The Universe as a Minified Bundle

Andrew Arrow imagines the universe as a 1.3 pebibyte minified JavaScript file with no source maps or comments. Physics, he argues, is reverse engineering a running production system. Drawing on Donald Hoffman's interface theory of perception, he suggests that spacetime may be a user interface, not the underlying architecture. He sees AI as a tool that could finally hold enough of the scientific codebase to recognize duplicate abstractions across fields, turning breakthroughs into the discovery that two folders point to the same thing.
Physics is what you do when prod is running, the source is missing, and somehow you still have to figure out the architecture.
- ivansavz
Okay, let's start a new game where we try to guess the prompt that produced this text.
My guess would be "Write a 2000 words blog post based on the analogy between the difficulty of understanding the laws of physics and minified source code."
It's a cool analogy, no doubt, but reading the 2000 words of the article, I felt there was no substance or flesh around it. Okay there were some examples vaguely related to the analogy, and writing was smoothish, but what was the message in the end? What were the new ideas (beyond the analogy)?
Every time I read a LLM generated long form text I am reminded of the communication engineering: communication channels can only decrease the information content. For example, in the communication setup:
Alice sends msg --encode--> codeword --channel--> codeword' --decode--> msg' Bob received
The best we can hope for is that the message was transmitted faithfully, so msg' = msg, since the channel noise can only degrade the information content, specifically, the mutual information is a non-increasing function:
I(msg;codeword') ≤ I(msg;codeword),
due to the monotonicity of information (a.k.a. data processing inequality).
Similarly, if Alice uses LLM to communicate to Bob, we have:
Alice's idea --encode--> prompt --LLM--> generated text --decode--> idea'
Monotonicity of information tells us
I(idea;generated text) ≤ I(idea;prompt).
So I really don't get it, why do people believe that adding LLM generation step could improve the commu […]
- voxleone
>>The coordinate grid is executable.
As it is in the Functional Universe
- cs1996
The reason I thought of the bundle metaphor is last week at work I was reading:
https://support.cognex.com/en/resources/external-documents/h...
and the:
https://support.cognex.com/en/resources/hardware-tech-manual...
but neither could tell me how to get an image from the camera to my golang program. And yet, the little sample webui program that the firmware serves up on port 8080 has a nice javascript webapp that can get an image from the camera. But, yes, no source. So AI read the bundle and boom, I now had a way to get the image.