this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
87 points (89.9% liked)

Showerthoughts

29528 readers
798 users here now

A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

Rules

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
quinten@lemmy.world
vatlark@lemmy.world
forkball@lemmy.world
Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world
87
The universe is bottle-necked at processor speed (lemmy.autism.place)
submitted 1 day ago by BackOnMyBS@lemmy.autism.place to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
24 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The universe is humongous.

  • The hard drive space is practically limited to the Big Bang on one end and the heat death of the universe on the other, but it contains all of the data for everything that exists. That's massive.

  • The RAM is massive because it's handling all the variables and changes of the present.

  • The cache is much smaller as established by the study that found the universe is not locally real. Things only happen once they are observed, but it happens almost instantaneously. Still, the cache is massive because it is handling everything that is being observed at the same time. That's a lot of things.

All of the above are massive extremes. However,

  • The processing speed is limited at the speed of light. In comparison to the others, the speed of light is soooooo ridiculously slow, causing a bottle neck.

PS - Massive because it's mass I've observed. Not really tho, you silly goat. Big bang while I swig Tang and watch a twig hang.

top 24 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[โ€“] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 44 points 1 day ago (1 children)

ive heard of a shower beer... but this seems more like the result of a shower joint

[โ€“] BackOnMyBS@lemmy.autism.place 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I dont do weed ๐Ÿšญ cause gives me panic for first 15 mins

[โ€“] Muun@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Glad to hear I'm not alone! I like weed, but the potential for panic attacks is too scary.

[โ€“] tdawg@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

My aunt gave me an edible for Thanksgiving last year and I felt nothing for the first few hours. Cue random panic attack on the ride home that lasted until 4 am

[โ€“] Muun@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Yup, had a massive panic attack from gummies. Went to the hospital because I thought I was having a stroke. Got pumped full of lorazepam and slept for 26 hours. Full day of my life gone.

[โ€“] BackOnMyBS@lemmy.autism.place 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yep, you're not alone! We're connected rn ๐Ÿ’ž

[โ€“] NarrativeBear@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

Spooky action at a distance.

[โ€“] TherapyGary@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

This is a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics.

The idea that the universe is "not locally real" suggests that particles don't have definite properties until they are measured, with their states potentially correlated over distances through quantum entanglement. This doesn't mean that only observed things exist; rather, it indicates that certain properties are simply indeterminate until measurement (or "observation")

In quantum mechanics, "observation" refers to the interaction that causes a system's wave function to collapse from multiple potential states into one actual state. This process affects the state of the system but does not imply that reality is created solely by observation, nor does it require a sentient observer

Edit: sorry to be a party pooper! I did enjoy reading your post

[โ€“] BackOnMyBS@lemmy.autism.place 1 points 1 day ago

Yep! The probability code is put within the quantum systems so that things are mostly predictable, but there's still enough "randomness" to prevent a deterministic system. The cache is basically figuring out all these probabilities when interacted with plus processing the more deterministic calculations of the macro world.

This works out. I asked Ephen Stephen, and they gave me the ๐Ÿ‘๐Ÿ‘

[โ€“] rovingnothing29@lemmy.world 19 points 1 day ago (3 children)

The variable C stands for cookie, not light speed.

[โ€“] BackOnMyBS@lemmy.autism.place 5 points 1 day ago

yum!! ๐Ÿ˜ฎ๐Ÿ˜‹

[โ€“] mangaskahn@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

Good enough for me. ๐Ÿคทโ€โ™‚๏ธ

[โ€“] j4k3@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There is a disparity between the Earth's, Life's, and the Universe's clock speeds.

Light speed is an irrelevant convention to the speed of causality.

We are like electrons that exist in a time delay circuit for an irrelevant blip, while the hardware chugs along, and we imagine ourselves the PC Master Race.

[โ€“] BackOnMyBS@lemmy.autism.place 3 points 1 day ago

This is it! Thank you ๐Ÿ˜‰๐Ÿ‘

[โ€“] SzethFriendOfNimi@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The Speed of Light is NOT About Light

[โ€“] JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee 4 points 1 day ago

If the universe is indeed a simulation, those would be reasonable assumptions to govern how we react to it. However, the former is still unfalsifiable.

[โ€“] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago

You are bottlenecked at memory speed on von Neumann machines.

[โ€“] Bougie_Birdie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I've often had the thought that the universe is a simulation.

Like, why are there hard physical limitations on things like the speed of light? That doesn't make a lot of sense for a natural system. Also what kind of bullshit is it that if you move super fast time goes slower?

The universe is a simulation, but it's not very well put together.

[โ€“] CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

why doesnt it make sense for a natural system? What do you expect a natural system to look like? As far as I can imagine, a universe that can be observed must display some consistent sent of mathematical rules (because any universe that did not, would be too chaotic to allow an ordered system like life to exist within it, and therefore all observers will find themselves existing within the limited ones), and a simulation is itself just executing a bunch of mathematical rules, and so any universe you can exist in will appear indistinguishable from a simulated one from the inside (unless the simulators do something specifically to reveal it).

[โ€“] Bougie_Birdie@lemmy.blahaj.zone -1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Do you think of life as being an ordered system? It seems pretty chaotic to me.

Anyway, if I relate my concept of a 'natural system' to biology, then I'd point out that there isn't really an upper limit to how fast animals go. I mean, sure, they're limited by their size or aerodynamics, but a cheetah doesn't have a 'top speed' that it bottoms out at, it could push harder or be induced to move faster.

If I think of it as a force of nature, I'd think about how water flows. The speed of a river isn't constant, and it could be manipulated or induced to move faster.

So from that lens, it just seems odd that there are universal constants, like the speed of light. You'd think some lights would move faster or slower than others based on their composition, because that's the behaviour we seem to experience in nature.

This isn't a serious debate or belief of mine. I accept the laws of science because they're testable, demonstrable, and repeatable. But when you contemplate the unknowable (what does God look like, anyway?), it's a fun diversion.

Also we're such an infinitesimally small part of the universe that I'm inclined to believe that if we are in a simulation, we're the bug that crawled into the computer.

[โ€“] CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 6 points 1 day ago

I would think of life as being ordered, yes. complicated, and with components small enough that we have a hard time envisioning it, but its not really much different from what you would get if you made a bunch of microscopic robots able to assemble more of themselves, and had them stick together to form a larger structure. We would probably imagine such things be made of something other than water and carbon chemistry, because when we make machines we usually use metal and silicon, but at the scale of cells where a component can be an individual molecule, carbon chemistry works well. I just think that we have poor intuition for what chaotic and ordered systems look like if the scale is beyond what we can see unaided.

[โ€“] Xeroxchasechase@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

It needs more processing to simulate the events when you move super fast, thus it reduces your fps, but the simulation is frame based and not time based, so time slows.