I kind of had a similar reaction watching Devs after having read that short story many years ago. But now that I’ve re-read the short story, I have to say, it’s pretty weak compared to Devs. I’m not sure this is the right forum to discuss specifics, so I’ll leave it at that.
Though I was very much hoping that Alex Garland’s work on reinterpreting Annihilation would’ve given him the courage to lean into the totally inexplicable in Devs.
For those who believe thinking or discussing a story is a 'spoiler', don't read on.
Both contain the same contradictions:
How can a computer calculate everything about the universe or a part of it with any degree of accuracy, without having space to store the information (i.e. having enough bits to store information on every subatomic particle and its state)?
If you treat the earth as a closed system say to try to get around this, your simulation is incomplete (e.g. excludes the influence of the sun).
An example from the article:
this thing could execute an infinite loop in less than ten seconds
In what sense could an infinite loop take 10 seconds? In what sense can you brute force the halting problem?
An example from devs:
The universe is a deterministic system, ergo the future can be predicted with full accuracy with enough inputs. But there are not enough qubits in the universe (which someone evidently told them, because it made it into the script, but is then blithely ignored).
Looks great and something I'd love. It must have taken a long time to create.
Shame it's on Steam. Is there any reason you haven't made this available directly? You could offer both a Steam version that takes a cut of your money, then one on your website that you retain the full payment. Or is that against Steam's laws?
Not against Steam's rules at all, but this is extremely common for PC games. Annoys me too. Most players seem to like Steam enough that they don't care.
Idk how it compares as I don’t have Steam and haven’t tried this out but, afik this looks really similar to Celestia [1] which I do know well and Celestia is Awesome!
So if this is a more robust simulator than Celestia I’m down to try it out.
macOS has barely functional OpenGL support and no Vulkan support at all. Most of the value of Proton comes from the DXVK project (aside from Wine itself), which is a D3D->Vulkan wrapper. In theory it could be combined with MoltenVK, which wraps Vulkan to Apples Metal API. Chaining two graphics wrappers like that is probably fairly error prone and the losses in performance are likely too high to make it applicable for video games. Additionally ever since Apple ditched 32 bit support, Wine became kind of useless on Macs since a lot of Windows software (especially older games) is x86 only. The announced move to ARM further decreases chances of Proton ever officially supporting macOS, as emulating x64 would be way to costly to play modern video games.
Space Engine is used in many of his videos.