[dead]
Cosmologically Unique IDs
11–20 of 159 posts
Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs
#12> In order to fix this, we might start sending out satellites in every direction
Minor correction: Satellites don't go in every direction; they orbit. Probes or spaceships are more appropriate terms.
Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs
#13Just past page 281 of Becky Chambers's delightful "the galaxy, and the ground within" . Received Message Encryption: 0 From: GC Transit Authority --- Gora System (path: 487-45411-479-4) To: Ooli Oht Ouloo (path: 5787-598-66) Subject: URGENT UPDATE Man I love the series. Looks like this multispecies universe has centrally-agreed-upon path addressing system.
You should check out Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep for more fun examples of how intra-galactic communication would be labeled, with routes & such.
Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs
#14> In order to fix this, we might start sending out satellites in every direction Minor correction: Satellites don't go in every direction; they orbit. Probes or spaceships are more appropriate terms.
Maybe they meant at every inclination. ;)
Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs
#15This analysis is not quite fair. It takes into account locality (i.e. the speed of light) when designing UUID schemes but not when computing the odds of a collision. Collisions only matter if the colliding UUIDs actually come into causal contact with each other after being generated. So just as you have to take locality into account when designing UUID trees, you also have to take it into account when computing the o…
You must consider both time and locality.
From now until protons decay and matter does not exist anymore is only 10^56 nanoseconds.
Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs
#16Fun read. One upside of the deterministic schemes is they include provenance/lineage. Can literally "trace up" the path the history back to the original ID giver. Kinda has me curious about how much information is required to represent any arbitrary provenance tree/graph on a network of N-nodes/objects (entirely via the self-described ID)? (thinking in the comment: I guess if worst case linear chain, and you assume t…
The ATProto underlying BlueSky social network is similar. It uses a content-addressed DAG.
Each “post” has a CID, which is a cryptographic hash of the data. To “prove” ownership of the post, there’s a witness hash that is sent that can be proved all the way up the tree to the repo root hash, which is signed with the root key.
Neat way of having data say “here’s the data, and if you care to verify it, here’s an MST”.
Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs
#17This analysis is not quite fair. It takes into account locality (i.e. the speed of light) when designing UUID schemes but not when computing the odds of a collision. Collisions only matter if the colliding UUIDs actually come into causal contact with each other after being generated. So just as you have to take locality into account when designing UUID trees, you also have to take it into account when computing the o…
You must consider both time and locality. From now until protons decay and matter does not exist anymore is only 10^56 nanoseconds.
If we think of the many worlds interpretation, how many universes will we be making every time we assign a CCUID to something?
Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs
#18I forget the context but the other day I also learned about Snowflake IDs [1] that are apparently used by Twitter, Discord, Instagram, and Mastodon.
Timestamp + random seems like it could be a good tradeoff to reduce the ID sizes and still get reasonable characteristics, I'm surprised the article didn't explore there (but then again "timestamps" are a lot more nebulous at universal scale I suppose). Just spitballing here but I wonder if it would be worthwhile to reclaim ten bits of the Snowflake timestamp and use the low 32 bits for a random number. Four billion IDs for each second.
There's a Tom Scott video [2] that describes Youtube video IDs as 11-digit base-64 random numbers, but I don't see any official documentation about that. At the end he says how many IDs are available but I don't think he considers collisions via the birthday paradox.
Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs
#19I'd propose using our current view of physical reality to own a subset of the UIID + version field if new physics is discovered. 10-20 bits: version/epoch 10-20 bits: cosmic region 40 bits: galaxy ID 40 bits: stellar/planetary address 64 bits: local timestamp This avoids the potentially pathological long chain of provenance, and also encodes coordinates into it. Every billion years or so it probably makes sense to re…
As for coordinates, don’t forget galaxies are clouds of stars flowing around and interacting with each other.
Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs
#20This analysis is not quite fair. It takes into account locality (i.e. the speed of light) when designing UUID schemes but not when computing the odds of a collision. Collisions only matter if the colliding UUIDs actually come into causal contact with each other after being generated. So just as you have to take locality into account when designing UUID trees, you also have to take it into account when computing the o…
You must consider both time and locality. From now until protons decay and matter does not exist anymore is only 10^56 nanoseconds.
I got a big laugh at the “only” part of that. I do have a sincere question about that number though, isn’t time relative? How would we know that number to be true or consistent? My incredibly naive assumption would be that with less matter time moves faster sort of accelerating; so, as matter “evaporates” the process accelerates and converges on that number (or close it)?