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Comment by mcculley | Hacker News Reader

Such exploits always remind me of the line from Stross' Accelerando about the ultimate end game for hacking: "running a timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of space-time itself, trying to break through to whatever's underneath"

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I am fairly sure I would not want to be within the lightcone of anyone making a attempt with chance doing anything. thats sounds like a good way to trigger vacuum decay and I would rather that universe not bluescreen.

I'm sure the sysadmins can restart us. They do have backups, right?

The computational substrate might just be a side-effect of something else happening in higher dimensions.

Even if you have backups, if you have never tested your backups, you don't have backups.

Not to worry, the VM we're on has only been running since last Tuesday.

If someone were to restore the universe from a faulty backup, would we even know there was anything missing? Assuming the consistency checks passed.

so that's where my socks have been going missing!

> Assuming the consistency checks passed.

You have a lot more faith in world-ops than I do. You think the have tests and checks?

Even if they restored us from a good backup, we probably wouldn't like the debugging session that follows.

The dark matter is just ghosts of println/log statements?

All of the sysadmins were fired, and along with IT, were replaced with devops SWEs who thought replication was good enough.

A blue screen would prove someone wrote shitty drivers so we'd know the universe is more like Windows than like OS X

The universe is actually more like Linux: we got it for free, but we have to figure out how it works on our own.

You call this free?

"Free" as in, "you arent paying the AWS bill" as opposed to "free speech" or "free beer"

To be fair, the universe offers as much free speech as is possible. You can say anything you think of. The universe ain't gonna stop ya.

Futurama already proved the universe is a simulation inside of a simulation written by some forgetful professor.

https://youtu.be/9gWgNetp8jE

Being involved in a vacuum decay event would not be bothersome in the slightest.

A very hard sci-fi novel about something like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schild%27s_Ladder (beware spoilers)

One of my favorites, and the only Greg Egan novel I've ever written fanfiction of. It looks dated compared to his newer writing, but the central conceit is something else.

> I would not want to be within the lightcone

If someone were to find an exploit to run arbitrary code using the computational ultrastructure of the universe, I wouldn't be too sure if in-game restrictions could keep us safe, though!

I would be less concerned with them succeeding and more with them failing and crashing the local shard

Let’s hope there are backups.

It’s ok, when it crashes it reboots and runs the same way from the beginning, so it would be like nothing even happened.

Ah yes, that old reliable determinism will save the day.

The only problem is that it also replays the part which caused the universe to crash.

So the universe is a Docker container?

The program doesn't notice when it crashes

that's just the first step for getting Doom to run

I'd like to point out this book is available as a free download from the authors blog:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

Well, we just discovered a sync error, so that might be a good edge case to start on:

https://www.science.org/content/article/quantum-paradox-poin...

That's not a sync error: it's just a demonstration that all collapse theories are inconsistent with some other assumptions we like to make. (There are many alternatives, the most famous of which is probably Hugh Everett III's relative state model, though none of them are completely elegant.) It hasn't just been discovered: it's been known since the 60s, and developed on-and-off since.

Of course, we haven't really tested this because we haven't attempted to put humans “in a superposition”. Physicalists assume that photons are adequate substitutes for humans, in the thought experiment, but something's wrong with our intuitions, so imo we should adopt some philosophical rigour about this whole thing.

Generally 'discovery' relates to experimental results and not theory.

For example, it seems like it would be more appropriate to say that the quantized nature of light was discovered in the early 20th century when confirmed by experiment and not that it was discovered in antiquity when Epicurus or Lucretius were talking about how light was made up of the smallest possible parts moving very quickly.

Also, given the parameters of the experiment in question, it arguably would be better described as "multi-layered Bell" than "Wigner's friend."

Everett's also fares well for the Frauchiger-Renner paradox too.

@skdh has some takes on this:

https://youtu.be/GerzZ6GDe-0?t=432

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wsjgtp9XZxo

Superderminism seems the odd choice to embrace here.

Also, given the Frauchiger-Renner paradox, the Occam's razor for fewest assumptions between the two would be contradictory outcomes being what needs to be embraced. Superderminism doesn't resolve Frauchiger-Renner.

Additionally, it seems really odd to me that it's at the exact point where a continuous system would be impossible to simulate (interactions with a presumably free agent) which is where things collapse to finite quantities, and yet as soon as the persistent information about such an interaction is erased it goes back to behaving continuously.

While superderminism could address the paradoxes, if superderminism existed the very behavior and quirkiness occurring seems superfluous viewed as a system design.

I believe that's what we call "physics"

Space-time? Why limit too space, meta-time is so much more interesting.

This wasn't a flippant remark either. Read Henri Bergson Time and Free Will for some thought provoking analysis.

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