Oh absolutely, the rabbit hole of deception can just go a lot deeper when people don’t even have to report numbers at all.

Like, they can fudge line items, but, if the line items are growing at the same rate after they merge them, then it’s pretty clear the new thing isn’t driving growth. And changes like that are visible and can be scrutinized as well.

We can watch the hands on this kind of reporting.

ALL ai efforts are face planting, but microsoft is the most easily scrutinized. The important thing being that they’re publicly traded and their business model is built on selling subscriptions and products; So we can see where they’re making money and spending it, and they can’t make demonstrably false claims about the success of projects (they might get sued for market manipulation).

As supposed to private companies like anthropic and openAI who can say what ever the hell they want about their success or failure, or companies like Google and Amazon who make their money in ways that make it hard to scrutinize if the AI stuff is landing.

Display on my glasses? That would be neat. Camera and microphone on my glasses? Why the fuck would I want that.

It’s a devil’s bargain. Except that the benefit is pretty slim next to the obvious cost.

The jist of this paper is that it’s not possible to computer a simulation of a universe. Like, there is no sequences of arithmetic or logical operations that could do it, and they’re providing proofs to that effect.

It’s not worth considering as a real possibility until a plausible pathway by which it could be done is presented. Not even like, a practical pathway, just something that could theoretically accomplish the task.

This paper is just saying that computers could not even theoretically do the task. There is no possible sequences of arithmetic or logical operations that could do it. And a computer is definitionally a machine that carries out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations.

More compute power than the entire universe could provide.

Saying that the universe could be a simulation, when we have no evidence for that assertion is the same as saying “god could have made the universe”

Like, we can’t prove that isn’t true, but why they hell would I believe it’s a reasonable possibility if there is no evidence suggesting it as a possibility.

we have no reason to believe that a universe could be simulated. No proven plausible pathway by which that could be accomplished.

That doesn’t prove it is not possible, you cannot prove a negative. It just means that we have no reason to believe it could be true.

If you find it an interesting thought experiment, then no reason not to think about it, but it should have no baring on anyone’s decision making or assumptions about the world.

If we can’t do it here, then the main point of the simulated universe thought experiment is void.

The argument being roughly that, if we could simulate a universe, and it could do the same, it would likely lead to an infinite chain of universe simulating other universes. In such a case, it would be highly unlikely that we just happened to be the first one in the chain, thus it would be likely we are a simulation in turn.

But it’s equally unlikely that we happen to be the last simulation in an infinite chain. So we’re probably not a simulation

if We cannot simulate a universe on a computer then the argument for why we would be a simulation is removed in turn, by the logic of the thought experiment.

Since the jist of the argument is that if it was possible, there would likely be an infinite number of simulations simulating each other up and down a chain, and in an infinite series it’s unlikely we’d happen to be the one at the top of the chain. It’s also equally unlikely that we’re at the end of an infinite chain.

So, if we can’t simulate here, no reason to believe we are a simulation in turn. Just like how there is no reason to believe in an as yet unobserved teapot floating between here and mars.

Computers are defined as machines that preform a series of arithmetic and logic operations.

The point being that this kind of math is not capable of simulating a universe. If it did something else, it wouldn’t be a computer. It would be something else.