Broadly speaking, I’d say simulation theory is pretty much more akin to religion than science, since it’s not really testable. We can draw analogies based on what we see in our own works, but ultimately it’s not really evidence based, just ‘hey, it’s funny that things look like simulation artifacts…’

There’s a couple of ways one may consider it distinct from a typical theology:

• Generally theology fixates on a “divine” being or beings as superior entities that we may appeal to or somehow guess what they want of us and be rewarded for guessing correctly. Simulation theory would have the higher order beings likely being less elevated in status.
• One could consider the possibility as shaping our behavior to the extent we come anywhere close to making a lower order universe. Theology doesn’t generally present the possibility that we could serve that role relative to another.

But that sounds like disproving a scenario no one claimed to be the case: that everything we perceive is as substantial as we think it is and can be simulated at full scale in real time by our own universe.

Part of the whole reason people think of simulation theory as worth bothering to contemplate is because they find quantum physics and relativity to be unsatisyingly “weird”. They like to think of how things break down at relativistic velocities and quantum scale as the sorts of ways a simulation would be limited if we tried, so they like to imagine a higher order universe that doesn’t have those pesky “weird” behaviors and we are only stuck with those due to simulation limits within this hypothetical higher order universe.

Nothing about it is practical, but a lot of these science themed “why” exercises aren’t themselves practical or sciency.

So first is to accept this is more philosophy/religious sort of discussion rather than science, because it’s not falsifiable.

One thing is that we don’t need to presume infinite recursion, just accept that there can be some recursion. Just like how a SNES game could run on a SNES emulator running inside qemu running on a computer of a different architecture. Each step limits the next and maybe you couldn’t have anything credible at the end of some chain, but the chain can nonetheless exist.

If U0 existed, U1 has no way of knowing the nature of U0. U1 has no way of knowing ‘absolute complexity’, knowing how long of a time is actually ‘long’, or how long time passes in U0 compared to U1. We see it already in our simulations, a hypothetical self-aware game engine would have some interesting concepts about reality, and hope they aren’t in a Bethesda game. Presuming they could have an accurate measurement of their world, they could conclude the observed triangles were the smallest particles. They would be unable to even know that everything they couldn’t perceive is not actually there, since when they go to observe it is made on demand. They’d have a set of physics based on the game engine, which superficially looks like ours, but we know they are simplifications with side effects. If you clip a chair just right in a corner of the room, it can jump out through the seemingly solid walls. For us that would be mostly ridiculous (quantum stuff gets weird…), but for them they’d just accept it as a weird quirk of physics (like we accept quantum stuff and time getting all weird based on relative velocity).

We don’t know that all this history took place, or even our own memories. Almost all games have participants act based on some history and claimed memories, even though you know the scenario has only been playing out in any modeled way for minutes. The environment and all participants had lore and memories pre-loaded.

Similarly, we don’t know all this fancy physics is substantial or merely superficial “special effects”. Some sci-fi game in-universe might marvel at the impossibly complicated physics of their interstellar travel but we would know it’s just hand waving around some pretty special effects.

This is why it’s kind of pointless to consider this concept as a ‘hard science’ and disproving it is just a pointless exercise since you can always undermine such an argument by saying the results were just as the simulation made them to be.

Yeah, this is one of those terrible ideas even if you thought that, in theory, you were onboard with ‘anti-DEI’.

Out of the blue the wrong person gets randomly pissed at you and invokes the highly subjective clause and suddenly you owe them $1.5M…

With many bearaucracies there’s plenty of practically valueless work going on.

Because some executive wants to brag about having over a hundred people under them. Because some proceas requires a sort of document be created that hasn’t been used in decades but no one has the time to validate what does or does not matter anymore. Because of a lot of little nonsense reasons where the path of least resistance is to keep plugging away. Because if you are 99 percent sure something is a waste of time and you optimize it, there’s a 1% chance you’ll catch hell for a mistake and almost no chance you get great recognition for the efficiency boost if it pans out.

Guess it’s a matter of degree, that was the sort of stuff I was alluding to in the first part, that you have all this convoluted instrumentation that you can dig into, and as you say perhaps even more maddening because at some times it’s needlessly over complicating something simple, and then at just the wrong time it tries to simplify something and ends up sealing off just the flexibility you might need.

The things is you really can’t be that good with windows.

Sure you can get good with registry and group policy and other stuff that is needlessly complicated to do relatively simple stuff. You can know your way around WMI and .net and powershell…

But at some point, the software actively hides the specifics of what is wrong. You can’t crack open something to see why it’s showing some ambigious hexadecimal code or a plain screen. You can’t add tracing to step through their code to see what unexpected condition they hit that they didn’t prepare to handle. On Linux you are likely to be able to plainly see a stack trace, download the source code, maybe trace it, modify the source code.

Windows is like welding the hood shut and wondering why mechanics have a hard time with the car.

Yes. Musk’s net worth including his stock is a bit shy of 500 billion, and Tesla market cap is about 1500 billion. His net worth includes all his assets that he could possibly leverage.

Actually he doesn’t. Most of his ‘wealth’ is Tesla shares already. Even if he could toss everything he has just toward controlling more of Tesla, and if the shareholders accepted it at current market value, he’d only have a third of the company.

Tesla is crazy over valued for a company that has only been able to be a car company that is in 14th place, yet assessed as being more valuable than all the 13 more successful car companies combined…

Yeah, the PayPal one is so spot on.

He had a company that I guess was like CitySearch that no one ever heard of and managed to win a lottery of selling it to Compaq who thought they had to do something in this whole dotcom thing.

Then he founded ‘x.com’, a failure of an online bank while Paypal took off. Then, somehow, in the wake of being merged in he talked the company into letting him be in charge, despite his company pretty much the relative failure in that relationship, and he nearly tanked it before being kicked out. Despite this for a long time he got credit as ‘the paypal guy’, despite his only contribution being almost tanking it after losing to it initiallly in the market. Again, won the lottery because he had such a share and eBay tossed so much money at it.

He’s supremely successful at taking credit from others when things work out.

I’d research Chilipad harder if I were in the market again. At very cursory glance it seems like less of an uphill battle. I could be wrong and they could be douchey, or their engineering somehow sucks, but maybe they are good too.

FreeSleep is what I would do if they try to force the subscription on me, but I probably wouldn’t buy the product hoping that I can change their firmware against their will. I don’t want to give money to a vendor I would just be antagonistic with.

If they announced they formally endorsed use of FreeSleep as an ‘advanced alternative’, ok, but that isn’t going to happen.

This is spot on. Note these asshats eventually caved and added local controls when customers kept saying how horrible it was to use the phone. The local controls are explicitly disabled unless the cloud service has recently approved the bed to allow the local controls to work. You have to use the phone to enable the local controls. The phone can’t do anything locally except tell it how to connect to wifi. If you don’t have the subscription or grandfathered in before the subscription, the local controls do nothing.

Well, unless you jailbreak your cover with FreeSleep.

So in my case (I didn’t want to, but not my choice, but at least it was cheap and without subscription at the time), it was about the water cooling/warming. It’s really nice and essentially inaudible.

I think Chilipad is a brand that does it without the online bullshit, though I didn’t get to try that.

None of this should ever require an internet connection, and it’s abundantly clear that’s an anti-consumer hostile forced behavior Eight Sleep did.

The designers were thinking “we want to force users to a monthly subscription”.

So against my preference, we bought one of these. Years ago and it wasn’t so crazy expensive and the basic ‘cloud’ functionality was free. Over the course of the years of the initially decent warranty, the covers sprang leaks and so we got free upgrades carrying us all the way to a generation of the product where they replaced the crappy molded leak prone water mat with decent tubes that seem to be more resilient, all without needing to get in the subscription. As a consequence, I know about their evolution.

From the onset, they were hammered with “phone over the internet control is bogus, add a remote or buttons on the base or something”, and they kept responding with vague “we are working a solution”. Well, they ultimately did, they added earbud-style 'tap N number of times on the side to adjust things or dismiss alarms". Ok, super awkward and still no buttons, but at least it has local controls, right? Well, I go to try it and it just gives the long-buzz error indication. Turns out the app has to be used to activate the bed or schedule a start time before the local controls will let you control it. When they explicitly added a local control loop, they blocked it from working unless the cloud service said it was ok.

This is not “crappy developer stupidly doesn’t know how to make local control work”. This is “developer going out of their way to screw over a customer to force them to keep paying for every single month they want the product to keep working”.

A shame, aversion to buttons aside, the hardware design is really quite good, quiet and effective and seemingly more leak resistant.

Problem is that as a provider, if you are sure you are confident you’ll get hit by an outage at some point anyway, it’s actually better for you if a bunch of other big names are brought down at the same time.

Instead of “that one service sucked”, the story is “aws sucked”. If it happens too much people will more widely say “ok they suck for using aws”, but for now the transparency gets them treated more like being affected by an unavoidable external condition.

I’m grateful a lot of sites I like didn’t use aws, but I’m not exactly a common demographic and even I won’t know if she is the services even move or not until another such outage.

Still based on taxes, they know how to make it work.

The basic logistics or the least of the open questions.

If every one gets 2k a month, how do prices react? Social security participants are only a subset of participants in the economy.

If everyone’s compensation is equal, guaranteed, and sufficient assuming prices didn’t just screw up, can you still get people doing work like sanitation? Social security is from a mindset that no productive prior is no longer required. It pays more to someone that made 100k a year than someone that made 50k a year, so your get proportional to what you put in.

It’s less a matter of needing years under its belt and more about paying out an actual basic income to everyone regardless of means testing or work requirements and without an expected end date for participants. We’ve just not seen it done at all.

Alaska is too small a payout. No one could have even basic needs meet there. It faiils the criteria for “basic”.

To receive social security, you can’t earn too much money. You generally have to choose either receive benefits or work. Also your payout depends on your specific pay in. You have to get paid during your younger years to “earn” your social security.

You can’t just do a "study’ of UBI. Every single study attempt I’ve seen looks like: -They have funding from something or another, they do not model the taxation half at all -They end up means testing because they can’t model taxation, so they fixate on those in need exclusively. -They tend to last maybe a year or two. The beneficiaries know this is a limited term benefit and need to make the most of it. -They do not target everyone, so the local market won’t even notice the difference in base earning power. You still have lots of poor people excluded from the study. -They did not just force people into the program, participants had to actively seek out participation.

What the experiments have repeatedly proven is that welfare can work to give motivated poor people a needed reprieve to get their feet on solid ground, which we already knew. We haven’t had an actual “study” of real UBI, just studies on welfare that they say is about UBI. About the only difference from actual welfare programs is that the participants are not audited to try to make sure the benefit shuts off the second they get a job. Which may be a good indicator at least that auditing the benefits could stand to be more lax.

UBI might work, but to date we haven’t actually tried it in any useful way. We have universal income in some places, but it’s generally well short of even basic.

We have voluntary programs, they are called charities and they gave so little participation that they have to pick and choose their battles and ensure they spend money on those that care.

Also hard to know if the charity is efficient, competent, and free of corruption.

UBI needs universal participations on contributor and recipient to maybe work. Hard to say even then since the nature of it resists meaningful experiments, and the few actual programs tend to fall well short of even “basic” income.