After a brief search I can't find any mention of any punishment for Sisyphus if he stopped pushing the boulder up the hill. That said, this is all taking place in Tartarus so there probably isn't much else to do and endlessly push a boulder up hill might be the better option lol. I can relate.

And my axe!

Plato's "the cave" thought experiment (circa 400 BC) is basically a suggestion of simulation. Modern science agrees - human perception of reality is limited and effectively a simulation. You don't need modern digital technology to imagine living in a simulation.

I laughed at the word 'fastness', but then realised it's a lot safer than offering 'speed' on the internet lol

Yeah that caught my eye too, seems odd. Most compression/encoding schemes benefit from a large dictionary but I don't think it would be constrained by the sometimes lesser total RAM on a GPU than the main system - in most cases that would make the dictionary larger than the video file. I'm curious.

I agree, the delivery services are definitely price gouging to a degree. It sucks that we're charged for delivery, service fees AND the item prices are inflated by around 20% too. Thing is, I think there's a bunch of reasons that TonyDelivers will eventually become as bad as the current market leaders. As his company grows, takes on employees, builds infrastructure, overheads increase, management grows - they'll fall into the same "traps"/profit seeking the other delivery companies have fallen into.

I totally agree! Although I think modern medication would be more useful than gold - pure quantities of modern meds weigh next to nothing. If you save enough lives of the rulers and their families they'll give you all the wealth and resources you need. They'll consider stealing the medication from you but they won't know which medications should be used for which illnesses, until they torture you I guess. I can't really think of a way of making sure they "be nice" rather than forcing you to give them everything you have. They weren't afraid of doing the unspeakable in pursuit of power back then.

1. The observer effect at the quantum level does feel like a CPU optimisation - the location of a particle is a probability field until measured. 1.1 In my experience these 'optimisations' recur at different levels - eg. economics, gravity, mass distribution, weather, even politics. Generalised models perform very well until you take local measurements - but they're less scientifically provable.
2. Dark matter/energy feels like a hack rather than a waste of CPU resources - it's a vague effect unmeasureable in the baryonic reality we inhabit. In the meantime it alters the structure of solar systems, galaxies and the observable universe itself and it's not clear how.
3. Occum's Razor actually works against your argument. If it's possible for base reality to contain simulated universes then there is already an [almost?] infinite probability our universe is simulated, as base reality could potentially hold [almost?] infinite simulations. If entities within those simulations can also create their own simulations then the chance of our reality being base reality becomes vanishingly small.

I agree that most people don't really need to worry about our universe being a simulation or not, but your statement "You can view our universe as a computer program, you can also view it as the universe." concerns me. This is true until you start trying to analyse how the universe works, but then all kinds of weird things crop up. It feels like you're saying we don't need to investigate this so why bother?

I sometimes joke that some entity created our universe to find the solution to the Travelling Salesman Problem and if we ever figure it out they'll switch our universe off. I'd like our universe to keep going a little bit longer so it would be nice to know if it's simulated.

VicForests should be forced to regenerate coupes that have not actually regenerated, even those already handed back to the government. If it hasn't regenerated as it would have without logging they should be liable. If the coupe was affected by bushfires they should still regenerate it.

And the little girl copying mum's expletives lol

Yeah big tech loves to throw dumb stuff your way to piss you off and keep you engaged, even if you've never shown an interest before.

Yeah I should bite the bullet and get a Pixel, they normally get the longest updates support or am I wrong? This habit of going for a budget phone and it becoming unusable/unsafe after 3 years is just a hidden cost I'm in denial over 😞