I regularly seek inspiration by taking long solo walks; and during my most recent such, considering what practical consequences (if any) there would be of the universe I know being a simulation - something flipped in my head, and I thought to myself, "Screw the simulators. If I'm the first copy of me, I should make it as hard as possible for any simulation of me to keep up with me - and if I'm a simulation, I'm going to try to do even better than my original did."
Ignoring the impracticality of trying to out-do myself, is there anything that someone living in an 'original' universe can do that would make it harder for a future simulator to reproduce them? And, mirror-wise, is there anything someone in a simulated universe could do to differentiate themselves from their original? And, if the answer to either question is 'yes'... would it be a good or bad idea to try?
(And is there any way to gather any actual data that might support the answers to such questions, instead of merely making guesses of a similar nature to classic college/stoner "Our whole universe could be, like, an /atom/, man" musings?)
It was in counter to some musings I was having, along the lines of "Is there anything I can do to make myself more interesting, in the sense of being more likely to be re-simulated?. If I tried, I could probably arrange to get myself namedropped in a published novel by a prizewinning authour, and thus anyone who wanted to simulate that particular fictional universe would also end up simulating me, as well. But do I really want to arrange my life to suit the hypothesized interests of future simulation-creators?"
If you are living in a simulation and the anthropic principle holds, then yes, you probably do want to arrange your life to be interesting.