Asklemmy

Ever walk into a room and forget why you went in there? That's garbage collection

You get stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner and the same movie/media coming out over and over again

Human music. Huh. I like it!

Why do you think our admins wouldn't use autoscale, when they've obviously built it into the simulation?

We would probably see more caching of parts of the universe that don't typically observe. Given that our current observation can't see this in current time, we don't immediately notice.

The interesting bit would be to figure out what parts get cached, since we may not be the only sentient life.

The server shuts down. Admin adds in few more sticks of ram and powers it on again.

The day is reset and we wake up again from the morning of that day where there was a RAM shortage.

The universe starts swapping

Another plague. It's just the garbage collector at work. Low on RAM? Free up space by removing objects from the simulation.

You should check out the short story "Sleepover" by Alastair Reynolds.

This is why older people think slower and lose memories or cognitive functions as side effects. They are depriorizized and moved from ram to pagefiles/swap disk.

If you're unfamiliar, the OS will move process memory onto disk when RAM runs out.

Teleportation based on old location data being deleted

I am the only person who lives in the simulaton. You all are computer generated.

We are the RAM

once we run out of ram then the universe starts running on Skyrim physics

Given the vastness of space and time, the. Umber of people who die and have yet to learn anything (babies), I’d imagine we’re a system with 32gb of RAM, only consuming a few hundred megabytes.

Besides, I’d imagine that any intelligence capable of constructing and running such a complex simulation would have the ability to scale their system as needed. Using our existing technology, they probably use hot swappable components so that if there is a hardware failure or the need to “download more ram” 🤣 then they can just remove and insert new components on the fly and we’d be none the wiser.

Of course, we being part of the simulation, I’d also wager that unless the creators of said simulation are truly evil and sadistic, we’ll never know because it’s just not part of the programming. And if not we’re, we’d probably already have figured it out by now (beyond guessing and thought experiments). But rest assured, it is fun to think about, in a creepy and existential way.

If we are a simulation, what is the end goal of our creators? Could we be the roadmap for creating anew world in their real life? Maybe they are studying their own history and trying to figure out how their race came into being and evolved over time. Or maybe we are part of a crude video game keeping little Suzie occupied until dinner time. Better yet, maybe Susan is learning about simulations at university and we are part of her post-doctoral thesis.

Starts with erectile dysfunction and ends with the little blue pill...

adjacent answer, but resource requirements are lower than might be expected since the simulation only needs to capture elements observed by a conscious entity. the vast majority of the known universe has not been observed in any detail that requires significant memory or processing resources. this same technique is employed by computer game designers so that only scenery and elements within view of a player are fully rendered.

Stutterers

I'm more concerned with what happens when the hardware invariably fails...

The server admins run a kill -9 on a few processes. Inside the sim, this looks a lot like the Chicxulub impact.

There would either be some kind of mass extinction event or something that would be considered "supernatural" would occur to maintain the status quo

Who knows.. maybe we'll experience pointless wars and massive inequality.. selfish douchebags who only care about bolstering their ego might gain power.. heck, maybe even the climate will slowly start changing for the worse.

Well, if we're in a simulation, then any assumptions we have about definitions, limitations, they may not apply. So, we think storage needs ram, but outside our restricted simulation, it could be far different.

Like, I frequently ponder how did something come from nothing. But I know I'm making assumptions when I ask that question. It may not be linear, may not be either or, there's something crucial im not seeing.