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.

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.

Pinball simulation has come a long way, but it still feels very different from the real thing.

Plus the bonus of an example of causing spin.

Obviously the ball response can be modeled as an impulse. However as you point out the difficultly is that the physics engine needs to calculate a correct result for the ball bouncing (i.e. it isn't simple to calculate the impulse).

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 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.

https://youtu.be/Jd3-eiid-Uw?t=147

Turns out that head-tracking parallax is surprisingly effective even without stereo vision. I'd guess there's some component about the effect working best when your head motion is large relative to the distance between your eyes, and also best for objects far enough away from your eyes that you're not getting a lot of information from the stereo vision.

I don't know exactly where those thresholds are, but I wouldn't be surprised if a pinball machine is in a regime where it works well.

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!

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.

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?)

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.

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.

But what fraction of that massively broader knowledge and experience is actually relevant to what the team works on? I think it will vary. It could be fairly high for UI design (as another commenter suggested), but low for, say, optimising backend APIs.

And do you really think it's easy to fix deep-seated communication issues? Do you think you could take someone from an Ask culture, and in a couple of weeks they'd be a happy, high-performing member of a Guess culture team (or vice versa)?

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.

You can have efficient communication even in culturally/racially/whatever diverse teams. Your original implication that somehow only homogeneity leads to more efficient communication is not quite correct.

No, you'd want the teams in different companies, so a diversity of companies as well.

The Google corporate model is bad for society and labor.

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...

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.

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.

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.

That’s possible, however, it’s possible it’ll give a chance to remove autocrats who have suppressed the scientific method in favor of their prevailing opinions or preferences.

There will be a painful period but it could rejuvenate the systems.

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.

I'm kind of tickled at the idea that a "hypothesis" is some hyper-specific thing with trappings of "credibility", and that anything less would be an insult, like we're not all just a bunch of nerds arguing on the internet. It's also kind of sad, though. This is why computer people need liberal arts education.

Which would be practically meaningless without some attached non-zero credibility.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and fine features occur for different reasons than coarse features.

All possible different-looking snapshots of a Mandelbrot fractal may look extremely very different, but they come from the same mathematical cause.

In contrast, the jagged molecules of my wood tabletop come from the nature of organic polymers and how biological systems are able to manufacture them, while the smooth scale of my tabletop comes because I made it that way with a belt sander.

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. :(

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.

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".

  To see a world in a grain of sand
  And a heaven in a wild flower,
  Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
  And eternity in an hour.

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.

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 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.

Very likely, yes.

Who was the last person close to you that died after buying poisoned food?

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".

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.

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.

=> 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...

Details observance, combined with the facility to abstract, is probably what makes me a programmer of the caliber I am. Not that I am great (far from it, when I see and compare others' work) but I have products being used by clients successfully, so good enough, I figure...

Ah, another thought: Also conversations with others about a problem I am facing. My wife has an uncanny ability to suggest things that sometimes cause me to reconsider some of my assumptions, and have the blinding flash of insight that allows me to successfully navigate through whatever my current obstacle might be. And she does not try to keep up with my area of technical knowledge anymore, yet still so valuable!

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.

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.

Wow man, I like this so much. I feel it strongly

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.

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.

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.