This message means something analogous to: “You loaded a file, but now the file doesn’t exist anymore (on disk), so I can’t update it with your changes. You can discard the loaded copy, but consider copying its contents first and create a new file from it, because for some technical reason I can’t do this myself.”
This Message Does Not Exist
41–50 of 278 posts
Re: This Message Does Not Exist
#42I've had similar philosophical thoughts about a transaction rollback. Consider this definition from go's database/sql package. func (tx *Tx) Rollback() error Rollback can fail, indicated as such by it can return an error. What are the cases where rollback could fail and what's the recovery mechanism? Does a failed rollback mean (logically) that the transaction is still open and uncommitted? But really, invoking rollb…
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Re: This Message Does Not Exist
#43Oh, finally a chance to put my Philosophy degree to use! The error says the "message" does not exist, but the message is not the same as the text. The message is an object that can be saved or discarded, and it contains text. The text still exists and can be copied, but the message is gone and can't be saved anymore.
"the message does not exist in our system, only in your browser as text, copy and save it if you want to keep it, if you refresh this page the text will disappear"
Re: This Message Does Not Exist
#44This reminds of a choice I once saw between the following:
“Save this Credit Card”
Or
“Never save this Credit Card”
With hashing and things, the latter is certainly possible, but I got a good chuckle out of it.
Re: This Message Does Not Exist
#45Re: This Message Does Not Exist
#46Oh, finally a chance to put my Philosophy degree to use! The error says the "message" does not exist, but the message is not the same as the text. The message is an object that can be saved or discarded, and it contains text. The text still exists and can be copied, but the message is gone and can't be saved anymore.
It's still funny that the text of a message can exist without being a message itself. That must make sense in the specific context of Outlook, but it shows that the conceptual design of the software does not match how we want to think about the domain abstractly.
Re: This Message Does Not Exist
#47I do not think you need a philosophical degree to handle this. A law degree is enough. Just add “legally” before “exist” and everything makes its perfect legal sense again.
Indeed, since this person… I mean message - is not in the list of ones legally allowed to exist, you can’t hire it, can’t fire it, the only thing you can do with it legally - is to kill it. But that does not prevent you from searching its pockets first and making use of its valuables.
(Sorry for the gallows humor).
Re: This Message Does Not Exist
#48Isn't all of this just equivalent to a pointer? "This variable doesn't exist" is a reasonable error message when you're, for example, dereferencing a pointer with a wrong data type: it could be the equivalent of "there's no integer at this address" or "this integer doesn't exist".
The problematic "this" is just an indexical in that case, and it works fine in terms of ontology, just like we might say "this house doesn't exist", while pointing at a burned up lot. Any fluent speaker of English will understand that, just like how they'd understand a description of the Parthenon as "this is a great temple", while looking at a ruin.
"This email doesn't exist" is not really problematic; the metadata persists but the body and subject have been deleted, plus whatever else constitutes "a message" in this schema. We can refer to it, because the pointers still exist, but the value at the address is gone.
The house might not exist anymore, but the address still does.
Re: This Message Does Not Exist
#49The message is the glue that binds reality and unreality. It exists, existed, never existed, all at the same time.
It is the paradox of creation, of existence, of dissolution and of consciousness.
Re: This Message Does Not Exist
#50My favorite Windows error message:
"Unknown device (not found)"