26 ms·

When understanding a new "magic", there's this beautiful moment when you grok it, and the abstraction poofs away. It's when you take apart a mechanical clock a

When understanding a new "magic", there's this beautiful moment when you grok it, and the abstraction poofs away. It's when you take apart a mechanical clock and keep looking for the time-keeping part, until you figure out that there isn't a time-keeping part in there, it's just gears and a spring. It's when you learn about integrated circuits and full-adders, and keep trying to understand how a bunch of transistors can do Mathematics, until you figure out that there isn't a mathematics-doing part in there, it's just circuits and wires, arranged in a way that makes the voltages come out right. It's when your understanding of the top-down structure snaps together with the bottom-up mechanics of the building blocks. There's no space left for the ghost in the machine to haunt, and you go "Oh. huh". I live for that moment.

Lerc 2y ago
That's the difference between technology magic and illusionist magic, When you see how the trick is done with illusions it's always a bit of a letdown because the answer is usually prosaic, the 'magic' vanishes and it becomes a trick. When you understand how a piece of technology works you get that beautiful moment.
- tialaramex 2y ago
  I've never got that. I feel the same way in either case, if your trick was easy everybody would do it. Sleight of hand tricks for example, if you're good they're completely seamless, I could never hope to reproduce and yet I know exactly how it's done. Take that Penn & Teller trick where the live audience is just lying - that's a bit lazy, we're not supposed to have some great admiration for this trick they're just showing you it's an option to just have the live audience lie to the recorded audience and that "works". Whereas their transparent version of cups and balls is the opposite, you must be a sleight of hand master or this won't look like anything.
  - gspencley 2y ago
    My wife and I are part time magicians. In my experience, people who share your mindset become magicians. At the risk of just repeating exactly what the person you're replying to wrote: The reason that non-magicians often feel let down when they find out how a trick is executed, is that it often feels like an insult to their intelligence. Magic toys with and exploits your assumptions. As soon as you find out that those assumptions were incorrect, and that you were just lied to by a prop (for example), your experience and perception of that illusion goes from "OMG" to "oh, that's all?" What we want the methods to be is some grandiose Ocean's 11 like "heist" with tons of sneaky maneuvers and difficult sleight of hand ... but MOST magic tricks, including the ones that Penn & Teller fool you with (not the ones where they tip the method) are not that. Penn & Teller have said themselves that (paraphrasing): "if the method is more interesting than the trick, the trick is not very good ... and that's when we show you the method. But the tricks we actually want to fool you with are just a bit of gaffer tape and a lie." The fact that you say that you appreciate magic tricks that involve a lot of sleight of hand, or require technical mastery, kind of supports what we're saying. Most magic tricks aren't that. To understand why, look at it from the point of view of a professional magician trying to pay the bills. I can do card manipulation. I have a card manipulation act that I perform. It is by far the most technically challenging routine that I do and it has literally taken me years to get to the point where I can execute it and perform it. It's closer to juggling than it is to what most magic is (though it's still magic because I'm producing playing cards and fans of playing cards at my fingertips in short sleeves). Now imagine that the majority of my act was that type of trick. I have bills to pay. I have crowds to entertain TODAY... and if I make just one mistake in a performance, the trick falls flat. Penn & Teller tip cups & balls because the methods employed in that trick are genuinely entertaining to watch. And the "let's have the audience lie"... I'm pretty sure you're referencing a segment in their 1990 TV special "Don't Try This at Home" where they had a large semi trailer truck run over Teller while surrounded by an audience who could see how it was done, which they tipped at the end. I wouldn't call that "lazy", I would call that using a medium to convey a message. Magic doesn't work on television. You need to see it in person to really appreciate that it wasn't done with stooges/actors and camera tricks. That's a thesis that they have carried with them over the years. No one would do that "trick" in any other venue than in a television special. You can't get a big truck up on stage... and if you're doing "instant stooge" type of work, where people on stage from the audience are in on it ... at the risk of getting philosophical, they didn't even experience a magic trick. So it's not so much that the method was "lazy" ... it's that it was completely ineffective, and thus not even a magic trick for a certain group of people. Which was the entire point of the segment.
quesera 2y ago
I was certain that you were going to conclude with a paragraph about LLMs.
- tehmillhouse 2y ago
  I was this close to concluding with a paragraph about Buddhism and the Self. Which is basically the same thing, but from the first-person perspective.
Joker_vD 2y ago
I've recently done reading "Digital Design and Computer Architecture" by Harris and Harris, and the part about microarchitecture had this exact impression on me: "oh, so we just demux the opcode, enable/disable the necessary signals/paths and it all... just works out in the end, if the clock is fine. Huh. Well, in retrospect it's kinda obvious."
asimovfan 2y ago
“The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.” ― Isaac Asimov
- dvektor 2y ago
  Keeping true to your username :) Man I'm not going to lie tho... I just could not make it through the foundation series
  - AndyKelley 2y ago
    I liked them. But I was pretty young when I read them, so pretty much any book had new insights and wisdom to offer me.
  - ghssds 2y ago
    While the Foundation series is what's best known nowadays, the Suzan Calvin and Elijah Bailay stuff, and more generally everything set before the Galactic Empire even exists in Asimov's fictional timeline is where Asimov is at his best.
hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
I went through an EE degree instead of a CS degree in undergrad specifically so I could peel back this magic and really understand what's going on, to some detail, down to the electromagnetism level. It is indeed a very freeing feeling to be resting atop so many layers of abstractions, with the understanding that if you ever had to, you could go down to any one of them and kind of feel your way around. I think for me the biggest magic-killing moment was when I realized that CPU clock cycles, timing trees, etc. were all just ways for us to shoehorn a fundamentally analog thing (how much voltage is in area X?) to a digital thing (does area X have enough voltage? yes? OK, call it a 1 and let's move on already!). Somehow to me that feels like the ultimate "leaky" abstraction, although of course decades and trillions of dollars have gone into making it ever more watertight for 99.99-several-more-9s% of the time. At least to the end user. Your mileage may vary if you're a TSMC researcher or something, of course.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  I work with FPGAs and embedded systems occasionally, and you have no idea how amazingly watertight the phone/desktop/server CPU abstraction is in comparison to what you get the moment you do something slightly weird. A combination of the chips, the firmware, and the OS does so much work to give you the abstraction of "machine runs code and it just works."
  - hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
    There's a paper from the 1990s of someone trying to do neural net-type things to construct an FPGA, and it gets really out there, like 'this gate isn't actually connected to anything but if we change anything about it the laws of electromagnetism cause the whole thing to stop working' weird. FPGAs are fascinating little dudes, esp in domains like HFT where their speed directly translates into dollars, but I totally believe you here.
    - altermark 2y ago
      https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
AnimalMuppet 2y ago
> It's when you take apart a mechanical clock and keep looking for the time-keeping part, until you figure out that there isn't a time-keeping part in there, it's just gears and a spring. The time-keeping part is arranging gears and a spring in a way that will, in fact, keep time. > It's when you learn about integrated circuits and full-adders, and keep trying to understand how a bunch of transistors can do Mathematics, until you figure out that there isn't a mathematics-doing part in there, it's just circuits and wires, arranged in a way that makes the voltages come out right. The mathematics-doing part in there is the arrangement of circuits and wires in ways that can actually do arithmetical operations on voltages. It's not magic. But an adder, while never more than a bunch of circuits and wires, is still a mathematics-doing part.
- harperlee 2y ago
  Well to be pedantic: the time-keeping part isn’t the gears but a pendulum. The spring gives energy to the pendulum, but that can’t effect more than in its amplitude: the period of a given pendulum is constant. Later springs demultiply the tick tack of the pendulum into desired units. The heart of the clock is that choke on energy though a period. Thats also why the famous phrase: clocks dont measure time but other clocks. (Please dont mind the grammar: writing on mobile)
  - wlesieutre 2y ago
    Or a balance wheel

Lerc 2y ago

That's the difference between technology magic and illusionist magic, When you see how the trick is done with illusions it's always a bit of a letdown because the answer is usually prosaic, the 'magic' vanishes and it becomes a trick. When you understand how a piece of technology works you get that beautiful moment.

tialaramex 2y ago
I've never got that. I feel the same way in either case, if your trick was easy everybody would do it. Sleight of hand tricks for example, if you're good they're completely seamless, I could never hope to reproduce and yet I know exactly how it's done. Take that Penn & Teller trick where the live audience is just lying - that's a bit lazy, we're not supposed to have some great admiration for this trick they're just showing you it's an option to just have the live audience lie to the recorded audience and that "works". Whereas their transparent version of cups and balls is the opposite, you must be a sleight of hand master or this won't look like anything.
- gspencley 2y ago
  My wife and I are part time magicians. In my experience, people who share your mindset become magicians. At the risk of just repeating exactly what the person you're replying to wrote: The reason that non-magicians often feel let down when they find out how a trick is executed, is that it often feels like an insult to their intelligence. Magic toys with and exploits your assumptions. As soon as you find out that those assumptions were incorrect, and that you were just lied to by a prop (for example), your experience and perception of that illusion goes from "OMG" to "oh, that's all?" What we want the methods to be is some grandiose Ocean's 11 like "heist" with tons of sneaky maneuvers and difficult sleight of hand ... but MOST magic tricks, including the ones that Penn & Teller fool you with (not the ones where they tip the method) are not that. Penn & Teller have said themselves that (paraphrasing): "if the method is more interesting than the trick, the trick is not very good ... and that's when we show you the method. But the tricks we actually want to fool you with are just a bit of gaffer tape and a lie." The fact that you say that you appreciate magic tricks that involve a lot of sleight of hand, or require technical mastery, kind of supports what we're saying. Most magic tricks aren't that. To understand why, look at it from the point of view of a professional magician trying to pay the bills. I can do card manipulation. I have a card manipulation act that I perform. It is by far the most technically challenging routine that I do and it has literally taken me years to get to the point where I can execute it and perform it. It's closer to juggling than it is to what most magic is (though it's still magic because I'm producing playing cards and fans of playing cards at my fingertips in short sleeves). Now imagine that the majority of my act was that type of trick. I have bills to pay. I have crowds to entertain TODAY... and if I make just one mistake in a performance, the trick falls flat. Penn & Teller tip cups & balls because the methods employed in that trick are genuinely entertaining to watch. And the "let's have the audience lie"... I'm pretty sure you're referencing a segment in their 1990 TV special "Don't Try This at Home" where they had a large semi trailer truck run over Teller while surrounded by an audience who could see how it was done, which they tipped at the end. I wouldn't call that "lazy", I would call that using a medium to convey a message. Magic doesn't work on television. You need to see it in person to really appreciate that it wasn't done with stooges/actors and camera tricks. That's a thesis that they have carried with them over the years. No one would do that "trick" in any other venue than in a television special. You can't get a big truck up on stage... and if you're doing "instant stooge" type of work, where people on stage from the audience are in on it ... at the risk of getting philosophical, they didn't even experience a magic trick. So it's not so much that the method was "lazy" ... it's that it was completely ineffective, and thus not even a magic trick for a certain group of people. Which was the entire point of the segment.

quesera 2y ago

I was certain that you were going to conclude with a paragraph about LLMs.

tehmillhouse 2y ago
I was this close to concluding with a paragraph about Buddhism and the Self. Which is basically the same thing, but from the first-person perspective.

Joker_vD 2y ago

I've recently done reading "Digital Design and Computer Architecture" by Harris and Harris, and the part about microarchitecture had this exact impression on me: "oh, so we just demux the opcode, enable/disable the necessary signals/paths and it all... just works out in the end, if the clock is fine. Huh. Well, in retrospect it's kinda obvious."

asimovfan 2y ago

“The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.” ― Isaac Asimov

dvektor 2y ago
Keeping true to your username :) Man I'm not going to lie tho... I just could not make it through the foundation series
- AndyKelley 2y ago
  I liked them. But I was pretty young when I read them, so pretty much any book had new insights and wisdom to offer me.
- ghssds 2y ago
  While the Foundation series is what's best known nowadays, the Suzan Calvin and Elijah Bailay stuff, and more generally everything set before the Galactic Empire even exists in Asimov's fictional timeline is where Asimov is at his best.

hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago

I went through an EE degree instead of a CS degree in undergrad specifically so I could peel back this magic and really understand what's going on, to some detail, down to the electromagnetism level. It is indeed a very freeing feeling to be resting atop so many layers of abstractions, with the understanding that if you ever had to, you could go down to any one of them and kind of feel your way around. I think for me the biggest magic-killing moment was when I realized that CPU clock cycles, timing trees, etc. were all just ways for us to shoehorn a fundamentally analog thing (how much voltage is in area X?) to a digital thing (does area X have enough voltage? yes? OK, call it a 1 and let's move on already!). Somehow to me that feels like the ultimate "leaky" abstraction, although of course decades and trillions of dollars have gone into making it ever more watertight for 99.99-several-more-9s% of the time. At least to the end user. Your mileage may vary if you're a TSMC researcher or something, of course.

pclmulqdq 2y ago
I work with FPGAs and embedded systems occasionally, and you have no idea how amazingly watertight the phone/desktop/server CPU abstraction is in comparison to what you get the moment you do something slightly weird. A combination of the chips, the firmware, and the OS does so much work to give you the abstraction of "machine runs code and it just works."
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
  There's a paper from the 1990s of someone trying to do neural net-type things to construct an FPGA, and it gets really out there, like 'this gate isn't actually connected to anything but if we change anything about it the laws of electromagnetism cause the whole thing to stop working' weird. FPGAs are fascinating little dudes, esp in domains like HFT where their speed directly translates into dollars, but I totally believe you here.
  - altermark 2y ago
    https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

AnimalMuppet 2y ago

> It's when you take apart a mechanical clock and keep looking for the time-keeping part, until you figure out that there isn't a time-keeping part in there, it's just gears and a spring. The time-keeping part is arranging gears and a spring in a way that will, in fact, keep time. > It's when you learn about integrated circuits and full-adders, and keep trying to understand how a bunch of transistors can do Mathematics, until you figure out that there isn't a mathematics-doing part in there, it's just circuits and wires, arranged in a way that makes the voltages come out right. The mathematics-doing part in there is the arrangement of circuits and wires in ways that can actually do arithmetical operations on voltages. It's not magic. But an adder, while never more than a bunch of circuits and wires, is still a mathematics-doing part.

harperlee 2y ago
Well to be pedantic: the time-keeping part isn’t the gears but a pendulum. The spring gives energy to the pendulum, but that can’t effect more than in its amplitude: the period of a given pendulum is constant. Later springs demultiply the tick tack of the pendulum into desired units. The heart of the clock is that choke on energy though a period. Thats also why the famous phrase: clocks dont measure time but other clocks. (Please dont mind the grammar: writing on mobile)
- wlesieutre 2y ago
  Or a balance wheel