My understanding is that all of the codecs we are discussing are deterministic. If you have evidence to the contrary I’d love to see it.

You can boot from USB with UEFI, that’s not a showstopper. Unless I’m missing something?

After a brief search I can’t find any mention of any punishment for Sisyphus if he stopped pushing the boulder up the hill. That said, this is all taking place in Tartarus so there probably isn’t much else to do and endlessly push a boulder up hill might be the better option lol. I can relate.

Are you negging him cos you want him to be your man baby?

And my axe!

Plato’s “the cave” thought experiment (circa 400 BC) is basically a suggestion of simulation. Modern science agrees - human perception of reality is limited and effectively a simulation. You don’t need modern digital technology to imagine living in a simulation.

I laughed at the word ‘fastness’, but then realised it’s a lot safer than offering ‘speed’ on the internet lol

Yeah that caught my eye too, seems odd. Most compression/encoding schemes benefit from a large dictionary but I don’t think it would be constrained by the sometimes lesser total RAM on a GPU than the main system - in most cases that would make the dictionary larger than the video file. I’m curious.

Exactly, most services can be tied into a central authentication system/SSO and can automatically be disabled upon disabling an SSO user.

I totally agree! Although I think modern medication would be more useful than gold - pure quantities of modern meds weigh next to nothing. If you save enough lives of the rulers and their families they’ll give you all the wealth and resources you need. They’ll consider stealing the medication from you but they won’t know which medications should be used for which illnesses, until they torture you I guess. I can’t really think of a way of making sure they “be nice” rather than forcing you to give them everything you have. They weren’t afraid of doing the unspeakable in pursuit of power back then.

1. The observer effect at the quantum level does feel like a CPU optimisation - the location of a particle is a probability field until measured. 1.1 In my experience these ‘optimisations’ recur at different levels - eg. economics, gravity, mass distribution, weather, even politics. Generalised models perform very well until you take local measurements - but they’re less scientifically provable.
2. Dark matter/energy feels like a hack rather than a waste of CPU resources - it’s a vague effect unmeasureable in the baryonic reality we inhabit. In the meantime it alters the structure of solar systems, galaxies and the observable universe itself and it’s not clear how.
3. Occum’s Razor actually works against your argument. If it’s possible for base reality to contain simulated universes then there is already an [almost?] infinite probability our universe is simulated, as base reality could potentially hold [almost?] infinite simulations. If entities within those simulations can also create their own simulations then the chance of our reality being base reality becomes vanishingly small.

Your statement “You can view our universe as a computer program, you can also view it as the universe.” concerns me. This is true until you start trying to analyse how the universe works, but then all kinds of weird things crop up.

Yeah they would have been releasing chaff and flares, you just can’t see the chaff in the dark

Specifically, fuck the Russian government and Putin in particular - who are already fucking Russia up more than any one else could.