Explain any one particular complex topic using an analogy you found interesting or easily understandable.

53 points

When people ask me about email, I like to tell them it’s just like using the Fediverse.

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5 points

Truly great analogy

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37 points

IPs and Ports are like street address and room number.

LLMs ie chatGPT are like a Galton Board. Your sentence is the bucket of balls at the top, each ball is a word or ‘token’, and the LLM is the arrangement of pegs on the board. Training the model is like moving the pegs around until the pattern you get at the bottom is desirable.

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34 points

Computers are essentially rocks we have tricked into doing math.

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9 points
*

Don’t oversimplify though, remember you need to put lightning into it first!

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3 points

Might we say they are “shocked rocks”?

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8 points

“Teaching sand how to think was a mistake”.

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2 points

Sand, light, lightning, and metal

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21 points

“Framerules” in Super Mario Bros. speedrunning on NES is probably the most memed analogy for a (very slightly) more complicated concept I know of.

The game can only send you to a new level every 21 frames (about .3 seconds), so there are tons of levels where timesaves don’t lead to any benefit, because you have to save a full .3 seconds in order to see any benefit.

In the community, this has been explained with the same analogy so many times that “Imagine there’s a bus” has become a well-known meme.

So, imagine there’s a bus that only leaves the station every .3 seconds (21 frames). Because the bus only leaves at the times on its schedule, arriving early for the bus doesn’t get you to your destination any faster, because you still have to wait for the time the bus will leave. For this reason, any new time saves in SMB1 must reach a new “framerule” (get there early enough to catch the previous bus) for there to be any real timesave.

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2 points

Thanks darbian.

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18 points

“ActivityPub is like using email pretty much.”

That’s my favorite analogy to use when I explain what the fediverse is sometimes.

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