The Universe as a Minified Bundle | Hacker News Reader

The Universe as a Minified Bundle

andrewarrow.dev

25 pointscs199619 comments

Okay, let's start a new game where we try to guess the prompt that produced this text.

My guess would be "Write a 2000 words blog post based on the analogy between the difficulty of understanding the laws of physics and minified source code."

It's a cool analogy, no doubt, but reading the 2000 words of the article, I felt there was no substance or flesh around it. Okay there were some examples vaguely related to the analogy, and writing was smoothish, but what was the message in the end? What were the new ideas (beyond the analogy)?

Every time I read a LLM generated long form text I am reminded of the communication engineering: communication channels can only decrease the information content. For example, in the communication setup:

   Alice sends msg  --encode--> codeword --channel--> codeword' --decode--> msg' Bob received

The best we can hope for is that the message was transmitted faithfully, so msg' = msg, since the channel noise can only degrade the information content, specifically, the mutual information is a non-increasing function:

   I(msg;codeword') ≤ I(msg;codeword),

due to the monotonicity of information (a.k.a. data processing inequality).

Similarly, if Alice uses LLM to communicate to Bob, we have:

   Alice's idea --encode--> prompt --LLM--> generated text --decode--> idea'

Monotonicity of information tells us

   I(idea;generated text) ≤ I(idea;prompt).

So I really don't get it, why do people believe that adding LLM generation step could improve the communication of their ideas? It seems directly analogous to passing a message through an additional noisy channel. Just show us the prompt.

Agree the essay has a suspiciously Claude/ChatGPT-like organization. This comment perfectly articulates my distaste for AI-generated text with words I've been struggling to find.

sometimes i feel like the reason nobody ever posts their raw prompts (or at least extremely rarely) is because even though we all know our prompts are not golden geese, they still feel like that in our hands. i'd bet everybody's prompt writing style is like a fingerprint and we all assume they look like our own.

totally. https://dontpastetheai.com/ all we want is to stop seeing obvious copy paste. Give me plausible deniability that it's human authored even though we all know nothing is human authored any more.

plenty of content is human authored. the low status ones are not, in my argument.

You could keep pretending that everyones using AI to make low quality or "AI high quality" output but either way, when its obvious its human made, and many humans still write, it will be higher status.

edit: isn't it ironic that that link looks AI generated asking to not share AI generation output

^ this one is perfect! Sounds almost 100% human authored.

I wrote this 100% as my human, for my flesh body, Mannan.

The one who's thinking of and writing and inspecting these words is the awareness sitting in the human-flesh body for the human named Mannan. no ai at all. I do like how AI does 3 paragraphs though and 3 lines and like uses the number 3 - I had read a book on design and from other sources had been doing this before AI made it popular, but what do I do? stop doing the thing I like?

edit: I'm betting that multiples of 3 makes the comment look 1% ai generated lol

>>The coordinate grid is executable.

As it is in the Functional Universe

https://voxleone.github.io/FunctionalUniverse/

Some how I knew this was all a big FU.

If "Time is the accumulation of committed transitions along worldlines." then what does it mean that state transitions have a finite duration? this seems circular.

the content from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyJwr4O03Hc is what made me think of this:

"Dr. Donald Hoffman challenges the traditional scientific view that physical matter and spacetime are fundamental. Instead, he argues that consciousness is the foundational reality, while spacetime acts merely as a virtual reality headset that renders objects only when we perceive them. Hoffman introduces recursive trace logic, a mathematical framework suggesting that our physical existence is a low-probability, training wheels version of a much broader, disembodied conscious network."

I thoroughly enjoyed that. I plan to read it again later while stoned.

> Instead, he argues that consciousness is the foundational reality, while spacetime acts merely as a virtual reality headset that renders objects only when we perceive them

This is called Idealism. It's a very very old idea, and a totally unsatisfying one.

> https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/idealism/

It is, I think, wholly unconvincing. It is at root solipsistic, and far beyond any notion of proof or validation. Saying that "consciousness is the fundamental thing" (and ignoring that there are perfectly mundane explanations for consciousness) reduces all of physics to black-box metaphysics.

You still need to reason and predict physical phenomena. You could run the world on black-box metaphysics if black-box metaphysics has math that works better. How does Platonism help us there?

Not much. That's the problem. If the universe is a projection of the self, that's fine if true, that's valid if true. We want to believe in things that are true even if they violate our sense of phenomenological aesthetics. But if true, I'm gonna need you to manifest me a million dollars or interrogate your soul for the winning powerball numbers tomorrow. I'll wait.

Why did the people die of famine, papa?

They didn't ideate food, dear.

--- Very unsatisifying indeed. I've always thought of it as the human penchant for escapism. In casu trying to interpret the world so that we control it. Which brings us back to Freud and the human condition: We are born trying to control things around us, fighting against our limits and learning to live with them.

The reason I thought of the bundle metaphor is last week at work I was reading:

https://support.cognex.com/en/resources/external-documents/h...

and the:

https://support.cognex.com/en/resources/hardware-tech-manual...

but neither could tell me how to get an image from the camera to my golang program. And yet, the little sample webui program that the firmware serves up on port 8080 has a nice javascript webapp that can get an image from the camera. But, yes, no source. So AI read the bundle and boom, I now had a way to get the image.

This is a pretty essay, but it also reminds me of this meme[1]. To paraphrase:

    Wheel is invented...
    "bro, the whole world is a wheel!"
    Books are invented...
    "bro, the whole world is a book!"
    Gears are invented...
    "bro, the whole world is a mechanical clock!"
    Computers are invented...
    "bro, the whole world is a simulation!"

As a scientist, it definitely easy for our current context to seep into our perception of science. Maybe our perception of metascience too.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyMemes/comments/12clqm7/br...

Surprisingly low in the crackpot index TBH. But it looks like a remix of AdS/CFT, ER=EPR, and space-time as an emergent property of entanglement, so no new ideas.

This is worth the read.

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