Yeah until you get to quantum computing and then it seems as if the universe is doing enormously more work than you would think necessary.

This comment and GP are two of the most concise and punchy descriptions I've ever heard of some of the deepest aspects of modern physics. On the one hand we have principles of locality and finite propagation speed, which limit the computational work to a small neighborhood, and on the other hand we have principles of non-locality and superposition, which cause the computation to explode as it swallows up potentially everything and every possible thing.

It might just be a reflection of the architecture the universe simulation is running on...

See Timmy, this is what happens when you run your universe on a holographic medium at an infinite distance.

Not necessarily.

You'd be correct given hidden variables.

But we know pretty convincingly that quantum anything does not have hidden variables.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

It doesn't have local hidden variables. That's an important distinction.

I'm not sure a non-local hidden variable explanation of QM is any distinct from superdeterminism though.

> non-local hidden variable

Like, global variables?

Naked singletons in your locality.

Alright, who's been messing with the universal gravitational constant and making it not universal? No one's in trouble, I just want to know.

There's another tantalizing possibility, that it varies over time rather than across space.

But only if someone observes it. The act of observation forces reality into existence.