[dead]
>the assumption that 'close enough' is actually 'good enough' for uniqueness
i'm pretty sure it's "far enough" that makes it "good enough"
Cosmologically Unique IDs
71–80 of 159 posts
Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs
#72Specifying a CSPRNG as an entropy source to avoid collision is incorrect. CSPRNGs make prediction of the next number difficult (cracking-AES difficulty) but do not add entropy and must be seeded uniquely otherwise they will output the same numbers. Unless the author is proposing having the same machine generate a single universe-scale list in one run. Also “banning” ids that are all 1s or 0s is silly; they are just a…
Banning 0s might be to avoid conflicts of with testing? Kind of like how you’d want to block logins with emails that have a domain example.com. Idk I’m grasping at straws
Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
So we need to be careful. We do not know what happens after we assign all UUIDs.
Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Protons (and mass and energy) could also potentially be created. If this happens, the heat death could be avoided. Conservation of mass and energy is an empirical observation, there is no theoretical basis for it. We just don't know any process we can implement that violates it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Conservation laws result from continuous symmetries in the laws of physics, as proven by Noether's theorem.
Time translation symmetry implies energy conservation, but time translation symmetry is only an empirical observation on a local scale and has not been shown to be true on a global universe scale.
Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs
#75This 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…
[dead]
Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was my thought. Nanoseconds are an eternity. You want to be using Planck units for your worst-case analysis.
If you go far beyond nanoseconds, energy becomes a limiting factor. You can only achieve ultra-fast processing if you dedicate vast amounts of matter to heat dissipation and energy generation. Think on a galactic scale: you cannot have even have molecular reaction speeds occurring at femtosecond or attosecond speeds constantly and everywhere without overheating everything.
If you have a black hole as an infinite heat sink this helps a great deal.
Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs
#77I 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?
Neutron star spins collectively can be used as a pretty accurate clock.
Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs
#78Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs
#79The obvious solution is a system like IP addresses. Every system has an address like
universe.galaxy.region.system or whatever, then the system is subdivided in whatever way is logical for that system.
That way you can route ships or data or whatever to a specific system in a logical way. Each system decides how to allocate addresses. Since most systems won’t have anything or anyone to care, something like NASA or registrars would just allocate a block to the system and give large things like planets an address.
Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs
#80but can you have an id for every id?