this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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Science Memes
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It's really an astrophysics joke disguised as a computer science joke. Hawking radiation is the term for radiation that escapes a black hole. /dev/null is kinda analogous to—at least the pop culture conception of—a black hole.
I thought it was an Epstein files joke
But in this context, it's about the loss of information, getting scrambled inside a black hole and then VERY slowly radiating back into space as gibberish.
It's a point where thermodynamics, entropy, Relativity and the quantum realm create a paradox - classical physics states that information supposedly cannot be destroyed... and yet in this extreme environment, it IS destroyed.
Awesome, thanks!!