The universe is not a simulation.

Our perception of our own lives IS a simulation. Our brain sits in the dark, with no actual contact to the outside world, receiving input through our evolutionary derived senses. Our senses are optimized for survival, as is our consciousness. We can never perceive things as they truly are, instead our brain builds a story that matches the observed "facts". This is why optical illusions work, for example.

History is similarly a projection of the past made by gathering imperfect data, that tries to tell a coherent story that is compact enough to use as a teaching aid. History does NOT repeat, it rhymes.

Long, long ago, folks got tired of having to re-implement compilers every time they got a new computer with an incompatible new instruction set, so they eventually invented the UCSD P-code system. This allowed far more portability of code, and helped popularize the Pascal language.

UCSD Pascal had a problem though, all code ran at the same privilege level, so it was easy to crash the environment, and debugging became a problem. Plus, it ran slower than native code, so it was passed over in the end.

Eventually, people at SUN got tired of having to re-implement their compilers on incompatible processors, and having seen P-code, wrote their own virtual system called Java. But everything ran at the same privilege level, so it was prone to breaking, plus it ran slower than native code.

So eventually, the folks at Microsoft got tired of having to port everything to new incompatible instruction sets, and having seen pCode and Java, decided to implement .NET so the could run one set of code everywhere. But it was slower, and had all the same issues, and never ran as fast as native win32 calls.

You see the theme I wove, the imperfection of the facts, all designed to show you how the same things keeps happening, over and over. But let me through one more at you

The customers of IBM were spending a lot of time re-implementing things on each new incompatible machine. IBM decided to implement a hardware virtual machine, which made it possible to run the old software on the new machine, with no loss of performance (thanks to faster new machines). However, at that time people expected to have to re-write their applications on new incompatible machines, so they optimized for the present day, and didn't have to worry about timelines exceeding a decade or so, as they would be re-writing things to take advantage of the new hardware.

When backwards compatibility came along, it had the effect of freezing many systems as they were in the late 1950s and 1960s, and giving those programs an artificially long life. This was the root cause for the Y2K problem.

So, now a counter-example shows that history isn't quite as repetitive as I first showed. I'm also certain that I've got a few errors in my history, as others will be happy to point out.

Lastly, <--- this (Hacker News) ---> is a community of people who have found enough coherence between our views of the world that it is worth it for us to all visit here and share our time and attention. It is mediated through a stack of code written in a variant of Lisp. I have no idea how it is actually funded. Dang moderates it and keeps us all in check, providing stewardship of this whole crazy thing. The fact that it's all bits at the bottom end doesn't mean it is simulated, just that it is quantifiable, as are the particles in our universe.