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Comment by smegger001 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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?

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.

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.

The program doesn't notice when it crashes

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

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

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