Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

One of my first real DIY projects during a summer in college nearly 20 years ago was replacing the rotted out basement bulkhead doors on the ~120 year old house I grew up in. I took measurements of the old ones, bought some nice tongue-and-groove cedar and high-quality hardware, and built the new doors in the garage. When they were fully assembled, I carried them over to install on the old stone frame. I took off the old ones, put mine in their place...and they didn't fit properly at all.

Momentarily baffled, I realized that, despite appearances, the old frame was actually not square, in fact it was a parallelogram. I'd measured the height and width and assumed it was square. The previous (experienced) carpenter who'd built the doors I was replacing had clearly noticed this, and simply allowed for the misalignment in his design. He built perfectly square-appearing doors that mounted to the not-square frame. I had to go back and rework mine considerably for them to fit without looking ridiculous. They're still there and holding up well, but I also still think of this lesson on a regular basis in my day to day life now.

A related thing that took me a while to accept when I started woodworking is that wood moves, a lot.

If you built the bookshelf in wood, it will be expanding, contracting and shifting over time with temperature and humidity variation throughout the day and season. And asymmetrically depending on the grain.

The straight right angles won't stay that way, and it's better to design such that they change in complementary ways, rather than remain perfect.

Coincidentally just had this realization last night. Leaned a piece of furniture against the wall, realized the ~perfectly straight/level edge didn't lean smoothly against the wall -- the wall is not perfectly straight!! :-O

I recognized this submission from its title but did not remember what it was about. For some reason this anecdote reminded me. Yes now I know it's about the man who built staircases with his father.

I can never look at staircases the same.

I think this is a very common sentiment among a lot of people, including me.

And also that’s why AI tools create mix reactions. A couple of months ago a post went viral which was really insightful on what I was originally drawn to cs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46881264

Unless you have endless budget, many things can be one-shot. You can't do a test run first, or roll back a cut if the length is too short. You can patch misplaced nail holes, or re-dig a hole (messing up filling a hole with concrete is another matter) and hope you don't kill a tree transplanting it, but the end result isn't clean.

The best I could do with woodworking in the end to approximate programming was live with wasting some timber, leave a lot of margin on the main cuts and size all the pieces as a whole.

Until the next OS update...

With wood you are up against nature. With software you are up against corporations and comities.

The fact that machine learning can learn highly detailed patterns is the very reason why AI is so useful. So what you’re saying doesn’t really make much sense

In the spirit of the article, what detail in the decision making of layoffs might you be missing?

I expect there's a lot of detail that I'm unaware of relating to running a company (planning; risk; legal; ...) that might make a decision foolish to me, but make sense if given more context.

You have my curiosity

This is not my field, but are we sure that reality is not quantised at some level?

Infinite is a very big claim.

I echo this. The kind of entropy that real users bring has been refreshing to face as a founder.

Being a founder has a lot of SRE like activities. Fortunately I used to actually like troubleshooting and hence love being a founder but I know a lot of people quit this path because of the "suprising amount of details" in reality!

a good read indeed! Makes me think about my use of coding agents differently, as the main thing they do is deal with a lot of details that matter to the execution but don't matter to me personally enough to figure them out. Would love to see this author's more recent take as this was written pre-LLMs taking over the world.....

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