareness.. But most of us are stuck in our thought-rut preventing this.
Perception itself carves out categories almost unconsciously leading to the thought-rut we are in. ie, Bootstrapping the perception of new detail in everyday life is very hard.
Meditation has totally helped me widen my scope and soften my awareness. I've found these two exercises also help me get out of my default mode of perception.
Image Streaming[1] is a fun little exercise that has helped me expand my perception of things or problems. I try to do it in a very high dynamic range way -- where I zoom out of a scene describe it in detail and then zoom in a describe it in detail.
There is also a fun improv exercise where you walk around looking at objects and calling it the wrong name. It sort of gets you our of default mode and you start seeing things 'differently' (a touch more vivid). I think the exercise is described in Impro by Keith Johnstone.
Mathematician David Bessis describes similar exercises in his book [ref] - wherein he explores a room blindfolded to awaken other senses, or visualize the places he has been to.
Don’t ignore any question is the strategy I’ve found. The problem is that some questions fall just below the conscious threshold. Meditation seems to help dredge up the questions and take them seriously.
The way I did it was by deliberately going against my normal impulses. The rule was "whatever you would normally do, do the opposite of that". If you would stay home, go out. If you would eat a steak, eat spaghetti instead. If you would get drunk, stay sober. If you would stay sober, get drunk. Basically, as long as it's not something that's likely to do irrevocable harm, do things that don't seem like good ideas and just see what happens.
The limits on our experiences are usually self-imposed by the fact that we tend to make specific choices limited to specific contexts. The experiences you have are the experiences that derive from what you think is a good idea. So doing things you think are bad ideas tends to result in a lot of new experiences.
Removing something critical and seeing what happens is a methodology used by Musk in all his companies: remove LIDAR from self driving car, remove flame trench from spaceship launch pad, etc. Results may vary.
"Results may vary" is not an acceptable methodology for the US Government, when millions of lives are potentially at stake.
Ed: among the ways millions of lives could be lost: losing control of our nuclear arsenal or nuclear materials due to haphazardly firing people responsible for maintaining them. Bungling the response to the next pandemic, due to haphazardly firing people, cutting science funding and deleting inconvenient data. Starvation and disease from ceasing aid around the world. There's also the wars likely to result from the collapse of trust in the US as a security partner, but I suppose it's not correct to blame that on DOGE per se, even if it's an extension of the same principle.
Sometimes people (e.g. US voters) will only learn by running into a wall. How all exactly will turn out is hard to tell and frankly maybe we better don't know. I'm tending to the conclusion there's no way around the movement of the big picture, the shifting of geo-political order in the world.
At this point, I've presented a handful of fairly straightforward hypotheses about cause and effect. They could be wrong, but it's on you to show that they're actually self-referential. There is no amount or kind of other people's opinions that will make them so.
That's equally true of all internet comments. None of us here on HN have or are claiming automatic credibility. We just make arguments that make sense to us. Feel free to close the tab if you don't find any value in this activity.
My friend is a doctor. Her profession uses sections of the NIH and CDC websites on a daily basis. They are the references for drug interactions with medical conditions. These sections are just gone.
Trump’s “cost saving” measures are already actively harming medical treatment in the USA.
I doubt adding paywalls and more 3rd parties will help reverse the trend of rising healthcare costs. But also, just why? Why not keep this information that our tax dollars have already paid for in the public domain? I thought we were supposed to care about efficiency and that information wanted to be free.
On reading the article before the comments, I literally was remembering Musk's initial descriptions of The Boring Company and how they were wildly forgetting or glossing over key details that would mean the difference between exciting leap forward to terrifying death trap.
I find your comment to be the same idea, but on something folks have foisted upon them and are forced to experience.
Can we please not DOGEify every comment thread? I know that it's on a lot of minds all the time, but we have a whole spot on the front page effectively reserved for DOGE 24/7, and I'd like to see literally anything else in the other 29 slots.
Agreed. People are unhealthily obsessed with DOGE here. And on top of that, basically every DOGE thread turns into a flame war. It's extremely deleterious for the site to have everything collapse into DOGE talk.
Thiel was part of ycombinator for a time, current head of yc worked for Palantir and has been working on DOGE-related Curtis Yarvin type stuff, so it is likely to come up here a lot.
I agree its quite annoying. But it only comes up because of the massive change it will cause across the whole country and it's important to remain prepared for implications.
A large percentage of HN's population doesn't live in the US, and many of those of us who do have other ways of keeping track of what's going on. Threads about DOGE on HN are not useful, they're almost always just flame wars. Those who feel enlightened by them can join the daily thread that inevitably pops up and leave the rest of us to talk about other things.
Don't think you are being naive, no apologies are needed. Still that whole situation puzzles me a lot. USA chooses. Clear outcomem, no surprises. Pro life, pro guns, anti immigrants, anti different, anti regulation. USA complains. What info am i missing...?
Reality being more complicated than a model is precisely their point:
The vision of a technocratic bureaucracy isn’t workable given the complexity of life — so we need to distribute decisions to be made in context. We’re paying huge sums for a technocratic system that can’t account for the actual needs and which leads to suboptimal outcomes.
Dismantling the regulatory state and attendant bureaucracy creates room for better, localized, contextual systems to flourish.
> Dismantling the regulatory state and attendant bureaucracy creates room for better, localized, contextual systems to flourish.
And I guess it doesn't matter how many people will be hurt during the churn...
But regardless, DOGE's goal isn't to make government better, it's to make government broken and cheap, so it will be easier to funnel money to Musk's (and other Trump cronies') companies instead.
This is what the critics fail to understand: this all should be documented because it's public work. There should be no "secret sauce" in the bureaucracy nor should the process be so abstract and complex that the hidden details are the most pertinent ones.
Government should not involve arcane wizardry nor should imputed mastery of it be held as an excuse to prevent it's modification to meet the will of the voters.
They don’t care about ‘saving money’, they’re just messing about to see if they can. To move the goalpost of what is acceptable. To goosestep the United States back into a Russia-aligned nation that lets rich people pluck the poors bald like chickens.
> But as you actually start building you’ll find there’s a surprising amount of nuance.
This has been my experience, building anything; especially shipping anything.
In my experience, shipping is orders of magnitude more involved than authoring.
There's ten million stupid little details, that pop up when least convenient. Experience has taught me to anticipate these details. Many times, they should be mitigated from the very start (security and localization are good examples).
That's why I tend to write every one of my projects -even "farting around" ones- as if they were shipping products.
Keeps me in practice.
Also, this is one of the areas where it really pays to have experienced engineers.
My thoughts exactly when it comes to simulating the real world for games, etc. An accurate simulation is only good for science, otherwise there's boundless detail that we don't pay attention to in the real world. Part of that I think is that we can examine anything in front of us in detail, but trying to recall the exact pattern or shade of colour of something arbitrary like the footpath outside your favourite café is impossible. We just can't do it.
This is true, but I sometimes find myself, nonetheless, wishing in some game that I could stop, pull out a microscrope or something, and go muuuuch deeper.
I'd be cautious about the word "fractal" misleading us into looking for a scale-spanning pattern that dictates both large and small details simultaneously.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and fine features occur for different reasons than coarse features.
What does it mean for the universe to have a fractal nature, other than that it looks more detailed the closer you look?
I mean, I think it is very poetic to suppose the universe has some sort of underlying fractal structure. But… perhaps the universe just looks like it has a fractal structure because the finest details are pretty small relative to us. At the bottom, the atoms, electrons, and quarks are more like potentials anyway, right?
They don’t have solid surfaces anyway. Maybe we can plot the potential fields in a way that makes them look like fractals? But… my modern physics, fields and waves, and even my mathematical understanding of fractals are all a bit rusty (so, what am I even doing in this conversation? Oh well), but shouldn’t the potential fields eventually be smooth at some point? And fractals are not very smooth.
Therefore I conclude the universe doesn’t have a fractal structure, it is just very small. But that isn’t poetic at all. :(
The other problem is that all the details matter all the time.
Like if you want to mathematically model what happens in a pool table hall when somebody strikes a ball with a great deal of force... by the time you get to the six or seventh bounce you are going to have to start to take into account the position and movement of people standing around the table watching it. The airflow, the vibration of them moving, the relative gravitational forces, etc. It all matters all the time.
And the problem only gets worse the larger the scale and longer the timelines.
Like if you want to manage a economy.
It is tempting to want to look at "things from a high level" and imagine that all the details just kinda average themselves out. So it isn't necessary to figure out the behavior of each individual in a national economy. It should be possible to simply plot out the results of their decision making over time and extrapolate that into the future to come up with meaningful policy decisions and 5 year plans.
The problem is that that doesn't work. Because all the details matter all the time.
Also the very act of making policies causes changes in the behavior economy in wildly unpredictable manners. Every individual actor involved is going to change their behavior and decision making based on your decision making, which then changes the behavior and decision making of every other individual, etc etc. In a endless fractal involving billions of actors, since your national economy is not isolated from the forces of every other economy and visa versa.
Also trying to make targets out of measurements and indicators tends to destroy the value of the measurements and indicators. Meaning that by setting policies you are destroying the information you are basing your decisions off of.
So you can't collect enough information to make good decisions. The information you receive is already obsolete by the time you get it. And the act of trying to create rules and policies based on the information you do have tends to destroy what little value it has left.
You sound like you would really enjoy the book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have failed.
I wonder if a lot of this comes back to the enlightenment/science-y way of looking at the world that imagines that the way to understand stuff is to break it into subproblems, solve those, and build back up from there. It relies on a fundamental assumption that there are separate things instead of a big continuous process of happening. I recently read about a study where participants were asked to pick the best car for a set of needs, and were given 4 variables per car in one case, and 16 variables per car in another. Then, each group was either distracted while pondering, or allowed to think through it directly/consciously. The conscious thought group did better than distracted group did when there were 4 variables, but worse when there were more. Intuition is great at the missable details.
…and that’s all before you get into all the other logical fallacies that tend to compromise one’s perspective. Anything that requires anticipating and/or interpreting the behaviors of other people, or that involves accounting for risks or probabilities—these are especially fraught as our own instincts and nature actively works to warp objective reality.
In the context of policy making (or presidential fiat, as the case may be), there is always the risk of mistaking what people should do with what they will do. A pragmatic strategy for success will include systems that can help to thwart the worst impulses of our flawed reasoning, including things like dispassionate peer reviewed analyses (oops) that is untethered by the ambitions or ideologies of individual people or groups (oops), a diverse array of advisory opinions (oops), functional checks on monolithic authority (oops), and mechanisms for correcting prior mistakes (fingers crossed).
I think this all contributes to the phenomenon that folks have (a bit erroneously) associated with the Dunning-Kruger effect—essentially the idea that people who haven’t learned enough to know how much they don’t know are dangerously overconfident and naive. That said, I think there is a tendency to assume this about others that’s probably fallacious in and of itself. In the case of current events, I don’t believe the individuals involved actually care enough to have even mounted the left peak of the Dunning-Kruger chart, but rather are fully uninformed and unconcerned with much of any implications outside of their own very narrow ideological ends (it’s probably more accurate to apply Dunning-Kruger to the ideology itself, or maybe the broader coalition of partisan cohorts who share it, than it is the people wielding it).
One thing I find interesting is the apparent "End of Greatness". It seems like the fractal nature of reality has both an upper and lower bound?
> The End of Greatness is an observational scale discovered at roughly 100 Mpc (roughly 300 million light-years) where the lumpiness seen in the large-scale structure of the universe is homogenized and isotropized in accordance with the cosmological principle. At this scale, no pseudo-random fractalness is apparent.
Possible, but since that scale is so far outside of human experience it is possible there is detail there that we are unable to perceive using our most modern techniques.
Its not just the(possible) fractal nature of the universes structure,it is that the composition of idividual portions varries, and those portions react differently to the forces bieng exerted on them.
And then at the fine level, is it the same to accelerated by a gravitational force, as it is to be accelerated by a magnetic one, of course not.
We have layers of complexity, and it is quite beyond any imagining or quantifying.
Luckily our aproximations will get a sandwich made or soup,it might be better for pondering the universe, as it can be stired to make little swirly fractals.
That presupposes a distinction between the universe and the observer. The idea that any such distinction is an illusion is both ancient and profound. (Perhaps even obvious, at least in the abstract.)
I think it can be charitably interpreted to mean, for everyday purposes, however much you "zoom in" on something, there's meaningful details at lower and lower resolutions until you've exhausted your focus or ability to zoom.
Surely, keeping a 1:1 match between our perception of the universe and the universe itself is a kind of order that would be constantly under threat by the inexorable move towards increasing entropy. The lack of match either now or in the future is what you would expect. Chaos is the expect state, order is the exception. Hence you should not expect for that match to exist by default
I read recently an article on HN that basically entropy (and hence increase thereof) is just a statistical model of uncertainty of the things we don't know. As soon as our understanding (of e.g. positions and velocity of individual molecules) increases, that what we call entropy, decreases. At least my understanding.
You can be born with your perception. For example, opposite sexes generally attract and you don’t really have to teach this. We’re born to see things the same, but somehow we work to obstruct this by modding our perception. When one person mods their perception, they become god ( a creator). For example, you aren’t the tallest one in the room but you see yourself as that. You create a reality, and this is something people are addicted to and causes all the harm in the world (someone is manipulating our shared perception with their lie).
Reality is a repository that we must all be good maintainers of. Beware the false PR (delusions).
Which brings me to the the author’s article. Many creatures on earth, past and present, omit or ignore all the little details. They live a lie that is just as intricate as the details. Details matter if the details matter to you. Humans are world builders, and they will reshape the details to see what they want. So will a snake, its own tail can look like its food if necessary.
I wonder if this is one reason why AI seems to have scaling limits. If building stairs is decomposed into n-steps, and each of those steps is decomposed into n-steps, and you keep on decomposing for L levels, then each time you want an extra level of detail you need n-times the training data/training time.
No it’s rather obvious why. It’s not a scaling issue otherwise humans wouldn't be able to exist. It’s missing data. It’s like trying to learn to swim by watching other swimmers only. You can keep watching more and more of this but there’s limits.
There are two things that enable us to do it. First we have prebuilt application specific brains. Our neural networks are geared towards specialized thinking related to human living without any training needed. LLMs are free form intelligences with no bias. To bring it back to the analogy, do you really need to teach a beaver to swim if it was always raised on land?
Second text and visual data alone is not enough information to build a model of the world. As humans we have more data and we can control data. Meaning we see, hear, listen, and importantly we can place inputs into the data and observe differences in outputs.
This is why alpha go is so powerful. It’s able to get the input data and observe the output and learn. LLMs don’t do this on an automated basis yet.
There's the reasonable amount of oversimplification necessary to just get through life, then there's actively trying to oversimplify because it makes life "easier".
I judge people very harshly based on whether they accept reality as complex or rail against it. I am not proud that I do it, but it seems like it has value.
I feel like strong yearnings for simplicity (and willingness to ignore messy reality) correlates with people who are unpleasant to have in my life. So many "simplicity-oriented" people are happy to burden others with "the details" but are unwilling to actually "pay" others to bear that burden. They're pretty vile people.
Edit: The people who recognize the value in offloading complexity and do "pay" (often handsomely) and are the best Customers to have. I've had some really rewarding financial and personal relationships with people who recognize their offloading complexity is a service you provide.
Reading Ian McGilchrist’s “Master and his Emissary” has been incredibly eye opening on this theme.
Oversimplification and getting upset with the world when it doesn’t fit your model of it is definitely a poor character trait —- which is nevertheless unfortunately trained and rewarded in our schools and much of our professional work.
The world is what it is and there are some helpful abstractions for navigating it, but don’t be upset when your model fails as it always will.
I was hoping this would get mentioned! I heard a podcast with him and was enthralled. Are his interpretations and outlook on this considered "valid" by the scientific community? I've been intrigued but curious about how seriously he's taken.
Indeed, often when we humans are upset about something, we later understand things better. Then comes that aha moment in which we see we were jumping to conclusions.
This is what frustrates me to no end, re what's going on with DOGE and the indistriminant shutting off of legacy systems.
As Joel Spolsky once commented, , all non-trivial abstractions are, to some degree, leaky.
This is because reality itself is leaky. Or another way to put it, reality itself is non-trivially complex.
And any sufficiently long-lived production system that works at scale necessarily has to accommodate that complexity, to some degree.
Yes, some of these systems are sub-optimal, but nonetheless, they work, to the extent that they are production systems.
And, as anyone who has worked on legacy production systems, that complexity is itself mired in complexity, often due to weird edge and corner cases that reflect the complexity of the world that the system is attuned to.
And then, to come in with the mentality of a cocky intern with delusions of grandeur and simply shut off these systems indiscriminantly.....
and yes, I am asserting that this is being done indiscriminantly.
It is foolish on a scale I can't fathom, as an engineer who appreciates the complexity of systems beyond my level of comprehension. Organic systems that have grown to accomodate reality, warts and all.
And to simply shut things off, indiscriminantly, is beyond foolish. It is reckless, and eventually, as the body count rises, evil.
Yeah, Chesterton’s Fence is simply not a principle that people like Elon pay attention to. Sometimes for the better, mostly for the worse, specially when taking over something that's already there.
In 1800, the government of the USA spent 2% of GDP.
In 2020, the government of the USA spent 30% of GDP.
In 2024, the government of France spent 57% of GDP.
Are the people of 2024 France really getting 28x the value from their government as 1800 USA?
It is not evil to ask these questions or to experiment with government,
And more people should consider backing off from political-media consumption as it is clearly toxic to the soul.
The reality that counts most is the one around you, and I see far too many people destroying their relationships with family, friends, and colleagues over national politics when there are much bigger fish to fry in one's own garden.
The question was 28x though. Not just are you getting more value, but is the value 28 times more. This is not clear, and probably answerable. Health care is very different between now and 1800 (in 1800 your lifespan was measurably better if you didn't go to a doctor ever - this was before handwashing and antibiotics). Even if you compare today, France and the US have many differences in the current system and so you can argue things either way and we learn more about your bias than any truth (there are pros and cons of both systems so all conclusions). Both todays are very different from either in 1800, and we have no way of knowing how either would be different.
I think probably the slaves in 1800, whose experience of the government was its violent enforcement of their sub-human status would probably find the protection of their civil rights in 2024 France to be quite a bit more than 28x as valuable, yes.
I think the women who couldn't independently own property, had no protections against marital rape, being beat by their husbands, or most any other form of abuse would agree that even the comparitively tepid protections offered by modern France are priceless in comparison.
I think children forced to labor without pay, homosexuals forced into hiding, Native Americans kidnapped from their parents and forced into boarding schools, and any number of other now-protected classes would also agree.
Sure, if the government only serves a small fraction of the population at the expense of all others, that small fraction can debateably get comparitively good value. But it sure sucks for literally everyone else.
The end of slavery was really due to slavery being uneconomic. That's why the Northern states didn't have slavery. It would have ended in the South as well, even without the Civil War (which was a kind of big state thing, of course).
Children forced to labour without pay -- also an economic issue.
Even though US is more wealthy than Europe, the average European seems struggling much less than their US counterpart. Just have a look at poverty, homelessness, health figures, even of educated people.
The latest votes, and your comment, only seem to indicate that US people on average find that to be fine enough, the price for a (for me weird) kind of freedom.
Perception is not reality. People complain all the time. People will always spend the most they can get by with. There are people earning $million/year who have less spending money after paying their monthly bills (to spend on things like food) than others living below the poverty line. This is all about how they spend money, the person making $million/year is clearly rich, but if they are still having trouble making ends meet.
Asking the question with the provided data is too simplistic to even argue about.
"Here's the non contextualized percentages, what do you think of the difference between this two percentages which are more than two centuries apart, and from different countries?"
Percentages don't really work like that. 56% of one number isn't 28 times 2% of a different number. And it's not even the right number. GDP measures rate of number flow, not rate of benefit flow, or amount of benefit.
It's also noteworthy how people ask this question about the government but never ask it about private corporations.
And the clear bias in the presentation of numbers in the "question".
What people called the "Government" provided rather different things 200 years ago, let alone issues with defining a comparable "GDP" in such different environments.
Did you mean to reply to me? I don't see how this counters what I said. If you mean to imply that the questions use of statistics is a comparable problem to the current "government experiment" then I don't agree.
No, I was intending to build upon what you said that the question likely isn't actually being asked in good faith, instead an attempt to "anchor" readers into the assumptions it makes rather than really examine the answer, and people may indeed then have issues with it.
To really design experiments we really need to be asking meaningful questions about comparable metrics, after all.
> It is not evil to ask these questions or to experiment with government
Asking these questions is fine -- good and necessary even. But the evil comes when one of your reckless experiments shuts down an agency that's providing medical care to HIV-positive pregnant women in Africa, and when their babies are born during the disruption, we find that they have contracted their mothers' HIV, because of that missing medical care.
This is just one example among many. It's not hyperbole to suggest that people will die because of what DOGE is doing.
> Are the people of 2024 France really getting 28x the value from their government as 1800 USA?
It is not the right question to ask. 28x is a number that doesn't make sense.
For example, you are in a restaurant, you can drink tap water for free, or sparkling water for $3, is sparkling water infinitely better than tap water? Infinity doesn't exist in the real world, but the real world has plenty of people drinking $3 sparkling water, which tells us that the reasoning is broken.
A more sensible reasoning would be: would you get better value by paying 55% (57%-2%=55%) of your income to "upgrade" from a 1800 US government to a 2024 France government, or you are better off doing something else with that money.
France has a massive welfare state and pension system (which is causing a crisis as they cant afford it in the long run). People probably are getting 28x more from the government than before those existed.
Yes, everyone pays taxes into the system. But don't think for a moment that when musk et.al. are done with their purge that your tax rate will magicaly plummet to 2%. It's going to either stay the same or go up. Unless you are in the 1%. In which case, you can start your celebration now.
I'll bite. Lets break the highest number down, Fermi-style.
=> 30% social services
=> 10% military and education
=> 10% healthcare
Leaves 10% for infrastructure (road/rail), governmental services (police, regulation of trade, traffic, construction), damage-control for innovations like leaded gas, CFCs, asbestos. And of course overhead to run the whole thing.
I'd honestly say thats not really a bad deal. Are there gonna be inefficiencies in the whole apparatus? For sure! But getting rid of those services, and trying to do this personally with the taxes you saved strikes me as completely infeasible.
edit: forgot research (CERN, ITER, etc.), which would be particularly tricky to fund privately.
PS: I was initially skeptical myself, and expected double digit percentages of unclear worth. But actually breaking this down gave me strong Monthy Python ("what have the romans ever done for us") vibes, and now I think that your point is much worse than it looks first glance (still don't understand why it would get flagged, though).
> In 2020, the government of the USA spent 30% of GDP.
Interesting that you specifically chose a covid year. In 2024 spending was 23%. The 50 year average of spending a percentage of GDP is 21%.[1]
Yet again, anyone who believes that we have some crazy out of line spending right now is in a media/propaganda echo chamber.
And if anyone believes that hacking apart our country under the guise of "cutting spending" again is falling for the same playbook. What is being done is not at all driven by cutting spending, that's just the justification bring put forward - any amount of looking into what's being done, vs what's is claimed is being done makes that obvious.
The echo chamber that had been created is out of control at this pointas somehow a significant number of people believe what is being said.
I’m sure there are optimizations to be made, but DOGE is acting like an insufferable greenie dev who wants to slash and burn without understanding the system or having acquired any wisdom about maintaining and refactoring complex systems.
Or vastly increased productivity -- that also had increasingly less to do with land ownership? Life used to suck if you didn't own land (or were one of the lucky few who could work as a merchant, a craftsman, a priest, a government official, etc). Effectively all of Europe had too little land for all its recorded history.
> ‘Spirit’ thermometers, made using brandy and other liquors, were in common use in the early days of thermometry. They were even considered as a potential standard fluid for thermometers. It wasn’t until the careful work of Swiss physicist Jean-André De Luc in the 18th century that physicists realized that alcohol thermometers are highly nonlinear and highly variable depending on concentration, which is in turn hard to measure.
During Deluc's time in the 18th century Geneva was not part of Switzerland, thus Deluc was Genevan/Genevese, not Swiss.
Geneva was an independent city republic with centuries of history until Napoleon (1798) when it was incorporated into France. After Napoleon during the Vienna Congress of 1815 - in the 19th century - Geneva joined Switzerland.
Other people from Geneva of the same time period include Rodolphe Töpffer, the first comic book artist, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
We don't use today's political borders for historic figures.
Imagine being a lumberjack and wood literally changed its properties every few years due to updates. They would be so pissed.
Or if you came into a construction job and the guy who was building stairs did not understand gravity, and was just using an AI to guide him.
Finally you’re working on a house and whenever you set up your drywall, it just does nothing. Turns out you were setting up drywall on the other side of the house. Common mistake.
Programming isn’t like carpentry - it’s closer to magical carpentry.
I attended a woo-woo university course, where the instructor invited a interpretative dancer to give a lesson.
The dancer bright out some paper, pencils, and almonds, and had everyone spend half an hour silently writing about their single almond. As it turns out, it's easier than it sounds; time passed quick and I (and most others) never felt bored. There's always more room for observation and analysis.
It struck me as a critical life lesson about the power of perception and attention. Every moment is infinite, and therefore it's a fool's task to try and learn/experience "everything".
I think there is a fine balance to this. I agree that going through life by experiencing as much as possible is futile. But on the other hand, spending all your time in thought is also problematic since your ideas never clash with reality.
I mentioned this to a friend, and he was kind of confused, understandably so, and said "...it's pinball...why is that taxing?"
It's not a dumb question, we have had virtual pinball games since the Atari 2600 at least, and even pretty fun stuff on the Amiga and DOS like Pinball Dreams and Epic Pinball, so why would a modern pinball game make my relatively beefy laptop struggle playing it?
The answer is because virtual pinball occupies a strange kind of space in the world of video games, in that they're trying to emulate something that is entirely dependent on extremely precise and subtle physics. It's not like you can really have too accurate of physics; the better the physics, the closer it is to a "real" pinball machine, and generally speaking the more fun the game is.
As such, I think you could honestly make a pinball game that taxes any hardware. You'll never be able to have "perfect" physics (as in physics that completely and totally imitate reality), you can only get asymptotically close to "perfect", and the closer you are, the more taxing the computation will end up being.
It just made me think, this applies to nearly anything. We all work with abstractions, but if dive into the details of something and recurse, it's not like it ever ends.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mechanical_gifs/comments/aflmj7/how...
It's not really a rigid body, it's a dynamic component that squeezes the ball.
Generally speaking, there are many ways you can simplify the game by sacrificing precison. This is exactly the kind of detail the original article is about. Ones simplified model of the world is always incomplete, and there are always surprising ways in which it will fall short.
I think my overall point still stands, but you might be right.
ETA:
I would like to point out that my dad was debating buying one of those virtual pinball tables, and so we played one at a mall, it was decidedly not fun. The physics were way too floaty, and didn't feel good at all. It looked like they were running it on some shitty Android and just mounted a big TV.
That's why I thought that maybe it was the physics in PinballFX slowing things down.
The one I felt at the mall kind of felt like I was playing on the moon. The ball felt really floaty and the way the ball bounced off the walls and bumpers just didn't feel or look right.
Adding some kind of "thumper" feedback would have certainly helped the experience though.
But I would be very surprised if any pinball software actually does that!
I think having something more or less like a rumble feature would do a lot too. Even if you just had a solenoid that thumps when hitting a bumper would make it feel a lot more realistic.
There’s always an infinite number of variables in a real pinball machine. Slight imperfections in the playfield surface making it not completely flat, slight imperfections in the shape of the ball so it’s not a perfect sphere, slight imperfections in the shape of the bumper. I could keep going, but I think there’s literally billions of potential variables that can modify the game.
These might seem insignificant, and in some cases they are, but it’s a chaos theory thing; small imperfections multiplied across enough of a timescale become pretty significant, and that’s a large part of what makes real pinball so much fun.
Of course there’s plenty of things we can do to approximate reality; adding a bit of randomness to the experience probably provides enough chaos to give us something more or less like reality in a lot of cases, but that is just an optimization hack.
Obviously there’s are ways of spoofing even that, just adding some randomness probably helps a lot.
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38407851 - Nov 2023 (136 comments)
Reality has a surprising amount of detail - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36309597 - June 2023 (1 comment)
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29429385 - Dec 2021 (118 comments)
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28006256 - July 2021 (1 comment)
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020495 - Jan 2020 (115 comments)
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255 - Jan 2018 (294 comments)
The argument that culturally homogeneous teams perform better due to more efficient communication (more is "already understood" at the outset, so there's less need to communicate explicitly, and fewer misunderstandings) is also sound.
So from a purely team-performance-maximising perspective, the question is: Which coefficient is higher? (More generally: What level of mixture is optimal?)
So, given a sound team culture and environment—great regardless of the style of team you have!—you can start with a diverse team and then collectively improve team cohesion and communication. You need some baseline level of effective leadership to do this, but it's absolutely doable, and I've seen it done.
To a first approximation: whichever of the two your political leanings make you more comfortable with.
To a second approximation: if your task is efficiency at a constrained task, homogeneity. If your task requires exploration and/or creativity, heterogeneity.
To a third approximation: the 2nd approximation argument, except the demands of nearly all tasks change over time.
Then you factor in the environment, including your management's competence at eliciting the value of various team members, etc.
And don't forget risk. Optimizing for a high level of performance in any dimension makes things brittle in all other dimensions.
A team that develops a user interface benefits more from "generic" cultural diversity (gender, ethnicity, social class, etc.) than a team that builds a processor microarchitecture.
But the latter team can still benefit from diversity: if it's all EEs, they'll probably do worse than a team that also has a mathematician, a physicist, a chemical engineer, a finance person, etc on it.
On the other hand, the processor team's communication might be smoother with an all EE team of high "generic" diversity than it would be with all white guys but from very different academic backgrounds.
If you have decent retention, the team will develop its own communication style anyway, so I suspect this factor doesn't matter as much.
Did you just define Groupthink, but in positive sounding words?
False Equivalence.
Efficient Communication is secondary to Different Whats and Whys which is what a diverse collection of people from different cultural backgrounds bring to the table. A single idea communicated however imperfectly can change the world. This is the reason "equal opportunities" should be guaranteed to all even though "equal outcomes" cannot be guaranteed.
So define a "suitable standard requirement" for a specific role and try and collect a diverse group of people who meet those criteria.
Oh silly me, I thought the reason was that it follows naturally from everyone having equal moral worth.
This may seem like impractical advice. How does one increase the scope of perception? Personally, I’ve found that a meditation practice leads to this.
Like sometimes I seem to be in alignment with someone, but things feel off. I once realized the "off" feeling was because I was running toward something I believed in, and they're running away from another thing that scared them. It's only circumstantial we were intellectually walking in the same direction, so I tread thoughtfully in collaboration with this person. It's attractive force vs repulsive.
Once I knew to look for this "away vs toward" dimension, I see it often :)
Image Streaming[1] is a fun little exercise that has helped me expand my perception of things or problems. I try to do it in a very high dynamic range way -- where I zoom out of a scene describe it in detail and then zoom in a describe it in detail.
There is also a fun improv exercise where you walk around looking at objects and calling it the wrong name. It sort of gets you our of default mode and you start seeing things 'differently' (a touch more vivid). I think the exercise is described in Impro by Keith Johnstone.
[1]: https://winwenger.com/resources/cps-techniques/image-streami...
[ref] https://www.amazon.com/Mathematica-Secret-World-Intuition-Cu...
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/01/23/impro-by-keith-johnsto...
The limits on our experiences are usually self-imposed by the fact that we tend to make specific choices limited to specific contexts. The experiences you have are the experiences that derive from what you think is a good idea. So doing things you think are bad ideas tends to result in a lot of new experiences.
Ed: among the ways millions of lives could be lost: losing control of our nuclear arsenal or nuclear materials due to haphazardly firing people responsible for maintaining them. Bungling the response to the next pandemic, due to haphazardly firing people, cutting science funding and deleting inconvenient data. Starvation and disease from ceasing aid around the world. There's also the wars likely to result from the collapse of trust in the US as a security partner, but I suppose it's not correct to blame that on DOGE per se, even if it's an extension of the same principle.
It seems pretty clear to me at least why it would lead to circular arguments.
There is no such mechanism.
If there was then the vast majority of political debates on HN wouldn’t even exist.
Readers are just going to assume it’s random noise, or at least indistinguishable from noise, from a rando on the internet.
Sufficient chimpanzees with keyboards, or an LLM, can also type out every comment you’ve ever written, including the last few.
Trump’s “cost saving” measures are already actively harming medical treatment in the USA.
I find your comment to be the same idea, but on something folks have foisted upon them and are forced to experience.
Remember when he said self driving is coming next year… every year… since 2017
But he is by far the most successful one.
At the very least the loudest successful one.
The vision of a technocratic bureaucracy isn’t workable given the complexity of life — so we need to distribute decisions to be made in context. We’re paying huge sums for a technocratic system that can’t account for the actual needs and which leads to suboptimal outcomes.
Dismantling the regulatory state and attendant bureaucracy creates room for better, localized, contextual systems to flourish.
And I guess it doesn't matter how many people will be hurt during the churn...
But regardless, DOGE's goal isn't to make government better, it's to make government broken and cheap, so it will be easier to funnel money to Musk's (and other Trump cronies') companies instead.
Government should not involve arcane wizardry nor should imputed mastery of it be held as an excuse to prevent it's modification to meet the will of the voters.
They don’t care about ‘saving money’, they’re just messing about to see if they can. To move the goalpost of what is acceptable. To goosestep the United States back into a Russia-aligned nation that lets rich people pluck the poors bald like chickens.
Not just that. They’re gish galloping the courts and the news.
So many things, some dumb, some dangerous, some contradictory.
The goal is to make it impossible to o keep track of what’s going on.
This has been my experience, building anything; especially shipping anything.
In my experience, shipping is orders of magnitude more involved than authoring.
There's ten million stupid little details, that pop up when least convenient. Experience has taught me to anticipate these details. Many times, they should be mitigated from the very start (security and localization are good examples).
That's why I tend to write every one of my projects -even "farting around" ones- as if they were shipping products.
Keeps me in practice.
Also, this is one of the areas where it really pays to have experienced engineers.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and fine features occur for different reasons than coarse features.
Important point. This makes reality even less tractable than a fractal, by a solid margin!
I mean, I think it is very poetic to suppose the universe has some sort of underlying fractal structure. But… perhaps the universe just looks like it has a fractal structure because the finest details are pretty small relative to us. At the bottom, the atoms, electrons, and quarks are more like potentials anyway, right?
They don’t have solid surfaces anyway. Maybe we can plot the potential fields in a way that makes them look like fractals? But… my modern physics, fields and waves, and even my mathematical understanding of fractals are all a bit rusty (so, what am I even doing in this conversation? Oh well), but shouldn’t the potential fields eventually be smooth at some point? And fractals are not very smooth.
Therefore I conclude the universe doesn’t have a fractal structure, it is just very small. But that isn’t poetic at all. :(
Like if you want to mathematically model what happens in a pool table hall when somebody strikes a ball with a great deal of force... by the time you get to the six or seventh bounce you are going to have to start to take into account the position and movement of people standing around the table watching it. The airflow, the vibration of them moving, the relative gravitational forces, etc. It all matters all the time.
And the problem only gets worse the larger the scale and longer the timelines.
Like if you want to manage a economy.
It is tempting to want to look at "things from a high level" and imagine that all the details just kinda average themselves out. So it isn't necessary to figure out the behavior of each individual in a national economy. It should be possible to simply plot out the results of their decision making over time and extrapolate that into the future to come up with meaningful policy decisions and 5 year plans.
The problem is that that doesn't work. Because all the details matter all the time.
Also the very act of making policies causes changes in the behavior economy in wildly unpredictable manners. Every individual actor involved is going to change their behavior and decision making based on your decision making, which then changes the behavior and decision making of every other individual, etc etc. In a endless fractal involving billions of actors, since your national economy is not isolated from the forces of every other economy and visa versa.
Also trying to make targets out of measurements and indicators tends to destroy the value of the measurements and indicators. Meaning that by setting policies you are destroying the information you are basing your decisions off of.
So you can't collect enough information to make good decisions. The information you receive is already obsolete by the time you get it. And the act of trying to create rules and policies based on the information you do have tends to destroy what little value it has left.
I wonder if a lot of this comes back to the enlightenment/science-y way of looking at the world that imagines that the way to understand stuff is to break it into subproblems, solve those, and build back up from there. It relies on a fundamental assumption that there are separate things instead of a big continuous process of happening. I recently read about a study where participants were asked to pick the best car for a set of needs, and were given 4 variables per car in one case, and 16 variables per car in another. Then, each group was either distracted while pondering, or allowed to think through it directly/consciously. The conscious thought group did better than distracted group did when there were 4 variables, but worse when there were more. Intuition is great at the missable details.
In the context of policy making (or presidential fiat, as the case may be), there is always the risk of mistaking what people should do with what they will do. A pragmatic strategy for success will include systems that can help to thwart the worst impulses of our flawed reasoning, including things like dispassionate peer reviewed analyses (oops) that is untethered by the ambitions or ideologies of individual people or groups (oops), a diverse array of advisory opinions (oops), functional checks on monolithic authority (oops), and mechanisms for correcting prior mistakes (fingers crossed).
I think this all contributes to the phenomenon that folks have (a bit erroneously) associated with the Dunning-Kruger effect—essentially the idea that people who haven’t learned enough to know how much they don’t know are dangerously overconfident and naive. That said, I think there is a tendency to assume this about others that’s probably fallacious in and of itself. In the case of current events, I don’t believe the individuals involved actually care enough to have even mounted the left peak of the Dunning-Kruger chart, but rather are fully uninformed and unconcerned with much of any implications outside of their own very narrow ideological ends (it’s probably more accurate to apply Dunning-Kruger to the ideology itself, or maybe the broader coalition of partisan cohorts who share it, than it is the people wielding it).
> The End of Greatness is an observational scale discovered at roughly 100 Mpc (roughly 300 million light-years) where the lumpiness seen in the large-scale structure of the universe is homogenized and isotropized in accordance with the cosmological principle. At this scale, no pseudo-random fractalness is apparent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#End_of_Gre...
with enough agency, and ignoring everything else in the world you realize that your perception is all there is, that you can ever be sure of.
There is no universe, there is no quantum physics. Those are just models, your perception models them.
Reality is a repository that we must all be good maintainers of. Beware the false PR (delusions).
Which brings me to the the author’s article. Many creatures on earth, past and present, omit or ignore all the little details. They live a lie that is just as intricate as the details. Details matter if the details matter to you. Humans are world builders, and they will reshape the details to see what they want. So will a snake, its own tail can look like its food if necessary.
There are two things that enable us to do it. First we have prebuilt application specific brains. Our neural networks are geared towards specialized thinking related to human living without any training needed. LLMs are free form intelligences with no bias. To bring it back to the analogy, do you really need to teach a beaver to swim if it was always raised on land?
Second text and visual data alone is not enough information to build a model of the world. As humans we have more data and we can control data. Meaning we see, hear, listen, and importantly we can place inputs into the data and observe differences in outputs.
This is why alpha go is so powerful. It’s able to get the input data and observe the output and learn. LLMs don’t do this on an automated basis yet.
I judge people very harshly based on whether they accept reality as complex or rail against it. I am not proud that I do it, but it seems like it has value.
I feel like strong yearnings for simplicity (and willingness to ignore messy reality) correlates with people who are unpleasant to have in my life. So many "simplicity-oriented" people are happy to burden others with "the details" but are unwilling to actually "pay" others to bear that burden. They're pretty vile people.
Edit: The people who recognize the value in offloading complexity and do "pay" (often handsomely) and are the best Customers to have. I've had some really rewarding financial and personal relationships with people who recognize their offloading complexity is a service you provide.
Wow man, I like this so much. I feel it strongly
Oversimplification and getting upset with the world when it doesn’t fit your model of it is definitely a poor character trait —- which is nevertheless unfortunately trained and rewarded in our schools and much of our professional work.
The world is what it is and there are some helpful abstractions for navigating it, but don’t be upset when your model fails as it always will.
As Joel Spolsky once commented, , all non-trivial abstractions are, to some degree, leaky.
This is because reality itself is leaky. Or another way to put it, reality itself is non-trivially complex.
And any sufficiently long-lived production system that works at scale necessarily has to accommodate that complexity, to some degree.
Yes, some of these systems are sub-optimal, but nonetheless, they work, to the extent that they are production systems.
And, as anyone who has worked on legacy production systems, that complexity is itself mired in complexity, often due to weird edge and corner cases that reflect the complexity of the world that the system is attuned to.
And then, to come in with the mentality of a cocky intern with delusions of grandeur and simply shut off these systems indiscriminantly.....
and yes, I am asserting that this is being done indiscriminantly.
It is foolish on a scale I can't fathom, as an engineer who appreciates the complexity of systems beyond my level of comprehension. Organic systems that have grown to accomodate reality, warts and all.
And to simply shut things off, indiscriminantly, is beyond foolish. It is reckless, and eventually, as the body count rises, evil.
No argument.
But is that reality public service? Or something else?
In 2020, the government of the USA spent 30% of GDP.
In 2024, the government of France spent 57% of GDP.
Are the people of 2024 France really getting 28x the value from their government as 1800 USA?
It is not evil to ask these questions or to experiment with government,
And more people should consider backing off from political-media consumption as it is clearly toxic to the soul.
The reality that counts most is the one around you, and I see far too many people destroying their relationships with family, friends, and colleagues over national politics when there are much bigger fish to fry in one's own garden.
oh but certainly. Healthcare, social security, education, … just to name a few
I think the women who couldn't independently own property, had no protections against marital rape, being beat by their husbands, or most any other form of abuse would agree that even the comparitively tepid protections offered by modern France are priceless in comparison.
I think children forced to labor without pay, homosexuals forced into hiding, Native Americans kidnapped from their parents and forced into boarding schools, and any number of other now-protected classes would also agree.
Sure, if the government only serves a small fraction of the population at the expense of all others, that small fraction can debateably get comparitively good value. But it sure sucks for literally everyone else.
The end of slavery was really due to slavery being uneconomic. That's why the Northern states didn't have slavery. It would have ended in the South as well, even without the Civil War (which was a kind of big state thing, of course).
Children forced to labour without pay -- also an economic issue.
The latest votes, and your comment, only seem to indicate that US people on average find that to be fine enough, the price for a (for me weird) kind of freedom.
"Here's the non contextualized percentages, what do you think of the difference between this two percentages which are more than two centuries apart, and from different countries?"
It's also noteworthy how people ask this question about the government but never ask it about private corporations.
I don't think anyone has a problem with the question being asked. It's the non-scientific method of experimentation that is troubling people.
What people called the "Government" provided rather different things 200 years ago, let alone issues with defining a comparable "GDP" in such different environments.
To really design experiments we really need to be asking meaningful questions about comparable metrics, after all.
Asking these questions is fine -- good and necessary even. But the evil comes when one of your reckless experiments shuts down an agency that's providing medical care to HIV-positive pregnant women in Africa, and when their babies are born during the disruption, we find that they have contracted their mothers' HIV, because of that missing medical care.
This is just one example among many. It's not hyperbole to suggest that people will die because of what DOGE is doing.
> Are the people of 2024 France really getting 28x the value from their government as 1800 USA?
I think that's a very easy "yes".
Very likely, yes.
Who was the last person close to you that died after buying poisoned food?
For example, you are in a restaurant, you can drink tap water for free, or sparkling water for $3, is sparkling water infinitely better than tap water? Infinity doesn't exist in the real world, but the real world has plenty of people drinking $3 sparkling water, which tells us that the reasoning is broken.
A more sensible reasoning would be: would you get better value by paying 55% (57%-2%=55%) of your income to "upgrade" from a 1800 US government to a 2024 France government, or you are better off doing something else with that money.
=> 30% social services
=> 10% military and education
=> 10% healthcare
Leaves 10% for infrastructure (road/rail), governmental services (police, regulation of trade, traffic, construction), damage-control for innovations like leaded gas, CFCs, asbestos. And of course overhead to run the whole thing.
I'd honestly say thats not really a bad deal. Are there gonna be inefficiencies in the whole apparatus? For sure! But getting rid of those services, and trying to do this personally with the taxes you saved strikes me as completely infeasible.
edit: forgot research (CERN, ITER, etc.), which would be particularly tricky to fund privately.
PS: I was initially skeptical myself, and expected double digit percentages of unclear worth. But actually breaking this down gave me strong Monthy Python ("what have the romans ever done for us") vibes, and now I think that your point is much worse than it looks first glance (still don't understand why it would get flagged, though).
Interesting that you specifically chose a covid year. In 2024 spending was 23%. The 50 year average of spending a percentage of GDP is 21%.[1]
Yet again, anyone who believes that we have some crazy out of line spending right now is in a media/propaganda echo chamber.
And if anyone believes that hacking apart our country under the guise of "cutting spending" again is falling for the same playbook. What is being done is not at all driven by cutting spending, that's just the justification bring put forward - any amount of looking into what's being done, vs what's is claimed is being done makes that obvious.
The echo chamber that had been created is out of control at this pointas somehow a significant number of people believe what is being said.
[1]https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60843/html#:~:text=In%20tota...
Here's a pretty large fish to fry: the breakdown of democracy, and a shift towards autocracy and dictatorship.
This is a fish that affects everyone's gardens, like it or not.
Destroying the government services that allow disabled people to get healthcare and other basic needs is toxic to my literal, physical body.
You're talking like this is all a genteel philosophical disagreement. People are going to die.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare%27s_effect_on_poverty
There are diminishing returns, though
During Deluc's time in the 18th century Geneva was not part of Switzerland, thus Deluc was Genevan/Genevese, not Swiss.
Geneva was an independent city republic with centuries of history until Napoleon (1798) when it was incorporated into France. After Napoleon during the Vienna Congress of 1815 - in the 19th century - Geneva joined Switzerland.
Other people from Geneva of the same time period include Rodolphe Töpffer, the first comic book artist, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
We don't use today's political borders for historic figures.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=johnsalvatier.org
Or if you came into a construction job and the guy who was building stairs did not understand gravity, and was just using an AI to guide him.
Finally you’re working on a house and whenever you set up your drywall, it just does nothing. Turns out you were setting up drywall on the other side of the house. Common mistake.
Programming isn’t like carpentry - it’s closer to magical carpentry.
The dancer bright out some paper, pencils, and almonds, and had everyone spend half an hour silently writing about their single almond. As it turns out, it's easier than it sounds; time passed quick and I (and most others) never felt bored. There's always more room for observation and analysis.
It struck me as a critical life lesson about the power of perception and attention. Every moment is infinite, and therefore it's a fool's task to try and learn/experience "everything".
E.g. see the "Open Door Policy" from Hamming's research talk: https://gwern.net/doc/science/1986-hamming#open-door-policy