A programmer's view of the Universe, part 2: Mario Kart | Hacker News Reader

A programmer's view of the Universe, part 2: Mario Kart

steve-yegge.blogspot.com

61 pointspavelludiq22 comments

The first part was a funny story about a little fish that tried real real hard then failed and died without hope.

The second part is a boring series of reaches that doesn't go anywhere (literally).

I was aware coming in that Yegge's style is to make tenuous metaphors that obfuscate the point more than they elucidate (remember the story about the Kingdom of Nouns) but I was so enamoured by part 1 that I inadvisedly read it nonetheless.

(As a side note it is possible to write in the style Yegge is trying to: Neal Stephenson achieves it in "In the Beginning was the Command Line" with the story about the different drills.)

I constantly remember the story of that damn drill, precisely because it is such a good metaphor. It might be worth learning that style of writing.

Prolixity much?

Metaphors are like business plans. When they take too long to explain, it's time to get a new one.

I think the parent post was referring to choosing certain leaky abstractions on purpose in order to frame the phenomena you are describing in such a way as to elicit the desired reaction from an audience. For example, you can change emotional response to a stimulus by using words with hot or cold connotations to describe it.

> But one way or another, all systems are embedded systems. [...] host systems often overlap and even cooperate. A city is composed of many interleaved subsystems. So is your body. It's not always a simple containment relationship. Systems are made of, and communicate with, other systems.

So now the definition of "embedded system" is essentially a "thingy". Thingies overlap and cooperate, thingies are made of and communicate with other thingies.

That's not very enlightening.

I have no idea what the purpose was of the 3000 (?) word analogy between Mario Cart, a fish tank and embedded systems. And also it's unclear how the "holes" (data channels) are related to reflection and metaprogramming.

And finally, I don't see how he can be so certain the state of the Universe was "undefined" before the big bang. Maybe the Universe had a definite and sensible but (to us) unknowable state before the Big Bang.

To our vantage point, the universe was "undefined" before the big bang. It's also "undefined" from our vantage point to every space that exists (or rather doesn't exist) outside of our universe.

If you buy certain flavors of string theory, you could say that we can only tell what's going on beyond our own 'brane, as our 'brane happens to be an embedded system that we would need to step outside to understand what exists outside of it.

Essentially it seems to me that Yegge is saying that we don't know what's going on outside of our 3-space 1-time universe, and that even posing the questions from within the universe is an exercise in futility.

What you're saying makes perfect sense, but that isn't what Yegge is saying at all. You're saying the state of the universe may or may not be sensible before the Big Bang, but it's unknowable so speculation is pointless. What Yegge is saying is that it's like an undefined variable: the state is totally arbitrary. But we don't even know if the universe could be anything before the Big Bang.

The state is arbitrary to the Host system, just like the state of memory before it is initialized is arbitrary to us. In the guest (Embedded) system, it's unknowable. Arbitrary is a term Gods (creators of embedded systems) use to refer to things that are unknowable from within guest systems, and that they don't particularly care about from the vantage point of the host.

The only assumption Yegge is making is that the Big Bang wasn't self-started from a confluence of previous state, but "initialized", overwriting that state, which almost makes sense: black holes overwrite later state, rendering incoming material arbitrary to its later states (they're an "information sink"), so why couldn't the Big Bang overwrite earlier state, rendering outgoing material arbitrary from its previous state (an "information tap")?

By saying the universe has an arbitrary state before the Big Bang you're also assuming the universe has _a_ state before the Big Bang. But perhaps the universe had no state at all.

A variable is a piece of memory and always has _a_ value. The value may be arbitrary, the value may be unknowable, but we know at least one thing: that at any point in time a variable has exactly 1 value.

Most values for quantum variables have multiple values at any point in space-time.

That said, even if we assume that the universe had no state prior to the big bang, we can postulate that state to be arbitrary, because it may be 0, it may be 1, or it may be both 0 and 1 at the same time.

A game is not an embedded system, a video game console (or a router, or any special purpose computer) is!

I see what he means, but it shouldn't be call embedded system. What about "embedded world", "contained world", "digital ecosystem"? I don't really like those names, though, sound too much from a 90s 'hacker' movies. What names would you use?

Not nearly as good as part one, he's back to rambling again.

Wait until the end of the series. He says in the comments that these posts are supposed to bring a larger point.

Kind of off-topic, but it is funny how these posts remind me of History class in high-school. I had an amazing teacher: she would say that most of the topics would individually seem dull (things like Middle Ages, Renaissance, French Revolution, Russian Revolution, World War I and II), the whole thing would be a whole more interesting in the end, where we could make sense of the why of the succession of historical events. And she was absolutely right. When we got a chance to look at all of the pieces, I was able to think of History as a running system.

Getting back to the point: I'd say that individually both posts seem pretty inane. Even the first one was imho too silly. I do expect, however, that in the end Yegge will manage to make sense of it all.

I'm talking about the writing, not the subject matter. The first post was well written, not overly verbose, and well paced. The second was his usual verbal diarrhea.

I think for many students, history would be much more interesting if taught backwards, starting with a current event and working your way through history answering the "whys".

Part 1 was an excellent read. Part two was a less excellent read, but deeper. I think the analogy of our universe being like an "embedded system" is a good one. I don't doubt that there's much more to it than we can understand, much like the betta can't understand why he's stuck in a fishbowl, or the hypothetical Mario who can't understand the invisible wall.

On another note, does anyone else find the "big bang" theory incredibly unsatisfying? I have no reason to believe it's not true, but as Yegge points out it seems to bring about more questions than it answers.

Steve's story has reminded me of the other HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=399967

This "other side" is exactly what makes low-level languages so powerful.

To be honest, I did not understand part 2. There was a nice idea lurking out there somewhere around the subtitle "Reflections", but then he started generalizing and the post just ended.

I guess this is the point from which we should stop reading and start thinking.

I should probably learn more about meta-programming in order to understand what he meant.

Steve, I'm sorry, but the universe may not be a Von Neumann architecture!

part one was really great article. it made me watch bettas in youtube and appreciate them.

Whats the point of this article?

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