A few New Scientist pieces on quantum mechanics — including one describing the universe as a web of relationships between forces, with no fundamental particles underneath — sent me down a familiar rabbit hole: what if the universe is a computer? I'll caveat this heavily. Humans find patterns where there are none, and any theory like this is built out of the limits of current understanding. But the fit is fun to sit with.
Start with the fact that the universe has hard limits on measurement. The Planck length is believed to be the smallest meaningful unit of distance, with Planck time as its companion — the smallest meaningful tick — both falling out of relativity and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. As far as physics is concerned, there is nothing smaller. The very small bottoms out there, just as the very large tops out at the size of the visible universe. Those look an awful lot like the bounds of a simulation: Planck time as the clock frequency, Planck length or mass as the size of a single bit.
Then quantum mechanics' strangeness starts to look like an optimization. If you were actually running this universe, you would not want to compute the exact position of every particle at every tick — that's absurdly expensive. Far cheaper to carry probabilities and only resolve an exact value when something forces the issue: when a particle enters the causal chain and gets observed. Which is more or less what quantum mechanics does. I don't understand the math nearly well enough to defend this, and it may dissolve under real scrutiny — but as a programmer, the idea of the cosmos doing lazy evaluation is strangely satisfying.