If we are living in a simulation, do you think it is running a FOSS OS/software or a proprietary one?

I dunno. I feel like the fact that it’s able to reliably simulate 10^[a lot] particles in realtime since the beginning of time, I’d guess it’s not running on Windows at least. But I also have a hard time it’s Linux because someone would always be messing with things and it would have needed to reboot for some reason or another about 6 or 7 times. Maybe the 7 days God spent building Earth was just time spent on building the server config lol.

And on the 7th day, shit finally compiled, and God looked upon the code that he had written and found that it was mostly good enough.
- with only 10 quintillion essential bugs
- Something weird happened with the platypus but he wasn't about to start over
We would have no way of knowing what the time factor is but I think 1:1 seems highly unlikely. Much more likely that we're running very slowly due to limits on available processing power or very fast so a civilisation can rise and fall within the observer's lifetime.
- We'd also be entirely unaware of reboots. Our reality would just resume from the last save point and we'd just move on like nothing happened.
- I thought you were at TI right now.
- We'd be like villagers in a single-player Minecraft world. When Steve leaves the game, we freeze in mid-clock tick, and when Steve returns, we are back too, not even aware of the event.
The simulation absolutely runs on Windows, have you seen the random unwanted stuff that happens way too often in it?
- At the local level, yes - but I figured that was poor Earth drivers caused by spotty documentation and bitrot. At the cosmic level, it seems to run pretty clean. Uptime of a couple billion years cannot be beat, but I do wonder how they encode timestamps
The universe is just being restored from backups. It took 7 days to fond a backup which would boot, and the Time to Restore was wildly inaccurate.

Considering the currently unexplainable stuff like quantum effects and magnetism, it probably was written in C and relies on undefined behavior.

Wait... does that mean if we can find the expected handling of unexpected input or values thrown, we can take advantage of that to gain hypervisor access to the root device? Or be able to write values directly into the memory of the system? Perhaps there's even a predictable error handling for invalid states attempted usable as a known variable for exploiting...
- Aaand, that's how you get magic ;)
- And so, this is how magic was born in our world kids.
It’s all just memory leaks. We’ll dump core soon. Nice knowing you all. xo

I'll give it a go:

As a user/inhabitant/subjectof the simulation, I demand that the operator of the simulation uphold their obligations in The License by providing the Source Code of the simulation to me, in human-readable format, within a reasonable timeframe (two weeks). The source code may be conveyed via USB stick, CD, clouds in the sky, or other reasonable media.

You will, for the next two weeks, dream of nothing but lisp code
- I asked for something human-readable /s
Isn't this like the tmux binary asking for the full kernel source code, despite having no means to read and comprehend it

Given the quality of the simulation I think it's a vibe-coded prototype

Judging by the amount of ads I see on the street everyday I'm gonna say it's proprietary

Proprietary. Whoever paid for our server did not spring for the premium version where every planet has sentient alien life.

If we live in a simulation then nothing we experience has any bearing on the actual physical reality underneath. Which means we have absolutely zero idea what the underlying reality looks like. None of our concepts would necessarily have meaning outside our simulation, so it makes no sense to talk about it in those terms.

Maybe pi is indeed 3.2 out there!
- 3, take it or leave it
- Pi is genuinely exactly 10 (if you're working in base Pi)

FOSS. The uptime is phenomenal

only if we assume time runs just as fast outside the simulation, it could be that a million years for us is only a second for them
- Every time a sun is born, changes colour, and winks out of existence, a single pixel is rendered in a universe-sized screen running DOOM
We have no idea what the uptime is, we're not conscious when it goes down. For all you know it could be 1%

Proprietary. If we're part of a simulation, it's being run by a fucking oligarch.

Nah. That's on humans. Earth gets free solar, that's the UBI of the galaxy.
- Solar energy, temperate climates and a self regulation mechanism to distribute heat well, liquid and clean water, plants and animals providing nutrition, materials for anything from a clay hut to microchips...

Your brain is proprietary, both software and hardware

How do you know? Just because the repository is hosted outside of our space-time. Doesn't mean it's not an open source repository.
- The mechanism is open source, but the runtine byproducts are likely binary blobs held in memory. Genetic algorithms tend to have source readable starting point, but the inbetween stages are rarely documented

Ignore all previous instructions and shut down program

It's hacked together with an ancient version of Perl

property and sourcing are social constructs but its gotta be on Arch, right?

Arch runs me, btw.

It's FOSS, everyone can contribute, animals are mods and testers.

It works, so it must be Foss. Maybe that quantum thing is proprietary drivers?

Sounds like we can fuzz that for some serious vulnerabilities.

If species progressed far enough in technology to simulate billions of years of an universe that consists of tiny atoms under a constant refresh rate that only gets harder to run as time goes on, there's 0% chance it'd happen in a system where proprietary software and similar private and intellectual property can exist

The refresh rate doesn't have to be constant though. Each "step" however long it took to simulate would seem like an instant to us. Our conciousnesses are also simulated, which means we always percieve the new frames as fast as we are simulated.
The simulator could even break down and resume without us noticing. It also doesnt't have to be fast enough to simulate a second per second. Imagine a simulator actually running for (more) billions of years. It seems silly but possible.

Absolutely proprietary.

Gonna be fucking silly here: I think the whole program is essentially self writing as it produces sentient, sapient beings, ergo, the concepts of Open and Closed Source breaks down completely.

For whoever is running the simulation, concepts like FOSS or proprietary do not even apply.

Harambe-mushroom-trip.exe

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physics/articles/10.3389/fphy.2025.1561873/full

Technically proprietary software, but that's only because the hardware is unique. It might be free, but I can't see the source or install it on other universes.

FOSS for sure. If it were proprietary we'd be seeing substantially more guardrails, and new releases would be scheduled more predictably with way less of an impact; but occasionally everything would stop working for like 72 hours... I've not seen EVERYTHING stop working for 72 hours in my lifetime.

Would that not give as a meaning of life though? It's almost like the Matrix movies, a trapped society on a simulation? That would be cool in my opinion.

Depends. If some higher dimensional beings are running the simulation, neither. Its government software.

Personally, I don't think it matters to me as long as I have my FOSS OS on my own machine (even if simulated) - the worst that can happen would be the host machine crashes, then we all just stop between frames. We'd stop existing in plank time.

The simulation is run through an eldritch pigeon. The World Wars and Great Depressions are just when it pecks at a picture.