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Comment by jd | Hacker News Reader

> But one way or another, all systems are embedded systems. [...] host systems often overlap and even cooperate. A city is composed of many interleaved subsystems. So is your body. It's not always a simple containment relationship. Systems are made of, and communicate with, other systems.

So now the definition of "embedded system" is essentially a "thingy". Thingies overlap and cooperate, thingies are made of and communicate with other thingies.

That's not very enlightening.

I have no idea what the purpose was of the 3000 (?) word analogy between Mario Cart, a fish tank and embedded systems. And also it's unclear how the "holes" (data channels) are related to reflection and metaprogramming.

And finally, I don't see how he can be so certain the state of the Universe was "undefined" before the big bang. Maybe the Universe had a definite and sensible but (to us) unknowable state before the Big Bang.

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To our vantage point, the universe was "undefined" before the big bang. It's also "undefined" from our vantage point to every space that exists (or rather doesn't exist) outside of our universe.

If you buy certain flavors of string theory, you could say that we can only tell what's going on beyond our own 'brane, as our 'brane happens to be an embedded system that we would need to step outside to understand what exists outside of it.

Essentially it seems to me that Yegge is saying that we don't know what's going on outside of our 3-space 1-time universe, and that even posing the questions from within the universe is an exercise in futility.

What you're saying makes perfect sense, but that isn't what Yegge is saying at all. You're saying the state of the universe may or may not be sensible before the Big Bang, but it's unknowable so speculation is pointless. What Yegge is saying is that it's like an undefined variable: the state is totally arbitrary. But we don't even know if the universe could be anything before the Big Bang.

The state is arbitrary to the Host system, just like the state of memory before it is initialized is arbitrary to us. In the guest (Embedded) system, it's unknowable. Arbitrary is a term Gods (creators of embedded systems) use to refer to things that are unknowable from within guest systems, and that they don't particularly care about from the vantage point of the host.

The only assumption Yegge is making is that the Big Bang wasn't self-started from a confluence of previous state, but "initialized", overwriting that state, which almost makes sense: black holes overwrite later state, rendering incoming material arbitrary to its later states (they're an "information sink"), so why couldn't the Big Bang overwrite earlier state, rendering outgoing material arbitrary from its previous state (an "information tap")?

By saying the universe has an arbitrary state before the Big Bang you're also assuming the universe has _a_ state before the Big Bang. But perhaps the universe had no state at all.

A variable is a piece of memory and always has _a_ value. The value may be arbitrary, the value may be unknowable, but we know at least one thing: that at any point in time a variable has exactly 1 value.

Most values for quantum variables have multiple values at any point in space-time.

That said, even if we assume that the universe had no state prior to the big bang, we can postulate that state to be arbitrary, because it may be 0, it may be 1, or it may be both 0 and 1 at the same time.

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