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Cosmologically Unique IDs

jasonfantl.com

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Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs

#41

Post by buzzerbetrayed »

ekipan wrote: post #18

I 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…

Getting the entire universe to agree on a single clock for creating timestamps sounds absurdly difficult. Probably impossible?

Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs

#42

Post by roywiggins »

mock-possum wrote: post #39
frikit wrote: post #37

The best way to solve this is not to, and just giving up on the idea of identification. If you have an infinite multiverse of infinite universes, and perhaps layers on that, with different physics, etc., you can’t have identity outside of all existence. In Judaism, one/the name of God is translated as “I am”. I believe this is because God’s existence is all, transcending whatever concepts you have of existence or of…

which name of god though - there are hundreds, and were right back at the same place of struggling to come up with a unique identifier.

gotta be careful:

https://hex.ooo/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.html

Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs

#43

Post by svnt »

lisper wrote: post #7

This 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…

Maybe the definitions are shifting, but in my experience “on point” is typically an endorsement in the area of “really/precisely good” — so I think what you mean is “on topic” or similar.

Pedantry ftw.

Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs

#44

Post by swiftcoder »

ekipan wrote: post #18

I 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…

> [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_ID

Isn't this just the same scheme as version 1 UUID, except with half the bits? I guess they didn't want to dedicate 128 bits to their IDs.

Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs

#45

Post by m4nu3l »

A more realistic estimate of the total number of addressable things should take into account that for anything to be addressable, its address should be stored somewhere at least once.

If it takes at least Npb particles to store one bit of information, then the number of addressable things would decrease with the number of bits of the address.

So let's call Nthg the number of addressable things, and assume the average number of bits per address grows with Nb = f(Ntng).

Then the maximum number of addressable things is the number that satisfies Nthg = Np/(Npb*f(Ntng)), where Np is the total number of particles.

Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs

#46

Post by lisper »

svnt wrote: post #43
lisper wrote: post #7

This 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…

Maybe the definitions are shifting, but in my experience “on point” is typically an endorsement in the area of “really/precisely good” — so I think what you mean is “on topic” or similar. Pedantry ftw.

:-)

Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs

#47

Post by petcat »

rbanffy wrote: post #17
u1hcw9nx wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> many worlds interpretation

These are only namespaces. Many worlds can have all the same (many) random numbers and they will never conflict with each other!

Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs

#48

Post by pavel_lishin »

rini17 wrote: post #24

From real life we know that people prefer to have multiple anonymous IDs, or self-selected handles, either makes fully deterministic generation schemes moot. Also, network routing requires objects that have multiple addresses. Physics side of whole thing is funny too, afaik quantum particles require fungibility, i.e. by doxxing atoms you unavoidably change the behavior of the system.

> From real life we know that people prefer to have multiple anonymous IDs

There's nothing stopping a entity from requesting multiple IDs from one of the "devices"!

Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs

#49

Post by hamdingers »

scotty79 wrote: post #21
u1hcw9nx wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must consider both time and locality. From now until protons decay and matter does not exist anymore is only 10^56 nanoseconds.

Proton decay is hypothetical.

So is the need for cosmologically unique IDs. We're having fun.
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