this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Explain any one particular complex topic using an analogy you found interesting or easily understandable.

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[–] luthis@lemmy.nz 21 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] rodbiren@midwest.social 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Computers are essentially rocks we have tricked into doing math.

[–] DiscoShrew@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 1 year ago

"Teaching sand how to think was a mistake".

[–] Guilvareux@feddit.uk 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] LongbottomLeaf@lemmy.nz 2 points 1 year ago

Might we say they are "shocked rocks"?

[–] hakase@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago

"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.

When I have to explain how email works, I walk them through the process of drafting a letter, placing a stamp on it, dropping, it in a mailbox, etc. The stamp and the address contain the "routing information if you will." I call the SMTP server, the postal service. I refer to the IMAP server as like the mailbox.

[–] Scooter411@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Like a balloon and something bad happening.

I found you Bender

[–] platypuspup@mander.xyz 4 points 1 year ago

I tell my students that going to a challenging class and not participating is like going to the gym and watching people work out. It is not only fairly useless to your goal of improving yourself, it creeps out everyone else and makes it feel like an unsafe place to try new things and make mistakes.

[–] ablackcatstail@lemmy.goblackcat.com 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's a broad topic as I use different analogies for different subject matter. What subject(s) are you thinking of?

[–] Datman2020@lemmy.fmhy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

I think my question was not clear. The very intention of the question is to tell **any **complex topic you've encountered that you've found a surprisingly understandable analogy of. there is no constraint of any subject.

[–] Hedup@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah, I always explain those concepts using analogies of how my ex wife used to do things. E.g. to explain quantum mechanics I usually tell them how my ex wife used to cheat on me and so on.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

The vocabulary of a language is like the fur of a beast: sure, it's highly visible, but what's inside (the grammar, or the beast itself) matters more.

[–] lastrogue@lemmy.einval.net 2 points 1 year ago

DNS is the phonebook of the internet and other networks.

[–] HappyMeatbag 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Freight trains and stopping climate change.

It can take a large freight train a mile to come to a stop after the engineer hits the brakes. Similarly, any pollution reductions we make now (reducing CO2 emissions, etc.) won’t be “felt” right away by the global climate.

That’s why we can’t wait until the ocean is flooding Miami before we take drastic action to mitigate damage to the environment. We need to do things now, because by the time the situation becomes dire, it’ll be too late - just like the engineer of the freight train can’t wait until he’s at the station before applying the brakes.

[–] Datman2020@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

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

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