Are we in a simulation?

One of the old philosophical problems, also tackled by movies like Matrix, along with many others, is, simply: Are we living inside a simulation?

Without going into philosophical aspects of that, I've got to say that if we are, it is damn impressive simulation indeed.

Take issue of observable universe, for example. Let's for starters assume that the rules of the universe must be fixed and running from the beginning and whoever is running can't just improvise general rules at some point. I make this assumption since as far as we've perceived so far, the rules have not changed - system (in our solar system level) has been the same from the start, introducing us such weird things as epicycles when we got it wrong.

But this is just small potatoes so far. Let's expand this a bit. Our galaxy, Milkyway, has estimated of 100-400 billion stars (so, 100*10^9 - 400*10^9, in a bit more easily readable notation when talking about huge scales), and by now we can assume that quite many, if not most of these stars have at least one, if not more, planets. So we're talking at least trillion (1*10^12) major objects, and we're completely ignoring things as asteroid belts and such.

And expanding this again. Ultra Deep Field shows just tiny, tiny fraction of sky we see (way smaller area than the moon!) and it alone shows something like 10000 galaxies. Expand this to entire sky and we're talking about hundreds of billions of galaxies (100*10^9) again. Each with trillion (1*10^12) major objects. Which would place total number of major objects to somewhere around 1*10^23 range. That's 1, with 23 zeros following.

It's late when I'm writing this so there might be some stupid math errors, but nevertheless, I don't think I'm too far off. And again, we're still discussing only planet- or moon-sized objects and larger; smaller objects are so far ignored.

So again, returning to assumption that the simulation must be mathematically perfect from the start, it would have to consider gravity interaction of all these objects, all the time.

And here we are, where we can't even analyze such problems with mere 3 objects (three-body problem) but only in some very limited scenarios!

So I say again, if this a simulation, it must be backed by some pretty impressive mathematics to be able to simulate all these objects, since we certainly don't have capabilities for even infinitely tiny fraction of something like it. Without cheating, of course, but such cheat would be kinda obvious later with sudden changes in system behavior when exposed to detailed observation...

Of course system might be limited to things we can observe, but this was kinda my point with this - at the moment we can observe stupidly huge amount of objects - not necessarily directly, nor all the time, but still the behavior of objects previously observed must remain consistent during the simulation, in case we are to observe them again later. So even with cheats, things get pretty heavy.

I know, there are arguments to counter things I've said here, but nevertheless the energy cost for running such simulation would be simply enormous. Even if the rules if this universe don't apply in universe that is running the simulation.

It's so ...

Again, this post has nothing to do with electronics, but some anecdotes about tourism in Finland.

One thing many foreigners don't get when talking about Finland is how sparsely populated this country actually is. Huge land area, combined with just 5 million or so inhabitants mostly centered in larger population centers at southern part of country means that there are literally thousands and thousands square kilometres of ... well, you could say nothing, but there's forests, lakes, rivers and such mostly natural things. Entire northern part of Finland, Lappi, has over 100000 square kilometres of area, with some 120000 people on it (excluding Rovaniemi - largest city there - that has about 58000 people living there).

When I decide to take a car for a work trip, the first three to four hours from Oulu - at highway speeds; 80-100km/h - is usually spent for just getting to main population hubs of this country, first being typically Jyväskylä (about 300km away from Oulu). For the first 200-300 kilometres or so the scenery is mostly forest among main roads (and when traveling southwards, there is only four major routes - I know them all my the heart by now). Later it turns to fields and forests along roads.

I was told this story some time ago now, but I think it's worth repeating here.

Some persons I know had a friend of theirs from (I think) Germany visiting them here at Finland one summer, years ago. Like many Finns, they had a summer home/cottage by a lake, with all the usual accessories; pier with small boat, sauna, and nothing but forests and lake nearby as their nearest neighbor was kilometers away (or possibly there was another cottage nearby, just with no one in there at the moment).

They had good time, going to sauna, having some beers, talking and so on. It was getting a bit late (but it was still light; due to northern location, there is plenty of light in summer nights here) and suddenly someone noticed that it had been ages now since they had seen their German friend.

They got worried and went looking for him. Quite soon they found him, too. He was there, just sitting at the end of the small pier, by the lake, just staring at the opposite end of the lake.

They asked him what he was doing. He didn't respond for a while, and when he did, all he said, in quiet and almost trance-like voice was:

"It's so quiet here..."

Having just the sounds of nature around you, with no man-made noise, can be a real experience alone, one that being native here don't necessarily appreciate as much as one could.


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Just one misclick ...

Well, that was some fun hour or so.

See, here I was, trying to figure out how to make it possible to connect from office WLAN (which is kinda limited, for a reason) to my desktop for testing purposes.

So I am browsing through the firewall settings, trying some things, and ...

...Shit. Everything just stops working. That last setting (some bridge rule) apparently was Very Bad Idea.

As pretty much nothing works (and remaining live interface happens to be DMZ, from which I can't do anything anyway.)  So only option I have is to hit factory reset in the router. And start desperately rebuilding everything from scratch. All the settings, all the firewall and forwarding rules, everything.

And I realize I have absolutely no recollection on how to do it. The setup has been there for some two years now, virtually untouched aside some minor tweaks here and there. At this point I'm getting a bit nervous, especially since I have no internet access - until I manage to reconfigure it correctly.

This isn't a very pleasant feeling.

But then a small memory hits me. Last time I did this, didn't I make notes?

Yes I did. Not very clear ones - I'm quite certain that no one but me could rebuild the setup from those - but they were just sufficient enough to allow me to set up everything quickly. First outbound access (damn Cisco boxes provided by ISP make that annoyingly difficult), then inbound services one by one.

And now we're back. At least some of the obsolete port forward tweaks that were needed at some point for testing got thrown out too.

I think there is a lesson here somewhere, but guess I'm not seeing it, not right now...

Why buy AMD?

First benchmarks are in, and it seems that Intel is still king of the hill at the very highest end, at least in single core performance which still seems to be major selling point, especially in gaming. In heavily multithreaded loads AMD seems to win out, just because they have more cores on the chips, but so far games are not really utilizing multiple cores. Ah well. Not exactly surprising.

I'd still suggest that you go for AMD if you can choose. I certainly can - I am not looking for the very highest end gaming experience, but for software stuff high thread count surely helps (make -j8 ...). But not just because AMD is underdog here - because there must be an underdog. If a single company has a monopoly, at any field, the general public always loses.

Did you notice how Intel dropped their prices massively immediately after AMD's launch?  If AMD wasn't around that definitely wouldn't have happened. On the contrary, prices would by even higher.

As long as AMD is alive and kicking, Intel can't extort customers for every last cent they have as the customers will just slip away. But if AMD were to die... Well, for everyone's sake I hope that will not happen. If you think high-end Intel CPUs are expensive, the cost is nothing compared to what the prices would be if AMD weren't here to keep them at bay.

So do support AMD, if possible. It's best for everyone (except Intel and their stockholders) that they remain viable competitor for Intel.

Curse of subscription software

I've got one simple rule about software: Absolutely no subscription software. Absolutely no exceptions, ever.

Sometimes this makes my life more difficult, like now I'm stuck with Photoshop CS4. Hell, I'll rather learn to use GIMP before I submit to handing out money to Adobe every month, for ever. The monthly price might sound low but accumulated over years and years, it gets stupid expensive overall. Repeat that for every single software you use and suddenly you are forever tied to paying for essentially nothing new.
And this is ignoring the fact that software companies do die occasionally - and when license server shuts down, suddenly you will have nothing for all that money spent. Unless you are willing to break several laws to crack that subscription-based prison.

In my case it also helps that I've never been into newest features there is, so I don't have to have the newest, shiniest thing there is.

Latest case here is EagleCad. Ten years ago when I was shopping around for CAD software, I ended up with Eagle, version 4 or 5 I think (IIRC, it was version 4, but my license included free upgrade to v5 that was published very shortly afterwards). Open source offerings were not mature enough and other paid software was ridiculously expensive.

Last year I upgraded my Eagle license to version 7, which was very much worth it due to several new features, and so far I've been happy with that.

And then Autodesk came along and decided to make it subscription-based. Well, fuck them, Eagle 7.7 will be the last version of Eagle I use. Since I've learned eagle pretty well and I have no reason to go shopping for alternatives, I haven't, not yet. But I've been told that open source ones (KiCad for example) have grown mature, so at some point I may have to start learning them.

There's just two major issues; old designs (in case of some updates) and component libraries. Component design (in Eagle, and  with other CAD package either) isn't very difficult, but for larger devices (say past 100 pins/balls) it's pretty labor-intensive to create, check, double-check and triple-check all pins. If I were to change CAD package, I would have to do all that work again. And that would - will - suck, when I get there. Not anytime soon, I hope... Although come to think of it, I might as well get started now, when there is no pressing need to. Less stress later on.

Now, unfortunately (and very likely by very deliberate design) Autodesk has removed all older Eagle versions (that is, versions that are subject to subscription slavery) from download pages. And I didn't have a copy (aside the one I have installed) anywhere as backup. But it seems that they've (at least for now) forgotten about the FTP site which is still up; so if you want to get copy of 7.7, go there now and get your backup copy before they get rid of that, too.

ftp://ftp.cadsoft.de/eagle/program/7.7/

One last scenario:

"Oh, the software you use is now obsolete so we shut it down -- but hey, you can upgrade to this newer, better, shinier PRO-version, it's just $19 more per month!"