It’s always a little disappointing to me when I think I’ve run into something unique but it ends up being user error or something.
Being a founder has a lot of SRE like activities. Fortunately I used to actually like troubleshooting and hence love being a founder but I know a lot of people quit this path because of the "suprising amount of details" in reality!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255 - Jan 19, 2018
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020495 - Jan 11, 2020
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29429385 - Dec 3, 2021
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38407851 - Nov 24, 2023
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43087779 - Feb 21, 2025
In the end I screwed some wall shelves in and called it good enough.
Momentarily baffled, I realized that, despite appearances, the old frame was actually not square, in fact it was a parallelogram. I'd measured the height and width and assumed it was square. The previous (experienced) carpenter who'd built the doors I was replacing had clearly noticed this, and simply allowed for the misalignment in his design. He built perfectly square-appearing doors that mounted to the not-square frame. I had to go back and rework mine considerably for them to fit without looking ridiculous. They're still there and holding up well, but I also still think of this lesson on a regular basis in my day to day life now.
AI doesn't deal with reality, it deals with tokens. This is why all those vibe-coded harnesses, little more than glue between various text IO interfaces, are several hundreds of thousands of source lines of code.
It's why a SOTA model took 100kSLoK to write a C compiler to compile one specific project.
It's why, when I asked for a simple markdown -> ansi escape codes converter (for terminal output) in Python, SOTA Claude and SOTA ChatGPT both give me +- 150 SLoC when my own LUT-based version came to under 10 lines of code + a LUT.
Reality has a surprising amount of detail, but LLMs don't exist in reality, they exist in a virtual world made up off tokens.
Yes.
> Or just in a virtual world made up of sensory signals?
No, definitely reality. Things affect my thought whether I sense them or not.
I think I'm drawn to programming because the fiddliness is tractable, and fixable.
In which other domain can I:
* introspect the relevant processes/state, step by step
* snapshot/undo
* fix niggles, once and for all, and for everyone; and get their fixes too
* probe and test my inputs and outputs, checking for quality. Get notified if a part changes in a way that breaks me.
And the only tool I need is a commodity general purpose PC.
When I try woodwork, or even electronics, I'm struck by much friction is in even simple tasks: tools, parts, lead time, safety, space, physical effort, cost, ...
Contemplating the details of a thing is really satisfying. At times I find myself sitting there and trying to decompose the astonishing amount of work, research, both evolutionary and revolutionary progress that has gone into reaching the current level of something. Buying myself a coffee and stare at the local ferry and acknowledge that someones life's work went into figuring out how to make the paint stick to metal.
Naturally the other point also sticks.. I too often get stuck on the details. :P
I can never look at staircases the same.
I expect there's a lot of detail that I'm unaware of relating to running a company (planning; risk; legal; ...) that might make a decision foolish to me, but make sense if given more context.
Boom890•4d ago
james_ross•4d ago
sdenton4•1h ago
When you hire someone to work on the stairs for you, you /hope/ they know what they're doing, especially if you don't have the skills yourself to judge their work. Same for an agent.