Hacking the simulation from inside is tricky. You run into all sorts of halting problems and the like. Rowhammer and similar may look like they are hacking from inside but in reality they are doing it with an outside knowledge of the system they are running on.

The Truman show 2.0

That was easy!

Long before the current simulation fad began..
It was postulated that this was a "grown reality and universe"
Somewhat similar to say a hothouse horticultural research experiment. Or say ..a lab experiment and we are in the Petrie dish.
More stark were the theories surrounding the reason "why do this?"..
The most probable answers were...
not any "advanced" or divine reason..
But narrowed down to 2 most likely possible reasons.
1- there is more than one petrie dish in the lab...more than ones garden plant in the hothouse.
This is just one "place"....among many.
The purpose and why...
for which began as either "amusement" and "learning and education"...
Other petrie dishes ..or plants were to a lesser degree engineered with many safeties..
But the learning curve was shallow.
This one we are in was engineered to be dangerous...a challenge...and those entering ...upon leaving...did not return to the lab....to the hothouse...but went elsewhere...
Hence the curiosity....those looking for answers..those looking for loved ones who came here but have not come back....and explains the expansion of the numbers of the species .
A good few texts were written on this particular theory.
It also goes on to speak of the fact the lab...the hothouse...with fewer and fewer and finally no engineers to maintain it...
This place has become even more dangerous..
The garden going to seed...growing wild...and no one maintaining it...

The second theory is one that was far more dire...
The reason for this "construct" (frankly I like that term far better...since the whole current "simulation" craze is based almost completely on the context of computer code...whereas a "construct" implies any number of possible permutating studies to complete the desired "effect")
Anyway...the more dire reason for this construct being...that it was built by us in escape from either an environment that was completely inhospitable to life of any sort.
And / or ...was engineered as the most practical, economical , least resource consuming method of escape from the original creation ...due to depleted resources, planet wide or exo threat ..such as the sun flaring to the point of crisping us all..or any number of other cosmological accidents ...

Since space faring is costly...and time is the issue...
Since this method of micronization may be more practical for migration ...to provide us with an exact replica of the place we left...and the issues we had to face and have yet to face...
Buying us time to solve them...and possibly live happily here...possibly go back...
The big issue with that is...
Billions of years have passed here...
How much time since we actually "left" the last place...
A few nanoseconds? A few minutes? A few years?
If we break the petrie dish...
Would suddenly we be forced to deal with dillemas that we are unprepared for? That we technically just left mere moments ago?
What if it is an imminient catastrophic event whixh we fled which was unavoidable....but we bought ourselves trillions of years to figure out how to live happily here....or go deeper still into another petrie dish fleeing deeper still...?

excellent books...
I have them here in my library somewhere...

I am not a philosopher, but to me, there is a crucial difference between an experiment running in a lab and a simulation. In the former, the subjects being observed exist in the same reality as the observer, only constrained. In the latter, the subjects exist in their own, separate reality.

I took philo...
not as useless as some may think it a study to be...
It means that problem solving...logic study....understanding questions...how to pose them...uncovering them...and asking more..as much as making sense of the world and when new innovation and discovery...occurs...being able to adjust and adapt to them and understand the "Why's?" better...

right...so a simulation was created ...for the simplest "context" possible...
where exactly?
In a "laboratory" a "research facility" a "testing stage" of some kind.

"simulation" of some kind of giant computer is about as limiting as a concept as it gets...to put the parameters of this place being a simulation of a computer generated origin..is as human and closed a concept as it gets.

The moment one conceives of an "outside" and an "inside" the most natural next step is to put conditions on the place out of similarity to the one inhabiting either of the two.
Some extrapolation ...some few differences may occur..
But the likelihood that the "other" place is vastly different to ours is highly unlikely.
You work with what already exists around you...

There is not one totally "alien" thing or concept that we as a species can come up with ...that isn't based in part on the natural laws existent as its base...at the least.

One does not create from a "nothing" from a "no concept of anything at all"
One creates and extrapolates based on what surrounds one...
regardless it being a wet brain (biological) or dry brain (computer) ..
this place is "experiential"
Plain and simple.
Ergo ...it has been based on a similar "experiential" origin.

I am nowhere near as eloquent as you are, but I can try clarifying what I mean by giving an example.

• Dropping a drop of chemical into a beaker...
• Growing cells in a Petri dish...
• Placing a boy rabbit and a girl rabbit in the same cage...
• Smashing a vase with a hammer...
• Shooting an accelerated helium nucleus against a gold plate...

...and seeing what happens, are all "real world" experiments. Some of them are more constrained than others but they are all real objects in our own world.

In contrast,

• Feeding a computer program with a set of formulas describing what happens when you do any of the above and running that program...
• Shifting toy battleships over a map...
• Following a board game, with or without an actual board...
• Writing a story in a book...

...are all simulations. The objects in these scenarios are not real objects in our reality, only their representations. But in their own reality, they are very real. What for you are two toy battleships moved around the map, from the point of view of those battleships may be a real naval combat with real people screaming in agony. Characters in that book are just words on paper in our world, but in their own they are real people with real problems, dreams and ambitions.

The word "simulation" does not necessarily have to involve a computer. And I do not necessarily restrict my definition of a "computer" either. A "computer" in my view is "any autonomous device that can execute the simulation without an external interference". Three out of my four examples do not involve any such device.

Put in a single sentence, "an experiment is a simulation when the subject exists in a different reality than the observer."

still...
all your examples follow concepts which are grounded in our reality.
which have a base in our reality.
for even a concept as linear as a simulation...there must be an environment for it in which the apparatus operates.
There must be given natural laws there.
and to construct said simulation, the simulated environment must have some basis of the original built in.
One cannot build a cat without knowing of cats.
One cannot build an experiential universe without experiencing one.
regardless of the construction being done by a wet brain or a dry brain. Or both.

Of course! All my examples are simulations for the purpose of creating an alternative version of our own reality. That is the usual application of simulation. To make it easier, faster, cheaper or even possible to tweak parameters in way you could not in real life and run the simulation again.

But there is nothing stopping you from being creative. You do not need to simulate "a cat", modeling it on Mrs Mittens. You can simulate the evolution of cats by starting from an Archean amoeba and tweaking the environmental factors in various ways to see what comes out the other end after 3 billion years.

Indeed. But those laws may be diametrically different from those in your own reality. Gravity can be negative.Your cat's mass may depend on the temperature.. The Sun can suck the light and heat rather than radiate it. Time can go sideways.

Of course you start from what you know but that is your own limitation, not the limitation on the possibilities of simulation.