The trick of optimizing games is to off-load as much as the simulation from the computer into the user's brain, which is MUCH more powerful and creative. Implication is more efficient (and richer) than simulation.
During development, when we first added Astrological signs to the characters, there was a discussion about whether we should invent our own original "Sim Zodiac" signs, or use the traditional ones, which have a lot of baggage and history (which some of the designers thought might be a problem).
Will Wright argued that we actually wanted to leverage the baggage and history of the traditional Astrological signs of the Zodiac, so we should just use those and not invent our own.
The way it works is that Will came up with twelve archetypal vectors of personality traits corresponding to each of the twelve Astrological signs, so when you set their personality traits, it looks up the sign with the nearest euclidian distance to the character's personality, and displays that as their sign. But there was absolutely no actual effect on their behavior.
That decision paid off almost instantly and measurably in testing, after we implemented the user interface for showing the Astrological sign in the character creation screen, without writing any code to make their sign affect their behavior: The testers immediately started reporting bugs that their character's sign had too much of an effect on their personality, and claimed that the non-existent effect of astrological signs on behavior needed to be tuned down. But that effect was totally coming from their imagination!
The create-a-sim user interface hid the corresponding astrological sign for the initial all-zero personality you first see before you've spent any points, because that would be insulting to 1/12th of the players (implying [your sign] has zero personality)!
Dr Myhill is quite controversial, and many who followed her advice were not helped by it. Always take advice with a grain of salt if the advice giver peddles her own line of supplements.
The same argument leads a rational person to stop obsessing about the supposed morality of killing humans. The touchy-feely appeal to "think about the suffering of the _humans_" is likewise species-ist
I think they're saying that you may have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. If your conclusion horrifies you—doesn't resemble what you were optimizing for—you may be optimizing for the wrong thing. Rationality isn't broken; revisit your optimization criteria. See the paperclip optimizer, the smiles optimizer, etc.
the single vast space-time would already be locked in a state of maximal entropy, nothing moves, the illusion of time is just the universe recalling a memory.
"Abort command if variables are unset" is the -u flag, not -e. Both were mentioned long ago in this thread, but GP was talking about -e being painful for interactive shells. Imagine an interactive shell exiting as soon as a user's command failed!
That doesn't solve the problem that parent incorrectly explained.
echo "$(false)"
swallows the exit code from $(false).
$ cat /tmp/test.sh
set -euvx
export SHELLOPTS
echo "$(false)"
echo "echo of string with failed subcommand does not kill script"
$(false)
echo "but consuming exit code does"
$ /tmp/test.sh
export SHELLOPTS
+ export SHELLOPTS
echo "$(false)"
false
++ false
+ echo ''
echo "echo of string with failed subcommand does not kill script"
+ echo 'echo of string with failed subcommand does not kill script'
echo of string with failed subcommand does not kill script
$(false)
false
++ false
