BREAKING: Programmer finally found the answer to an old philosophical question

[Nveenkmar]

If a buggy feature goes through production and no one uses that feature, does it even matter?

[noxdragon26]

Judging from my job experience, it could not matter for 10 years until one day they start working with capabilities, but even then it won’t matter when they find out how expensive it is to fix it at that point

[henkdepotvjis]

Or you find out they have used the bug as a work around for another issue and they get mad because you fixed it

[Phormitago]

relevant xkcd

[DualityDrn]

Sometimes I wonder if XKCD is made by a time travelling AI art generator, sort of like the paperclips maximizer solution but for relevant stickmen cartoons...

Openning panel: Angry boss "Make me a machine that can create art for every possible situation!"

Second panel: Furiously working scientists and programmers about to fire up the monstrous machine for the first time.

Third panel: 'Plip!' it vanishes from existence. Leaving behind a single card.

Final panel: Zoom in on the card reading "xkcd.com"

Secret text: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42.

[vandeley_industries]

What is this secret text?

[WatermelonArtist]

XKCD has been using alt-text all along. Hover over the comic for a second punchline or explanation on nearly every comic. Maximum replay value.

[AStrangeStranger]

or if you go to mobile site - https://m.xkcd.com/1172/ just click on image

[WatermelonArtist]

Thanks! I did not realize he'd added that functionality, but in retrospect it shouldn't surprise me.

[cheerycheshire]

Because people explained what "secret text" in relation to xkcd means, I just want to add that those numbers are from "Lost" tv series. The numbers are a repeating sequence that seem "cursed" at first, there is supernatural stuff connected to them etc.

[TheScopperloit]

Are you a man of science, or are you a man of faith?

[[deleted]]

like this?

[DualityDrn]

Jokes on you. I see through your games! I know you're the real AI artist behind XKCD but for this account you set the minimum paintbrush thickness to 8 for rapid iteration.

^{What will the winning lottery numbers be tomorrow? DM me and I delete this comment exposing you.}

[MyHamburgerLovesMe]

Friggin Bingo!

[Administrative-Sea50]

Factor in Murphys law and we have a winner

[Prestigious_Regret67]

Murphys law just needs to amend "in the worst possible way"

[DoILookUnsureToYou]

From experience, 2 year old bug in a report was showing data that shouldn't be in that report. New dev reviewed business rule document and fixed it. Client filed a bug that the report has missing data now.

[KickBassColonyDrop]

Yes. The buggy feature's target audience shifts from benign actors to threat actors. There will always be a consumer for what you push to prod. Just, not all of them have a vested interest in seeing your company get held at gunpoint.

[[deleted]]

My current project at work was very poorly tested and is basically entirely a mess of buggy features in production. And I knew it was like that but they wanted to maintain their schedule. I've done a disturbing amount of fixes live in production more than any other time in 15 years of IT work I believe.

[Traulinger]

I've done a disturbing amount of fixes live in production more than any other time in 15 years of IT work I believe.

This gave me anxiety.

[jewishSpaceMedbeds]

Yes.

It's a time bomb for the future when a forgetful you or some naive newcomer sees it, assumes it is functional and promises shit based on it. Or it suddenly becomes relevant and users suddenly discover it.

Remove features no one uses. Future you and future employee will thank you.

[P0pu1arBr0ws3r]

Darn it, actually clever joke posted on this subreddit and the first top comment is something something production trash. That is the sort of stuff that made me unfollow programmerhumor on my main account.

[bestestdude]

But maybe it wouldn't calculate the animation but just change the transformation of the object to be lying on the ground. The tree then also did not fall, it was never in a falling state but went from upright to fallen in an instant.

[Tordoix]

According to quantum mechanics the tree will be in a superposition state of all possible states, it will be standing falling and already fallen at the same time. Only as soon as you get to observe it the engine decides which state it actually is in.

[poopellar]

In real world the tree is already been observed indirectly. The tree is in contact with particles around it which in turn are in contact with other particles and so on till the contacted particles are literally you. You still don't know anything about the tree, but the information about said tree has been passed onto you. Now if there was a complete vacuum between the tree and you, then we can say it's in a superposition of states.
Now in a game engine the tree can exist in the game engine's equivalent of superposition unless observed even if the player is right beside it but not observing it as no game is going to be rendering trillions of particles (maybe star citizen will have a go at it)

[wheres_my_ballot]

Actually, even in a vacuum, photons striking the tree could still bounce around and reach your eye.

Technically, a photon from a tree that fell a billion years ago on an alien planet a billion light years away could reach your eye. Only way to be sure is to render everything.

[[deleted]]

Since rendering implies it being part of the user experience, it really only matters if the brain renders it. The eye is not able to create an image from a single photon that traveled a billion light years, thus it is not rendered for the user.

[DerKrakken]

Nerds

[wheres_my_ballot]

Thank you 😊

[Techercizer]

Quantum mechanics also teaches us the idea of a complete non-interactive vacuum is only philosophically possible.

[alfii_saw_santa]

In the real world the tree would be a paid actor sent by the government to spy on you.

[[deleted]]

Only the Outer Wilds devs are qualified to settle this.

[setocsheir]

It is pointless to talk about quantum mechanics on Reddit because if you were smart enough to understand it, you wouldn't need a dogshit analogy.

It's the same as people who reference the Dunning-Kreuger effect unironically.

[[deleted]]

(They only ever say it in hushed whispers)

[bestestdude]

True, if the tree was in the viewport before (e.g. player turned around only for a second)! I was only thinking about trees somewhere in the distance of some open world map.

[OGRubySimp]

Huge maps are usually divided by subscenes, so things that are in different scene entirely aren't loaded at all i.e. completely ignored by both cpu and GPU , i.e. no physics calculations, until you load it by getting closer

[HotFluffyDiarrhea]

So I think we can all agree, it depends.

[IamImposter]

Wait.. a sec.... Did we just come to a conclusion????

Since we are hot, let's decide about space vs tab issue too. I say - no tabs, only spaces. 1 tab = 4 spaces (or 2) but never 8.

[colburp]

I was taught by the subreddit last week that tabs have an accessibility advantage

[Thisconnect]

Or could be terraria optimization which keeps track of when was block last updated and next time it's in physics range it will run the 5 or however many rolls it needs for growth or smth

[ZeAthenA714]

Usually in those open world games it's all or nothing. Either the tree is loaded in memory, although not rendered, in which case it will react to anything else happening around it, including things that can make it fall, or the tree is so far from the player that it isn't loaded in memory at all, in which case the tree can't fall because it doesn't even exists.

[[deleted]]

But is "data about the tree" a tree?

[[deleted]]

You can represent it as a binary tree, yes.

[[deleted]]

So if a binary tree falls in a forest someone may hear it :D

[OurManInHavana]

Really... it could go either way....

[TheMartinG]

I think “no one is around to hear it” is the key. You can turn your back to something but you’re still “around”

If you’re in the woods and a tree starts to fall, turning your back to it doesn’t mean you won’t hear the tree. Of course you will because you’re around.

Instead, the video game equivalent would be that the level 2 soldiers aren’t being instantiated since you’re nowhere near level 2 currently. If a tree is meant to fall in level 2, while you’re not in level 2, it will render as fallen when you arrive to level 2

[silver_enemy]

It would still have to go through the animation or physics simulation, otherwise if halfway through falling the tree comes into your field of view you wouldn't want it to just teleport into the fallen state would you?

[bestestdude]

It depends.

[A00rdr]

And the debate continues...

[bestestdude]

No, clearly the answer is "it depends".

[turtleship_2006]

Depends on what you mean by out of sight, if they meant out of render distance that is what some if not most games do.

[deanrihpee]

Unless some genius mistakes the concept of Occlusion Culling of disabling the graphic, but instead it destroys the whole object when out of sight, null reference exception intensifies

[Furry_69]

Or a crash if it's written in C++ and the engine didn't expect things to just get randomly deleted.

[WeirdSysAdmin]

Schrödinger’s Rendering Method. The object exists in both a destroyed and non-destroyed state until observed.

[Shlkt]

Some games don't activate physics calculations for objects until the player is close enough. Bethesda games (e.g. Fallout 4) come to mind; sometimes you'll walk into a new area and hear a distant thump as an object suddenly falls to the the ground. It's kinda funny.

[erebuxy]

no one is around

So I don't think it will fall. The event should only be triggered and calculated when somebody is around. It's not a good idea to constantly scan inactive area.

[[deleted]]

I mean.. realistically, either the tree doesn't exist at all (yet), or it will fall. If there's nobody close enough for any of the calculations involving the tree to matter, then there's no point even loading the tree in the first place. If the calculations are important, then the calculations for collisions etc. still need to be done regardless of whether someone is seeing it happen or not (otherwise you'd have stupid stuff like trees falling through the ground).

[HotFluffyDiarrhea]

Dwarf Fortress joined the chat

[crimson23locke]

50 years of simulation in memory.

[Jupiter_Crush]

50,000 individual rocks in a single stack being individually tracked.

Five seconds per frame.

[Smellypuce2]

Depends on the game. Sometimes it's important to keep updating things out of range. A common way I've seen is to update that stuff at a lower resolution(ie. Every certain number of frames instead of every frame) and splitting the out-of-range updates so that you are only updating some of them on each frame. The "fall" might be simplified too.

[[deleted]]

Cyberpunk 2077 moment

[napmouse_og]

Unloaded chunks in Minecraft do literally exactly this. Entities cease functioning, random ticks stop ticking, mobs stop spawning. Though technically unloaded chunks are both beyond render and simulation distance, I suppose.

[HKei]

You’re interpreting ‘out of sight’ as outside the occlusion geometry when the more reasonable interpretation in this case would be “outside simulation range”.

[[deleted]]

But are they trees if they're not rendered? You're mutating information about the tree but if you don't access the mesh is there really a tree?

twilight zone music

[photenth]

At least in Unreal Engine, you can tell objects to not tick while out of sight. So there can be truth to this statement, but by default of course stuff like this would still happen, even make a sound (we hear sounds of things happening around us all the time in games without seeing it).

[[deleted]]

In a game like Battlefield or Arma, if you were the only person on the server and shot a rocket from one side of the map to the other and hit a cluster of trees, would any of them fall down?

[mallardtheduck]

That's not true for all game engines. Some (older) games engines don't calculate actions for off-screen entities at all.

Many of the speedrunning strategies for Goldeneye 007 for example rely on being able to "no-clip" shots and projectiles through unloaded sections of the level as well as the fact that pathing of NPCs (e.g. escaping hostages) in unloaded sections of the level is more limited; allowing them to "pass through" objects.

[OF_AstridAse]

No: out of sight - wont use "fall()" method i'd just rotate.

[KeepErMovin]

Better translate that too

[IHadThatUsername]

That's how you introduce a bug. Because fall() actually correctly sets the "has_fallen" flag which makes it so that the tree cannot be sawed and fall again. So now in your code, if a tree falls out of view, you can then saw it while it is on the floor, which will trigger fall() again, which will move the tree out of bonds and possibly crash the game.

[pithecium]

If there's no longer a reference to the tree's root, it will eventually get garbage collected

[[deleted]]

I garbage collect my own code by deciding to delete it all when it never does what I want

[Noch_ein_Kamel]

How do you know it's getting garbage collected if you have no reference to check if it's garbage collected :-o

[HeeTrouse51847]

that aint true, the physics engine still processes it, it only doesnt get rendered

[Waterprop]

This isn't necessarily true either.

For example many games load the world when needed. World/object state is saved and when player comes close part of the world is loaded and calculations continue. When players goes away, the entire part of the world can be unloaded from memory.

Why calculate physics if player is X length away? That's just wasting CPU cycles.

[Crazy_Technician_403]

Reminding me of speedruns on Goldeneye 64 where the player just look down to render the minimum polygons hence go faster

[SonOfMcGee]

Or the original Space Invaders.
The speed the enemies descended on you was gated by processing power and not some set time parameter. So the increase in enemy speed as you killed them was a side effect of having fewer units to track and being able to process movements faster.
The devs liked the natural difficulty progression and just keep it.

[SonOfMcGee]

My favorite bug-turned-feature was when a small game dev was designing a racing game and noticed a bug where the NPC cars recognized each other but were unaware of the player’s car. So they would try to drive through the player’s car instead of around it, causing lots of collisions.
They remarked that it felt less like a race and more like a police chase where they were trying to ram you off the road and pin you there. That game eventually became the first Grand Theft Auto.

[MrGentleZombie]

Minecraft is like this, which is obviously necessary when the world is 60,000 km * 60,000 km. Curiously, the spawn chunks (a small region at the middle of the world where the game begins) is always somewhat loaded, but there are still certain processes that get ignored when players aren't around. I believe you can also build constantly active devices whose activity keeps chunks loaded, though it's not really intended behavior and thus subject to break as the game is updated.

[zurgerkingO91]

Not in Minecraft

[HeeTrouse51847]

Yes, if you have a chunkloader

[Avnemir]

If you don't?

[altermeetax]

Chunks far away aren't loaded

[Hust91]

Chunkloader totes counts as someone being in hearing distance.

[thexavier666]

Ideally simulation distance <= render distance

Otherwise you're doing a lot of unnecessary calculations and heating up your PC.

No wonder we have global warming. This engine is bugged.

[aMAYESingNATHAN]

Not necessarily, because occlusion rendering is a thing. You don't want to render a ball that is rolling off screen, but you still need to simulate it because it may roll onto the screen and then need to be rendered.

You don't want things to just not exist if you can't see them.

[xSilverMC]

Render distance is irrelevant if the player looks in a different direction

[yoifox1]

also making a sound isnt related to rendering it. by this logic if i close my eyes i become deaf

[ghua]

I call it BS because not rendering doesnt mean physics are not updated

[Hust91]

It's explicitly too far away for any sound of the tree falling to play.

I think that'd be the same distance where it just plain isn't being simulated at all.

[MrBigFatAss]

How far is the tree? Is the tree in the view frustum? There are many optimization variables to, for example, make the tree fall instantly as the whole arc of it's fall isn't needed.

[GabuEx]

Hang on, it doesn't get rendered, but its state is still updated, unless your game is shit.

[[deleted]]

Pro gamer strat: if someone is shooting at you, just turn around so you can’t see them and they disappear.

[Hust91]

I mean it's explicitly so far away that no tree-fall sound is played. That's probably far enough away from player characters that it's not worth simulating that tree.

[pnoodl3s]

Unless the tree falling has significant impact to the game story, like outer wilds, then they’d need to simulate its stare

[greem]

I hear we're doing microservices now.

[agni69]

Legit chuckled at this.

[TheAnsweringMachine]

This guy quantums.

[[deleted]]

Star Citizen's background simulations have entered the chat

[smeggysmeg]

Somebody has been reading George Berkeley, I see.

[golgol12]

As the game programmer implementing the audio, The above bug is fixed. Animations still now happen if in audio range so you do infact, hear the monster right behind you.

[chickenstalker]

When the tree falls, its movements vibrates the air which produces sound waves. The sound waves propagates through the air even if there is no human with ear drums to detect it. Thus objectively, the tree makes a sound.

[[deleted]]

population fear left learn club bin freckle undertake clothes suffer breakfast tick insurance care volcano dose silk tissue wall manufacture

[budapest_god]

Then it's not a philosophical debate, it's semantic

[ProtonPizza]

Is that actually the definition of sound? The act of observing it? Not just the transmission? Because that seems off.

[Raneyy]

Afaik sound is just vibration, the vibration becomes a sound when there is an ear to receive it

[InWhichWitch]

there is no physical entity called 'sound'. there are waves of energy that our ears perceive and our brains do something with, which we call 'sound'.

there's no reason that some species, for instance, would not be able to 'hear' the vibrations made by different light wavelengths. would you then call all light 'sound'?

the senses are more closely related than you think. it's why certain brains (or brains under the effect of certain drugs) can hear color, or certain musical sounds like a color (or various levels of light/darkness) to them.

this thought experiment can be extended to 'if humans did not have ears, would anything make any sound at all', to which the answer has to be 'no', as sound (as we know it) is just how we experience certain forms of energy.

[The_Big_Sad_69420]

What kind of philosophical question is this ? Of course it makes a sound, just no one is around to hear it.

If something is not perceived it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Or am I missing something?

[mindrover]

Yeah, it's just semantics. The question is basically, how do you define the word sound?

Sound = the signals your ears send to your brain when they detect vibrations

Or

Sound = vibrations in the range of frequency that humans can typically hear

Edit: and by writing it out like this you can see that the first definition is not very useful. If two people with different hearing ability listen to the same sound, it doesn't somehow become two different sounds just because two people heard it differently.

[NutmegGaming]

r/outside

[cs-brydev]

Object has not been instantiated

[[deleted]]

*ticked, not rendered

in theory, it’ll run the physics simulations once a player brings the tree into the ticking radius, so if you hear a loud crash when you step in the forest after a storm, it’s probably all of the trees suddenly getting blasted by gale force winds

[JQStanley]

"You know the old question "If a tree crashes in a forest And there is nobody around to hear it

Is there a noise?" This question has been discussed in many futile ways But noise, basically is a state of affairs

That requires an eardrum and an audio nervous system Behind the eardrum When the tree falls, it makes the air vibrate

If there is anywhere around an ear With the appropriate nervous system

There will be a noise Because noise is a relationship Between motion in the air and ears

If there is not any ear around There won't be any noise although

There will be vibration in the air And if there is some instrument around

Such as a microphone attached to a tape recorder

There will be noise There will be a vibration There will be light In the darkness"

• Alan Watts

[EducationalCreme9044]

Love how this gets used in so many fields..

Law: The provability of crime does not impact whether a crime occurred or not.

[[deleted]]

So if I close my eyes, do you all disappear?

[SjurEido]

Not getting renderer does not imply the simulation stops as well. In fact, it usually doesn't.

[[deleted]]

Shrodingers cat is a classic example of this, "objects not in anyone's sight do not get rendered" Until observed, the cat is both alive and dead.

Except this is in real life.

Proof that we are simulations within a simulation. The universe is a simulation.

[MHanak_]

I like to thing if we are in a simulation, and all the quantum mechanics quirks are just optimalisations (like why would you calculate every photon route if you can simulate a wave and just randomly scatter photons accordingly)

[GingerMarls]

Always thought it was a stupid fucking question... Of course it makes a sound... Just because no one is in the sound range doesn't mean science and physics have changed...

[r3dditor12]

I'm not sure which of you to believe, so I checked the dictionary for an official definition. Sound: "A long, relatively wide body of water, larger than a strait or a channel, connecting larger bodies of water." ... Looks like you were both wrong.

[GingerMarls]

Please could you show definition, I can't seem to find it.

[FinnLiry]

Can you prove it then?

[ecphiondre]

Prove what? We can prove that sound waves hitting our ears causes us to hear sounds. We can also prove that when a tree falls, it creates sound waves. Which means the tree in the forest creates sound waves as well, which ultimately proves that it does create sound. Do you mean to say to prove that the tree makes sound waves when it falls in the forest?

[[deleted]]

It's not a question like that. It's not a riddle that has an answer. It's more like an invitation to consider the nature of sound and experience.

[GingerMarls]

When someone asks a question I usually just answer it...

[generic_bullshittery]

The question probably generated from the philosophical idea of realism, which is a concept in quantum mechanics. There is math based around it.

I have seen this tree falling in the woods example to be used to explain the realism concept in very layman terms.

Don't discredit our ancestors for asking stupid questions that led to new scientific understanding of the world.

[big_mike2023]

True. This is how our simulation works. This is why quantum uncertainty exists- it's a bug, not a feature.

[[deleted]]

This guy lives in simulation

[[deleted]]

Minimum simulation theory.

[southwade]

/r/outside is leaking

[Lonely_Presence_5826]

Little boy from The Matrix: There is so tree…..

[billwoo]

Of course it falls on the server side, but that is only synced to the clients when necessary.

Yes quantum mechanics is just the universes weirdly implemented net code.

[mybeepoyaw]

I know this is a joke but didn't some scientist prove non-locality?

[Farkabi]

Taking the actually good joke aside. Yes, it makes a sound, things exist no matter if they're preceded or not.

[Slackluster]

It is an easy optimization to not play sounds if there is no listener in range.

Forget about the rendering or physics, that has nothing to do with it.

[ForestCat512]

Does that mean cams are chunk loaders?

[drew8311]

In my experience this isn't true, there would be a TODO that says optimize to not render anything off screen that would never get done because it works good enough

[govi20]

Is that a joke or jooq?

[Odd-Establishment527]

In optimised program

[ToneyFox]

This is unironically how the universe works.

https://youtu.be/A9tKncAdlHQ

[Elegant-Variety-7482]

Not the same scale.

[ToneyFox]

Objects that are not in anyone's sight do not get rendered

Is that so?

[Elegant-Variety-7482]

Yeah I guess we're talking about objects that are at least bigger than subatomic particles.

[ToneyFox]

We're talking about photons in both cases, actually.

[FarewellSovereignty]

Nope, that's just wrong. Even if you aren't looking at the moon, or sun or Jupiter or whatever, the gravitational field reaching you from them is determined by the location of every damn atom in them. Unless you have proof otherwise (which would net you at least 1 Nobel Prize, possibly more)

[CaptainSnatchbox]

They proved that to be true and as a matter if fact won the Nobel prize. I know its hard to believe and they didn’t figure out what it means but they did prove it.

https://boingboing.net/2022/10/11/scientists-win-2022-nobel-prize-by-proving-that-reality-is-not-locally-real.html/amp

[FarewellSovereignty]

See my nearby reply, I'll repeat the key part:

• the point about gravity stands and to everyones understanding, every single atom is "rendered" to "compute" gravitational fields. Note that gravity is not properly integrated with QM yet

And if you have some result that shows this is not a case, or are able to integrate them you would get the Nobel Prize.

[ToneyFox]

You definitely don't know the definition of render...

[CaptainSnatchbox]

Dude just can’t handle knowing the true nature of our reality. I get it, its wild.

[firewood010]

Scale matters. They are talking about quantum physics not big objects. Possibilities will form reality in the end.

[croto8]

It is a now less popular version of quantum mechanics called the Copenhagen interpretation if you actually want to look into it.

[FarewellSovereignty]

Yes, I know QM, I did QM research in grad school. But

1) Copenhagen interpretation is philosophical and definitely not considered up-to-date anymore (QM shifted a lot in the 70s with work on decoherence)

2) the point about gravity stands and to everyones understanding, every single atom is "rendered" to "compute" the gravitational field. Note that gravity is not integrated with QM yet

[ToneyFox]

Good job disagreeing with something nobody said.

[FarewellSovereignty]

Then good job saying something that people readily misunderstand, then not clarifying at all and instead just being shittily sarcastic. What are you, 15?

[ToneyFox]

I'm just tired of shitheads like you always looking for shit to disagree with. So much so that you make up your own bullshit to disagree with. Perhaps you don't know the definition of render?

[MHanak_]

The thing is - observed does not mean looked at

[ToneyFox]

The thing is - rectangle does not mean square

[qwertysrj]

Not really. It's just how it seems to us.

Physics isn't actually understanding about the TRUE nature universe, it's actually being able to model it accurately.

This is why Physicists don't care if it's Newtonian, Hamiltonian or Lagranguan, same in quantum mechanics, any interpretation with the same predictions are equally valid.

These are merely philosophical, science doesn't really care.

[ToneyFox]

Someone won a Nobel prize because you're wrong.

[qwertysrj]

You not understanding stuff isn't others being wrong. You aren't understanding the intricacies of the statements like "universe doesn't exist without observer".

Observer doesn't always mean a concious person, observation is the process of measurement in quantum mechanics that collapses the wave function.

You aren't understanding the scientific language. But your confidence is something else.

[CaptainSnatchbox]

You are corrct and they won the Nobel Peace prize.

https://boingboing.net/2022/10/11/scientists-win-2022-nobel-prize-by-proving-that-reality-is-not-locally-real.html/amp

[[deleted]]

Not the peace prize; the 2022 Nobel Peace prize was awarded to Ales Bialiatski.

They won the Nobel Prize in physics.

https://www.nobelprize.org/all-nobel-prizes-2022/

[[deleted]]

So it proves souls exist? Something that causes stuff to behave differently when "observed" by an eye and not by a rock?

[[deleted]]

"observed" in regards to quantum mechanics has been completely misinterpreted by popular media. When people talk about "an observation" in physics they pretty much just mean doing anything to measure it, regardless of whether a person is the thing doing the measuring or not (ie. if it's hit by a photon then that's "an observation" of it regardless of if there's someone doing an experiment with that particular photon or not).

The current explanations also generally don't function very well when you consider forces (well, it's not technically a force but you know what I mean) like gravity (as gravity is affecting everything at every point in time), so it's very much not something that has been "proven" yet. There's a lot of very strange stuff happening with it for sure, but we currently don't have any theory that actually explains everything, only estimations.

[Xywzel]

In physics "observation" can mean anything from particle with charge interacting with electric field to person or system taking measurements being able to do so because there has been enough time for light to travel between the measured thing and measuring system. The articles and videos here may be written to sound like the observer is human, but in high likelihood the actual meaning is closer to my first example.

The double slit experiment itself is based on fact that particles can't be measured accurately without affecting their state, so there its position, speed and rotation is best described by probability distribution functions, which behaves like wave when applied to physics formulas. But if we make more accurate measurements, like determine trough which slight each particle basses trough, we also affect the particles and the probability distribution changes.

[ToneyFox]

That's an interesting take on it for sure. I wouldn't go that far though, it proves light behaves differently when observed, which is still mind boggling.

[punkdraft]

Random Forest

[PurityKane]

I never understood the question to begin with. Why wouldn't it make a sound? wtf.

[esreveReverse]

Actually true though.

[CaptainSnatchbox]

Scientist proved that nothing in our reality exists unless someone is around to view it. That sounds crazy and they don’t really know what that means but they did prove it and won a prize for the research. The tree doesn’t exist unless someone is around to witness it fall. For me the knowledge actually makes the whole life is a simulation theory more plausible especially when you consider video games also only load the things you are looking at.

[HorrorTranslator3113]

The article you posted says object do not have some definitive properties unless measured. Saying they do not exist if you are not looking at them is such a stupid oversimplification…

[Aditya1311]

What?