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Comment by thom | Hacker News Reader

Were I to have a religion, it would be following the poor, stressed programmer tasked with creating (on some insane deadline) the universe we inhabit. To fix various performance bugs, he (I like to think he's called Colin) had to implement all sorts of hacky workarounds: lazy loading so some information is only calculated when it's observed, a maximum speed of information propagation to enable sharding, a system to insert new nodes in the linked list of spacetime, pushing galaxies apart and ensuring the complex timelines of intelligent species never have to snap together and run on a single instance. The work is constant and unrewarding, but I am thankful to Colin for his work, however mysterious it might seem to us.

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They say the deadline was quite literally 6 days. Some of the employees rage-quit and started their own business (they are doing fantastic but work conditions are reportedly hellish). As far as we know, they were still tweaking the physical constants until not long ago.

[BUG #3451249]

Unlimited resource drain caused by conscious blobs of particles (a.k.a humans) invoking recursive thought patterns over their own existence.

Workaround: ponder function can return a feeling of existential dread accompanied by increased weights for headache "sensation", causing blob to terminate process.

Estimate: M

Label: Backend

I reckon we're just a bug and Colin doesn't even know about our existence.

We might even just be a heisenbug in a bug reproducer.

Good thing too. Once Colin finds out, we'll be features that he has to document so that everyone else involved will know to use us or to bypass us.

Oh. I have a [PR#4519842] that implements a biased value system of labour which should reduce the time available for such patterns to occur, and limit the recursion to a brief few who can embed/summarise such artefacts in written record as a form of memoization.

Should I rebase on your workaround?

This comment reminded me, with a smile, of Scott Alexander's Unsong: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/unsong-available-in-paperba...

I too enjoyed Unsong, but I've never gone back and reread it because I found the chapter about The Broadcast so haunting.

It is a very well written, truly horrible chapter.

It doesn't have a huge bearing on the story, so can be skipped - and I think a lot of people probably should.

I didn't have much interest in reading this book until I read this comment.

To Amazon!

A very heavy recommendation from me for this.

Hn has no spoiler tags but one of the really big things to me is this https://gist.github.com/IanCal/d9667ae9c6ce15315191a36c6b3af...

I once saw the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle described as the result of the simulation creators using an 8 bit variable to store position and momentum combinations which were each themselves 8 bit values.

Call it professional bias, but I like to think about it as a big VM. If for some reason, things go awry, the (said) programmer will hit the pause button, then diligently go to the last valid snapshot, fix the bug and then get things going again. If this isn't desired, fixing the current mess is also an option.

The time required for fixing bugs isn't really an issue in this case, he can take as long as he likes.

VMs are too resource hungry.

No, the many-worlds interpretation shows that our universes are merely containers with copy-on-write behavior :)

Yeah, could be a giant LMDB, but that's implementation detail :)

I imagine there's some serious optimization involved to make it all fit in memory.

So the first lead coder was this Lucifer guy. Wrote the whole code for the physical universe layer in like days on Red Bull and maybe speed.

Unfortunately he was shady and found to be embezzling from the company so he was fired. Only then did the team actually look at that code. Absolutely incomprehensible mess, and it looked like he left back doors in so he and his pals could manifest weird stuff in the universe and fuck with the inhabitants.

Like get this... a human draws a five pointed star on the ground and says some weird stuff and it trips some code that looks like obfuscated malware that calls out to a dodgy server, but we can't remove it because the whole thing is a giant spaghetti monolith.

The Lord put together a proper team of angelic hosts to rewrite the whole thing using solid software engineering practices, but of course that was aeons ago. But when it finally does ship we will get a new heaven and a new Earth with a whole list of promised features.

Archangel Michael, who is in charge of the project, keeps moving the deadline back, but he says they're making progress. It's a microservice architecture.

And then there's the kid Jesus who promises us relief from all the skullduggery coded into our existence if we will only agree to subscribe to his Salvation as a Service (SaaS) subscription model.

> a maximum speed

It's even hackier than that. Everything moves at c always, if not through space then through time or some combination.

I love this comment but I don't understand the "linked list" reference. What aspect of physics/the universe is that referring to? Also why does the maximum speed enable sharding? Struggling with that part too haha.

It's so space can expand without increasing the Planck length

Ohh I think I understand. Thank you!

The standard model of cosmology is basically this but without making reference to something Prime Mover that caused it all to start, a Colin or God. The best science could do is show us that the universe just is, but even that wouldn't answer the question of why or where it came from even if the future and the past were infinitely long.

There will always be at least one turtle.

Ok, well then he went and screwed the pooch with non-locality.

This is the best of possible worlds. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

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