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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • It’s still a bad idea. If they have some really nasty malware installed it could rootkit your device, and vice versa - and you never really know. Just build a small portable computer (eg. Raspberry pi, NUC, etc) and use their KB/mouse/display.

    Other peeps are saying just connect to a remote desktop you have hosted somewhere using your friend’s PC - don’t do that, you can’t trust their software/hardware.








  • I agree, the delivery services are definitely price gouging to a degree. It sucks that we’re charged for delivery, service fees AND the item prices are inflated by around 20% too. Thing is, I think there’s a bunch of reasons that TonyDelivers will eventually become as bad as the current market leaders. As his company grows, takes on employees, builds infrastructure, overheads increase, management grows - they’ll fall into the same “traps”/profit seeking the other delivery companies have fallen into.



    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.

    I agree that most people don’t really need to worry about our universe being a simulation or not, but 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. It feels like you’re saying we don’t need to investigate this so why bother?

    I sometimes joke that some entity created our universe to find the solution to the Travelling Salesman Problem and if we ever figure it out they’ll switch our universe off. I’d like our universe to keep going a little bit longer so it would be nice to know if it’s simulated.