The theory, which I probably misunderstand because I have a similar level of education to a macaque, states that because a simulated world would eventually develop to the point where it creates its own simulations, it's then just a matter of probability that we are in a simulation. That is, if there's one real world, and a zillion simulated ones, it's more likely that we're in a simulated world. That's probably an oversimplification, but it's the gist I got from listening to people talk about the theory.

But if the real world sets up a simulated world which more or less perfectly simulates itself, the processing required to create a mirror sim-within-a-sim would need at least twice that much power/resources, no? How could the infinitely recursive simulations even begin to be set up unless more and more hardware is constantly being added by the real meat people to its initial simulation? It would be like that cartoon (or was it a silent movie?) of a guy laying down train track struts while sitting on the cowcatcher of a moving train. Except in this case the train would be moving at close to the speed of light.

Doesn't this fact alone disprove the entire hypothesis? If I set up a 1:1 simulation of our universe, then just sit back and watch, any attempts by my simulant people to create something that would exhaust all of my hardware would just... not work? Blue screen? Crash the system? Crunching the numbers of a 1:1 sim within a 1:1 sim would not be physically possible for a processor that can just about handle the first simulation. The simulation's own simulated processors would still need to have their processing done by Meat World, you're essentially just passing the CPU-buck backwards like it's a rugby ball until it lands in the lap of the real world.

And this is just if the simulated people create ONE simulation. If 10 people in that one world decide to set up similar simulations simultaneously, the hardware for the entire sim realty would be toast overnight.

What am I not getting about this?

Cheers!

Wouldn't it cut down on search queries (and thus save resources) if I could search for "this is my phrase" rather than rawdogging it as an unbound series of words, each of which seems to be pulling up results unconnected to the other words in the phrase?

There are only 2 reasons I can think of why a website's search engine lacks this incredibly basic functionality:

1. The site wants you to spend more time there, seeing more ads and padding out their engagement stats.
2. They're just too stupid to know that these sorts of bare-bones search engines are close to useless, or they just don't think it's worth the effort. Apathetic incompetence, basically.

Is there a sound financial or programmatic reason for running a search engine which has all the intelligence of a turnip?

Cheers!

EDIT: I should have been a bit more specific: I'm mainly talking about search engines within websites (rather than DDG or Google). One good example is BitTorrent sites; they rarely let you define exact phrases. Most shopping websites, even the behemoth Amazon, don't seem to respect quotation marks around phrases.

Thinking about the gaming magazines I used to read as a kid in the '90s. Some of them have found their way online thanks to preservationist efforts, but most are seemingly gone forever. (I'm talking about the particular magazine I read as a kid, many others have complete or near-complete collections available online in the form of scanned hardcopies.)

Do the publishing houses keep a digital copy of every magazine they release? If so, why don't they release them? They could probably charge a fee to download them, like other digital magazines do, but of course it'd be great if they just shared them for free for historical purposes on the Internet Archive or something.

It would be an insanely short-sighted practice to not keep masters of these publications forever, no? 🤔 The raw files probably take up a few CDs' worth of space for the entire run of the magazine. Big assumptions on my part, I have no clue how any of it is done!

So:

1. Do they retain the files forever?
2. If so, why might they not be shared 20 or 30 years later?

Cheers!

[-ish] Ireland, Scotland = Irish, Scottish

[-an] Morocco, Germany = Moroccan, German

[-ese] Portugal, China = Portuguese, Chinese

What rule is at play here? 🤔

Cheers!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Knight

She was the first woman in Australia to be given a life sentence without any possibility of parole.

(Edited to add the link. I did add it originally, but I guess it doesn't post it if you also write in the body of the post? 🤷‍)

Natalia was born in Ukraine in 2003, and was diagnosed with a rare form of dwarfism. More or less immediately, she was given up for adoption.

Adopted by a couple in the US, they facetiously but legally changed her birth year to 1989 with a view to skirting child abandonment laws. Her real age - the age she actually was when they adopted her - was confirmed by DNA testing, as well as contemporaneous documentation in Ukraine.

After seeing Orphan, a horror film in which an adopted child is actually a crazy adult with a rare genetic condition that makes her look like a kid, they hatched the idea of fudging the documentation like in the movie - except in reverse. In the film, the character changes her documentation to make herself seem younger than she is. With Natalia, they needed her to be an adult.

They moved her into her own apartment (an 8 or 9-year-old at this point), then quietly snuck off to Canada along with their biological children.

And the evil cunts got away with it. They lied about her, saying she was threatening to kill everyone and was a sociopath (again, taking their cues from the horror film). A fucking 8-year-old dwarf was gonna kill them all, they said.

Truly repugnant people.

If a judge is called 'corrupt' by a defendant outside court in front of the media, or if something more unambiguously libelous is said, can the judge sue the defendant?

Is it a stable/static effect no matter what, or is it a bit more stretchy/bouncy depending on how the object is behaving?

Thank you!

I'm going to convert my computer chair from pneumatic to static. I'm currently using plastic clasps that are held on with jubilee clips, but they're not great and need replaced (I'm a heavy lad). A sturdy metal version would be better.

I'm assuming the plumbing world would have something like this, but the language of the plumber is arcane and inaccessible to regular goombas like me. What do I type into the search box?

Cheers!

Alphanumerical lists are sortable by alphabet and number, obviously, but if you have a list where each entry begins with a different punctuation mark (or any other kind of non-alphanumeric character), is there a similar standardised ordering method for them?

I imagine, for example, that a comma will come before whatever this is: ¦

I just tested an A-Z sort in Google Sheets where each cell was a different punctuation mark, and it seemed to rearrange what I'd entered into some sort of order, but is this order shared universally? Is there a global Unicode-compliant ordering method everyone uses?

Cheers!

Really ought'a be illegal to have filler tracks, especially from a band who delivers one new album for every third Pope. Fuckin' heartbreaking.

EDIT: I suck at memeing, so I have to explain: I was talking about the promise of X-number of tracks on an upcoming album, only to get the album and discover that that number is significantly lower when you skip the fizzing and crackling filler tracks. I know the length of the album as a whole is "album length", because the individual songs are often very long, but it still feels like I've been tricked. And I don't wish to deny the band their right to artistically express themselves through buzzes, zips and whizzes 👍