In part, that's what I mean by the limitations of the metaphor. If you use a purely describable model of the universe, i.e. one that just takes what is there and tries to reason with it, then you're right. If we discover we're running on a stack machine and you can inject arbitrary code into the computer (to take an extreme example), then we could (and probably would) say "oh, okay, so physical reality is running on a computer and the computer is what really is".
On a more intuitive level, though, I still think it would make sense to speak of "hacking the universe". In that example, what you've hacked is not the real construct of the universe, but some kind of virtualization layer whose abstraction was far from perfect. Yet that virtualization layer is what reality seems like.
Now you can imagine having a series of universes where the virtualization layer is more and more like the underlying layer, and then there's no point (Sorites-like) where I can say that "getting to the underlying layer was hacking in universe X, but now that we're in universe Y where the two layers are just a little bit more similar, it's no longer hacking".
Thus, like the heap that doesn't become un-heap at some well defined number of grains of sand, the idea of when it's hacking and when it's not isn't rigorously defined. It's more an observation that if I saw there being a very limited set of actions through which you could seemingly do the impossible, I'd quite likely think "the universe shouldn't have acted like that". If it were a computer program, the program shouldn't have acted like that.
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On a more intuitive level, though, I still think it would make sense to speak of "hacking the universe". In that example, what you've hacked is not the real construct of the universe, but some kind of virtualization layer whose abstraction was far from perfect. Yet that virtualization layer is what reality seems like.
Now you can imagine having a series of universes where the virtualization layer is more and more like the underlying layer, and then there's no point (Sorites-like) where I can say that "getting to the underlying layer was hacking in universe X, but now that we're in universe Y where the two layers are just a little bit more similar, it's no longer hacking".
Thus, like the heap that doesn't become un-heap at some well defined number of grains of sand, the idea of when it's hacking and when it's not isn't rigorously defined. It's more an observation that if I saw there being a very limited set of actions through which you could seemingly do the impossible, I'd quite likely think "the universe shouldn't have acted like that". If it were a computer program, the program shouldn't have acted like that.