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#2238·Dirk Meulenbelt, 4 days agoLet's fuck with your intuitions a little bit:
Say "stop" when it's no longer an explanation:
Didactic chapter in plain English with examples and edge cases, distilled into a concise technical note with formal definitions, invariants, and pseudocode.
Literate program interleaving prose and code, or a heavily commented Python implementation with docstrings and tests.
The same code stripped of comments/tests and then minified or obfuscated (e.g., Python one‑liner, obfuscated C), up through esolangs and formalisms (Brainfuck, untyped lambda calculus with Church numerals, SKI combinators).
Operational specifications with minimal labels (Turing machine tables), then hand‑written assembly without labels and self‑modifying tricks, down to raw machine code bytes/hex and binary blobs with unknown ISA or entry point.
The same bits recast as DNA base mapping with unknown block codec, unknown compression, encrypted archives indistinguishable from noise, arbitrary bitstrings for unspecified UTMs, or physical media (flux/RF) without modulation specs.
Haha not a programmer so understood maybe half of it, but I think I see what you mean. There'll always be inexplicit parts to every explanation. My concept of explanations is that there must be at least some explicit part for it to be called an explanation. That's why genes aren't explanations.