6 ms·
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 computation
by mcculley 2y ago
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"
- smegger001 2y agoI 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.
- tux3 2y agoI'm sure the sysadmins can restart us. They do have backups, right?
- mcculley 2y agoThe computational substrate might just be a side-effect of something else happening in higher dimensions.
- Drakim 2y agoEven if you have backups, if you have never tested your backups, you don't have backups.
- skeaker 2y agoNot to worry, the VM we're on has only been running since last Tuesday.
- kevindamm 2y agoIf someone were to restore the universe from a faulty backup, would we even know there was anything missing? Assuming the consistency checks passed.
- fragmede 2y agoso that's where my socks have been going missing!
- IIsi50MHz 2y agoAnd here I was, attributing it to intermittently tangent universes: at points where they touch, random things can cross over.
- Drakim 2y ago> Assuming the consistency checks passed. You have a lot more faith in world-ops than I do. You think the have tests and checks?
- TeMPOraL 2y agoEven if they restored us from a good backup, we probably wouldn't like the debugging session that follows.
- kevindamm 2y agoThe dark matter is just ghosts of println/log statements?
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoAll of the sysadmins were fired, and along with IT, were replaced with devops SWEs who thought replication was good enough.
- vasco 2y agoA blue screen would prove someone wrote shitty drivers so we'd know the universe is more like Windows than like OS X
- jl6 2y agoThe universe is actually more like Linux: we got it for free, but we have to figure out how it works on our own.
- tambourine_man 2y agoYou call this free?
- smegger001 2y ago"Free" as in, "you arent paying the AWS bill" as opposed to "free speech" or "free beer"
- Aerroon 2y agoTo 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.
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoFuturama already proved the universe is a simulation inside of a simulation written by some forgetful professor. https://youtu.be/9gWgNetp8jE https://youtu.be/9gWgNetp8jE
- Diederich 2y agoBeing involved in a vacuum decay event would not be bothersome in the slightest.
- alecco 2y agoA very hard sci-fi novel about something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schild%27s_Ladder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schild%27s_Ladder (beware spoilers)
- Filligree 2y agoOne 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.
- lampiaio 2y ago> 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!
- smegger001 2y agoI would be less concerned with them succeeding and more with them failing and crashing the local shard
- volemo 2y agoLet’s hope there are backups.
- bemmu 2y agoIt’s ok, when it crashes it reboots and runs the same way from the beginning, so it would be like nothing even happened.
- ZaoLahma 2y agoAh yes, that old reliable determinism will save the day.
- bemmu 2y agoThe only problem is that it also replays the part which caused the universe to crash.
- a_vanderbilt 2y agoSo the universe is a Docker container?
- skrebbel 2y agoThe program doesn't notice when it crashes
- Kipters 2y agothat's just the first step for getting Doom to run
- IIAOPSW 2y agoI believe that's what we call "physics"
- kromem 2y agoWell, 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-points-shaky-foundations-reality https://www.science.org/content/article/quantum-paradox-poin...
- wizzwizz4 2y agoThat'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.
- kromem 2y agoGenerally '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.
- DarmokJalad1701 2y ago@skdh has some takes on this: https://youtu.be/GerzZ6GDe-0?t=432 https://youtu.be/GerzZ6GDe-0?t=432 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wsjgtp9XZxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wsjgtp9XZxo
- kromem 2y ago
- snypher 2y agoI'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/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
- Guthur 2y agoSpace-time? Why limit too space, meta-time is so much more interesting.
- Guthur 2y agoThis wasn't a flippant remark either. Read Henri Bergson Time and Free Will for some thought provoking analysis.