Hacker Cinema
Diaspora
2022 · Film · short · 16 min
Directed by Tyler Mckenzie Evans
In a black suburb, a couple begins to notice that their neighbours are disappearing and white people are moving in. They soon discover something much more unpalatable.
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2 comments on Hacker News
A fun variant of this is that the log can be taken at variable intervals and as long as it is sufficiently detailed, it can still capture all salient details.
Similarly a simulation run at some "tick rate" can also be run at 2x the rate while taking 1/2 the step per tick. Within the universe nobody would notice, as long as the steps were fine enough to begin with.
I think it was in Diaspora (or Permutation City?) that Greg Egan proposed that any tick rate would be unnoticable to that simulated beings, including "none".
In other words, the movie Top Gun will continue to exist as-is, no matter how many copies are made of it, including none. Encoded as a digital file it is just a number, a pure timeless concept, it doesn't have to be written down to exist. It always existed on the number line, even before Tom Cruise was born. In fact, every encoding of Top Gun exists on the number line, in every compression format, in every resolution, even a future 16K resolution that was never filmed and has no display devices made for it yet. Its encoding as a 400GB long number is there, already, and will always be there.
In other words, and simulation, an log of events, any experience already exists in mathematics, in every encoding... somewhere on the number line. This includes the entire physical universe. This isn't hypothetical, it's necessarily true! Anything that can be represented by a finite amount of information must be on the number line.
Even if you assume the Universe lasts forever, you can break its history up into a sequence of states, each of which is finite. Then the series will exists on the number line as a set of points heading off to infinity.
It varies. He can be a bit plodding sometimes, especially when exploring politics - his characters tend to be introspective rather than bold actors. So I found Teranesia (SE Asian ecopolitics) rather a struggle, but on the other hand I flew through Diaspora, where most of the characters don't even have physical bodies and there were a lot of very abstract concepts.
None of his output is light reading, but (IMHO) it's extremely substantive, as opposed to the physically substantial 1,000 page doorstops and franchise vehicles...I doubt I'd enjoy a novelization of Avatar, for example. I'm into that movie for the magic carpet ride rather than the dialog or character development.