This Message Does Not Exist
kmjn.org
kmjn.org
https://philpapers.org/rec/SIDTAM
> According to an intuitive semantics for 'I,' 'here' and 'now,' 'I am not here now' should always be false when uttered. But occurrences of 'I am not here now' on an answering machine seem to be true (when the speaker is not home).
(If you're interested, you can google for "answering machine paradox" for more takes on it.)
This is only a paradox if you think of language as a way of describing some "real", static state of affairs in the world (look up " correspondence theory of truth"). There is no paradox here if we think of language as pragmatic, action directing, since it is obvious what the sentence should convey (look up "pragmatism"). Some people will argue that there is some sort of static meaning hidden behind the actual words which enters the consciousness of the listener, others will say that the meaning is only generated by the person hearing the words.
This is as philosophical of a question as it gets, and has been debated even more heatedly ever since Wittgenstein.
If you do not see that debating these questions is relevant and interesting, but would rather reduce all of philosophy to that first obvious-seeming and thus "not a real problem" position, then I wish you a good time bathing in your ignorance.
However, if you comprehend that what we take for granted in every area and discipline can be subjected to reasonable reflection, then I welcome you to the dark side. Nothing is clear, no knowledge absolute - many engineers seem to forget this while over-indulging in an overly simplistic world view :)
There are many similar situations where what we hear, read or see is technically incorrect. Since the sender (or the activator of an agent) of the message in such case assumes the interpreter has enough common knowledge, it is a perfectly okay communication.
A video tape containing a recording: "your watching this means I'm dead."
A secretary of a company impersonating the company when sending a message to many recipients.
An actor speaking about his character, as if they are somebody they know very well.
Writing that an AI hallucinates.
My car informing me that one of the tyres is low on pressure, even though it does not know what a tyre is, let alone how to measure pressure.
Thank you for putting this in a larger philosophical prospective. For I have something on the next level, a car that tells me "a tire has low pressure", but does NOT tell me which tire it is. I did the best I could to understand why my beloved car would do this, but gave up and had to interpret it as a deliberately malicious act.
My suspicions were confirmed when 1 of 4 sensors (inside the tires) had failed, and the technician read the diagnostic and proceeded directly to the tire in question. I had been desperately holding on to the remote possibility that the car really didn't know which tire has low pressure or which sensor failed, but it told the technician but not me.
I am wondering if it would be best to give the car to the technician to ensure my personal safety. How would the next aspect of this dislike manifest? Most scenarios I can think of result in the car's own suicide, but perhaps it will run me over? Please help.
Signed, LOW TIRE PRESSURE
As a possible exception, anaphora/cataphora resolution is pretty well-studied and for example is supported in spaCy (https://spacy.io/universe/project/neuralcoref), but this is mapping one word in an utterance to another word in the utterance, rather than to an entity in the context.
It relies on a pretty obvious mischaracterization of the situation at hand - there isn't a person saying "I am not here" at all, it's a machine playing a recording. With the necessary context, the dilemma becomes a pretty obvious non-dilemma.
If you're saying we should be willing to explore our minds through philosophical problems, I agree with you. I just think this particular philosophical problem is pretty lame.
Is the conclusion supposed to be that that formal meaning of any particular word is less important than the ability to communicate abstract ideas? That's an interesting notion though I'd argue that notion isn't helped by a half-broken analogy.
The programming analogy would be that processing a particular type of data will often have hidden pitfalls for the most intuitive approach. It might be easy to avoid those pitfalls by modifying your program, but someone had to notice and document the problem and the workaround.
Another thing: The great thing about Philosophy is that there are no wrong answers. But, the bad thing about philosophy classes is there are wrong answers. Open-endedness and free thinking don't scale to 150-seat lecture halls, indifferent TAs, and PhD-candidate "professors" doing the bare minimum to get a diploma.
If you want to tell me it's akin to astrology, or some other pseudo made up framework, fine.
I don't have a problem with fantasy. I have a problem with those telling me it's real.
"I took a series of university classes, where we examined the natural laws in The Land, and Thomas Covenant's ring, and derived a measure of predictive weather patterns! I know science!" <-- philosophy
I don't need to study astrology for years, to know it's nonsense in about 10 minutes.
Yet I've hear a lot more philosophical blather than that, and so yes, I have enough data to make a determination.
There's an inner logic to tarot cards, books and books on it, but that doesn't make it useful or valuable.
I've already clarified why this is not so. Thus, your main, true disagreement is that you do not agree with my assessment.
Copernicus deniers didn't need years of study either as their source material said differently.
I'm not saying anything either way on philosophy, I'm simply pointing out that your presented logic there is flawed
"I am not here now". I'm not seeing the problem.
There are a lot of philosophy 'problems' like this, which leads me to think philosophers lead blessed, problem-free lives.
In your example, "here" is semantically different from the "here" in the answering machine case and doesn't result in a paradox.
On the other hand, perhaps we should consider whether analytical philosophy, following the linguistic turn [1], is creating problems for itself when it tries to find metaphysical truth by analyzing human language as if it were a formal system. For example, when David Chalmers says "even God could not create a male vixen", is he mistaking an accidental lexicographical fact for a metaphysical insight?
PARADOX, in philoſophy, a propoſition ſeemingly abſurd,
as being contrary to to ſome received opinion, but yet true
in fact.
No ſcience abounds more with paradoxes than geome-
try: thus, that a right line ſhould continually approach
to the hyperbola, and yet never reach it, is a true para-
dox; and in the ſame manner, a ſpiral may continually
approach to the point, and yet not reach it, in any number
of revolutions, however great.
Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 1771,
Vol. 3, p. 455(See also the 'Problem' of Induction, which I had to spend a great deal of time on in college, and even after reading centuries of debate about it, is the least problematic 'problem' I've ever encountered. Maybe this is a linguistic issue, and philosophers should stop calling things 'problems' when the rest of us have to make rent.)
It smells like you are just mocking people for being interested in thinking about things. Why?
I agree, perhaps with the qualification of 'eventually', having been both of these people:
1) someone born dirt poor who had to spend every waking moment to feed myself
2) someone who can pontificate in comment sections
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach wander philosophically.
Playing with ourselves. Man plans, god laughs. Everyone has a plan until they get hit in the mouth. I could go on.
Zeno's paradoxes for example show us the weaknesses of Ancient Greek's system of reasoning, the weaknesses of their kid of logic and math. But will have troubles seeing them as paradoxes if they do not know logic at all or if they know modern logic and modern math which solve all of the Zeno's paradoxes (or most of them?). Now Zeno's paradoxes are not paradoxes at all, but the silly mistakes of reasoning.
It reminds me of edge-cases in programming, you designed a beautiful program and then edge-cases started to pop up, you patch your program, patch it some more, and in no time at all your beautiful program becomes a heap of spaghetti code. The only way to avoid it is to code something that you coded before many times and know all the shenanigans allowing you to combine beautiful design with the practical applicability.
Here is the same thing, if you do not know what the system the author uses, you cannot judge if his reasoning stupid or not.
I don't know either, but I believe, that it is an interesting observation. The person said "I'm not here now", and it was obviously false, when they said it, but when answering machine says it the statements becomes true. I'm not sure what the problem is, but I think, that the problem starts biting you hard, when you try to define a set of all such statements and to choose a condition of their truthfulness. Of course, you can use your intuition as a tool for demarcation, but philosophy doesn't work that way, it seeks an objective criteria, preferably a formal one.
But that's of course what an engineer would say.
That was a great movie, if you've just finished watching it.
Think of a physical message on a piece of paper. The paper is on fire. You can still see the text, but it’s too late to put out the fire.
If you have good memory, you can figuratively stop time at that instant and memorize the contents of the paper. With a computer, the message is already “burned” on the server, but the frozen instant in front of you can be extended indefinitely.
E: The obvious way to fix this is to stop talking about messages existing/not existing, but talk in terms of messages being stored in X (or having been deleted from X), for some value of X.
Now, when I try to finish and send that I’m hopefully going to get an error message. But “you already sent this email” is both right and wrong, since “this” email (the one I’m looking at) may have different contents from the one I sent.
Agreed that the best error message is just more precise though: “You are attempting to edit a draft that you already finished and sent from another device. Would you like to treat this as a new email?” Or something like that.
The message should have said "This message is not saved on the server. If you close this window without copying and saving its text you cannot retrieve it from the server ever again.
It reminds me of the ted ex talk where a man states that the universe does not exist because it is everything and if we would make a list of everything, the list would not be included as a topic of the list.
This message clearly exists. It's could be not factually correct, but a lie still exists.
If you open a text file in an editor, and then delete the file on disk, then the file does not exist anymore, but you can still read its contents in your editor. Same if you open a web page in your browser, and the page is then deleted server-side. You can still read the loaded copy of the web page in your browser, although the web page doesn’t exist anymore. The “message” in TFA’s notification is exactly like that.
In the common sense interpretation "file" is not a "message". Nor is the display on which you are reading the message. Nor is a clay-tablet on which ancient Sumerians wrote messages.
"Message" is information sent by someone to someone else. A message could be saved in a file but then the file is just the "medium" for transferring the message to its future readers.
So I would think that "This message does not exist" is something like writing "This is not a pipe" on a painting of a pipe.
I never understood what Marshall McLuhan meant with "Medium is the message". Medium is what makes it possible to transmit messages. Can anybody help me out, what did McLuhan mean?
Trying to guess what is going on. I guess they refer to the original message (on the server) and its local copy. Both referred to as "the message".
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.
> We learn a final affordance, which complicates the story. An inexistent message has contents, which may be copied – but only if the message has not yet been discarded.
The message is gone and can't be saved anymore, but it can still be discarded (or presumably not discarded).
Doesn't Outlook rely on the Exchange mailstore?
It's a long time since I was near to Outlook and Exchange, but I thought the Exchange mailstore was some kind of X400 abomination, and that the IMAP capability was a bolt-on.
If it can show you the content, the container must exist!
Like people who’s bodies are gone but who’s souls are still here? I see dead messages… :P
That distinction might be worthwhile, and it’s certainly true from a technical standpoint. But the real problem here is the message is not the same as the message. If that was referring to a single message it’d make a great philosophical problem. Unfortunately we’re just talking about a more boring problem of two different messages with two different texts where the text of one of them accidentally referred to the other one as ‘this’.
if the message stopped existing, but nobody was there, did it make the trash-can sound?
The physical bits do exist, though, on the storage medium. Now, of course this does not match our usual image of existing, since the bytes were technically always there, but it still exists in the physical world.
You can actually make the same argument with a letter: The paper and ink were there before, the pattern ist what brought it to existence.
I know the answer for the case where this question refers to something on my pc. I have disabled audio warnings, alerts, etc so if the message stopped existing and I wasn't around to notice then it clearly does not make a trash-can sound.
Is the goal to have it be readable to the naked, nominally working human eye? If so then I’d wager you could use magnetic paper as storage if you were a particularly persistent driver developer.
The behavior admittedly does not make sense for files (although I suppose you could rename or delete the directory that contains it), but it's sort of unavoidable if you don't want to take locks while some client application you don't control may or may not make changes.
How about: "This message has been deleted from the mail server, but Outlook still has it in its temporary cache on this device. You can copy the message contents, or discard it from the cache, at which point it will be permanently deleted."
feynman has a nice philosophy on this that I think is true & useful: (that there's great variety in capability of the average person, we should explain things faithfully & without dumbing it down):
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@omarshehata/1123783593602927...
Even that isn’t a given. I’ve seen banks using emoji in their notifications. Companies are using ML to predict which emoji to change your text to. There are emoji domain names. Etcetera.
You would programmatically build the self help tutorial like a ui test (use a test browser and it would be like cypress/selenium). You would write a script, (ai) text to speech, and you could even respond to user input for branching.
These would be, de facto, your acceptance test suite and your tutorials will flag when they break on new ui developments, helping to keep them up to date
though do they want to?
If they can learn, they would've. And then cease being a non-technical user.
I'm glad you said this because Feynman has a beautiful response to it: basically, there is no such thing as a "non-technical user". Almost everyone is adept at navigating _some_ complex system in their life. I agree with you that they probably don't want to learn.
but the reason they don't want to learn is because they don't think there is any value on it, they believe it is a waste of time. For the same reason I (used to) believe it's a waste of time for me to play puzzle games (I'm bad at it, I don't enjoy it, what's the point). Or learn to manage people, or learn to understand politics, etc.
I'm asking you (and everyone reading this) to suspend disbelief and pretend that these users DO have capacity to learn, and they just don't see any value in it, and it's on us to clearly (and concisely) communicate the value without gatekeeping and without dumbing it down. I have been surprised at how people's capacity to learn was much greater than I expected, and I hope the same will be true for you.
I see this attitude a lot of, "well, if you want to understand how this system works, we have to start from scratch" (and they start to lecture for hours about some fundamental things). I think this is a failure mode: an inability to figure out _what_ fundamental pieces actually matter to understanding the current system.
Apologies for the rant, I feel strongly about this because I think there's a lot of low hanging fruit here that everyone can benefit from, but I'm still trying to refine my thoughts.
i tried to write about this here: https://omarshehata.substack.com/p/my-favorite-1980s-canadia...
"This message no longer exists in your Inbox. If you close it, you will not be able to open it again."
What's more amazing is that this state actually happens often enough in Outlook that somebody wrote code to detect it, and to create a message box for the user to warn them about it.
It's true in the physical world - signs like 'beware of falling pottery' for example. The electronic world is a facsimile of the real world!
This is stupid, and you are stupid to entertain this idiotic notion.
Let's take another example:
"The mobility device can no longer operate. Your destination is no longer available."
This tells me absolutely nothing. It possibly even implies that something very bad has happened to my destination!
"The bus engine has broken down. Your route destination is no longer in service."
Even to someone who doesn't know what a "bus", "engine", or a "route" are, this is an actionable and clear message. If I don't know what those things are, I can quickly figure out what a bus, engine and route are, or pass the message to someone who does understand.
Removing information and replacing it with nonsense does not make an error message better. You don't need to be technical to be able to make sense of a message.
1. No error message. Just recover the cached message.
2. The message is deleted
There’s a world we live in where ahem-ahem a certain design focused company would’ve done it this way.
Ultimately, it’s the responsibility of the Mail app to make a decision on whether to recover the cached message or not. It’s those engineers & designers who built that damn cache in the first place. And the server too.
Let _them_ deal with the consequences of messages existing in one but not the other. It’s not the user’s job to care.
“This message has been deleted, but you still have a temporary copy. If you need to save anything from it, you should do so before discarding the temporary copy.”
"Sorry, this message can no longer be saved. Copy this message before discarding it if you will need access to it later."
WHY can’t it be saved?
Is the internet not connected? Check your WiFi.
Is the server full? Talk to admin.
Is the message deleted by another user? Talk to your team about ways of working?
Is it an internal application error? Tough luck, maybe the error code can be googled at least.
This does not mean you need to dump a stack trace in the users face, the examples above can still be presented briefly. If that’s too much effort to implement, consider an expandable details section.
The amount of applications lately where I had to open the verbose developer logs only to find silly user fixable errors is astonishing. Last one was simply credentials that had expired.
To anyone who thinks you are giving the users a magical experience, free from technicalities, by hiding root causes behind a facade of abstract, please think again. You are just frustrating the users even more, by making errors unpredictable.
Sorry, but no. And this idea that everyone else is condescending is offensive nonsense.
I understand where you're coming from, but the people who understand how actual users behave and what actual users want, in the real world, are not condescending - they're empathic. They recognize that the majority of people in the world are not like us, in terms of technical abilities, yes, but more importantly, in terms of desires.
The average user doesn't care. They don't have time to do things like "talk to admin", nor do they even know what "check your wifi" means. "Talk to your team about ways of working"? I'm sure most employees would just love to go and have awkward conversations with others, that's exactly what they want to do this minute.
This is even on the off-chance that the user has even read the message, which is incredibly unlikely. I can't count the number of times I've had developers tell me they had an error message and don't know what to do, and my solution was "let's read it, it says this is the error" and that being revelatory for them.
I agree that the problem with technical and non-technical users alike is one of motivation. Like you say, someone who is not technically minded won't care that the server is out of pace or their wifi is disconnected and developers who just want to get their code to compile don't care about learning how some new framework works.
But in all these cases, the users do care about doing whatever they were trying to do when they got the error. And the best way to help them is to give them all the relevant information they or someone else needs to fix it. Giving some generic error like "sorry your file could not be saved" neither helps those who are motivated to fix it, nor those who aren't motivated.
Or, "Can't i just restore it out of the trash?"
- discard it permanently - store this version on the server - save as a file to your computer”
“The message has been deleted, but your app still shows it. You will not be able to see the message again if you discard it, and it will disappear soon.”
‘your data has been deleted on the server, but that your client still has a cached copy’
"This message cannot be saved because it no longer exists on the server.", and then it's all solved.
It is the paradox of creation, of existence, of dissolution and of consciousness.
The answer to "how can I find all SharePoint Sites where I am a member?" is:
> Search SharePoint for contentclass:STS_Site
How is this, and op, cluster f possible? How do these decisions get into prod?
The developer doesn’t know what went wrong and things definitely don’t go wrong all the time at Microsoft! This is as surprising to the developer as it is to you!
It’s also pleasantly humane, not like “ERROR:”, meaning it’s more of a silly and fun oopsie doopsie than a systems engineering failure.
Don’t you just feel better as the user seeing that? It’s not the systems engineer’s fault and neither is it yours. It just kind of happened. What even is “it”? No one knows! Computers are weird — eh? Nothing like a whimsical hiccup in your computing to brighten the day.
Whatever you were doing, whether it’s saving work, buying something, or completing critical forms, some of that was probably done, or maybe not, but who really knows? Hehe, not us — we are just as surprised!
Oh, and don’t call support with this stuff. There’s not enough to go on even if you reported it for us to investigate. It’s just one of these things, you know?
Forget about it and move on buddy! You’ve got an essay to rewrite/a purchase to figure out/a critical form to complete again, and who knows what will happen then! Will it go through? Maybe, maybe not. It will be surprising if it doesn’t! Isn’t it just so exciting?
I find it as infuriating as you.
I've seen teams messages on firefox and safari about features not existing "download the teams native app!"
Consider this definition from go's database/sql package.
func (tx *Tx) Rollback() error
Now, obviously the error isn't totally useless as an error can be returned to indicate, say, the connection to the database was dropped. But even in that case, the definition of a transaction's validity/lifetime means that even if rollback fails, the transaction is in the same state as if rollback had succeeded.
Rolling back a transaction twice probably indicates an error in your program, which Go's API is giving you a chance to report to yourself.
Ultimately every network request can fail because of the Two Generals' Problem. Actually, every single operation on a computer can fail (as in, do something other than what you were promised or promised yourself it would do). Nothing in life is guaranteed, the environment is adversarial. The fact that we create machines that can be predicted with 0.00000000001% certainty and carve out a safe environment for them and feed them energy is not common and unnatural and all computers will also eventually succumb to entropy. The network is just where that is common enough that considering that another computer can die in our programs can be more useful than completely ignoring the possibility. This possibility is represented as a non-zero number called "error" in the Go API you've posted, so that you have the option of branching your program to a different execution path if the database you're communicating with stops existing or at least stops being reachable.
- Sleep(1) sleeps for exactly 1 second.
- Sleep(1) sleeps for approximately 1 second.
- Sleep(1) sleeps for at least 1 second.
- Sleep(1) sleeps for an unknown, but short amount of time. Certainly not weeks, months or years.
This is correct - Sleep(1) does sleep for approximately 1 second; the problem is you're confusing the 95% confidence interval (which might be as narrow as (999ms,1001ms) for some reasonable designs) with the absolute error bounds (which are (0ms,∞ms], and yes, the infinity end is inclusive).
This is surprisingly common when running on certain VM instance types on public cloud! Common enough that I've had to account for it in production code.
Unless you actually expect your environment to spend more than 5% of its time on average getting suspended and resumed. Maybe you work on some tooling that is scheduled to run right around migration time (for servers) or sleep/resume time (for clients).
Yes, it means exactly that until something else manages to close the transaction.
Generally that's done by noticing that the connection has failed, or a timeout has expired, assuming "roll back unless confirmed" is the default behavior (usually true, but not always).
The reason you might want to explicitly tell something to roll back is to shorten ^ that latency, or to wait for it to complete before doing something else that requires it to be gone.
Has anybody ever did something useful with that exception?
There's a similar situation in raw socket programming in some OSes: You might be done writing all your outbound data into the socket (i.e. your last write() call returned indicating success), but the receiving application might crash before being able to read all of your data.
By implementing an application-level shutdown command that the other side acknowledges, that can be avoided; maybe some SQL protocol implementations do that, and that exception is thrown if the shutdown request is never acknowledged.
You can ask around and manually coordinate a decision, and tell the databasecwhat you decided.
But that's not the same thing as rollback failing (although it is the invocation of rollback failing) as neither rollback nor commit was fully issued and received, so it makes sense that the transaction would stay open (given that the database doesn't tie transactions to the a connection or a session, and for a two phase commit scenario I'd expect the transaction coordinator to "own" the transaction so it's lifetime isn't necessary tied to a session).
Someone decided to literally pull the plug and replace the master database server node from the rack, while the batch was still running. He assumed the other server nodes would pick up where this one left off. So the batch log of the application first complained about the master disappearing, then about the rollback failing on another master node because it wasn't the coordinator and had no idea of this transaction.
It also means the decision about the commit/rollback was irrelevant, as next week's batch run had deleted the records in question. Presumably, some ephemeral records were hanging around, deciding if they were deleted either in week X or week X+1.
The default final state of a transaction that is not explicitly committed (and even autocommit is still explicit) is that it is aborted, purely because the only way a transaction can be committed is by commiting it vs there are an infinite number of ways and reasons for the transactions to abort. If the rollback is successful or not there is logically no way that the state of the transaction after rollback being invoked is that the transaction is still usable for something.
With hashing and things, the latter is certainly possible, but I got a good chuckle out of it.
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).
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.
We're standing inside the living room while saying the house doesn't exist. And as soon as we walk out the living room will disappear.
If it is, that's probably a desync issue, like others have said. Still not particularly mysterious or ontologically interesting. So much of parallel and distributed programming is about solving desync problems.
I put it in super scare quotes for a reason, because it depends on what you mean by "message".
But the text is still on the screen. That's why you can copy it.
> If it is, that's probably a desync issue, like others have said. Still not particularly mysterious or ontologically interesting. So much of parallel and distributed programming is about solving desync problems.
If it's just a desync, then it could resync things if it wanted to. Instead it gives a confusing and contradictory warning.
The way the warning contradicts itself is pretty interesting, and I and the author think it's fun to delve into how the word "message" is supposed to be defined here, and how it's causing problems.
But it's not simply a reference to a thing that's gone. It's not actually gone yet. It's a ghost.
Maybe a better comparison would be a weak reference to an object that's in line to being garbage collected.
> A returned value of 1 seems to say, "I'm here, but you can't use me."
> Strange as it may seem, that's exactly what is going on. A return code of 1
> means we're not allowed to install the print spooler because interrupt 47
> is being used for some other purpose by some other interrupt handler. This
> is a fascinating bit of business to contemplate.
To me it sounds like that the service hogging interrupt 47 is saying that it can't be used for print spooling purposes.
Things like this shows how literally that is true. Make a product, sell a product, what could possibly be the problem with that?
This reminds me of another quiet funny error message, again, from Microsoft about a Windows Phone error message telling users to "insert CD and Restart Your Computer" ( https://thenextweb.com/news/this-is-the-funniest-windows-err...)
Related is the Bertrand Russell paradox:
X = {z | z is not an element of z}
So, X is an element of X if and only if it is not -- a contradiction.
The usual solution was to have two steps:
(1) Over here, say, on the left, we have everything we want to regard as elements.
(2) On the right, we have everything we want to regard as sets. The sets consist only of elements.
That's a good fix.
For more, there is the elegant, long popular, P. Halmos Naive Set Theory, now available in PDF, LaTeX, etc.
For more there is the appendix to J. Kelley, General Topology.
For more there is P. Suppes, Axiomatic Set Theory.
For more, sure you want more????
"Unknown device (not found)"
If we placed a giant sign around Earth stating, 'This planet does not exist,' and considering that Earth will not survive the Sun's demise in 5 billion years, would it be a paradox for aliens in galaxy GN-z11, located 13.4 billion light-years away, to observe this sign?
1. You load a page with the message, and your client (browser) renders its contents after fetching it from the server with an API call
2. Some unrelated process causes the message to be deleted on the server
3. Some asynchronous process on the client (like a periodic refresh) tries to get the message, but it's since been deleted, but the client-side rendered state stays the same
4. Thus the error: the message doesn't exist anymore, so you can discard it to manually make your browser state consistent with the server. Or you can just refresh and it'll be gone. So if you want to save the contents, copy it in your clipboard first, before refreshing.
I had a similar, though not the same, on new and old Outlook and indeed it appeared on Thunderbird. After an hour or two also appeared on Outlooks.
My sides.
Browser:
Server: WTAF are you trying to do, here, man?
Message: Hi everybody!
Yeah it is gonna be some palmface story.
Outlook is server authoritative. Message does not exist on server and thus it can't be saved.
But it is available on that client - client was able to load it before it was removed from server - and such it can be copied out or discarded from client.
"This message does not exist" can be taken to be a false statement, without introducing any contradiction.
It is not like "this message is false" (Liar's Paradox) or "this sentence has no proof" (Gödel's sentence).
Unfortunately, just because "this message does not exist" is a false statement, contradicted by existential evidence, doesn't mean that the remaining claims next to it can be dismissed as false.
Also I think you are missing the point. This is clearly written tongue-in-cheek. The author is being entirely rhetorical; they're not asking you to solve the apparent inconsistency. They just thought the error message was silly, and that working through it logically (as if each statement in the error message is true and correct) is a funny exercise.
"This person does not exist" under an AI-generated image similarly tells the truth; the image is not the person.
> Make sure you copy the contents of the message before you discard if you want to use them later.
Like, really? Is that the best you can do? You rely on a human to copy-paste text because you can not be bothered to create it yourself?
In theory, yes, that might be the best they can do because they can't connect to the server - in my case however, that was not the case. Outlook worked fine and I got new notifications, but I had to manually preserve the content.
It's been 20 years since gmail "disrupted" webmail, yet it still sucks. At best they only give the illusion of search, because they don't have the resources to do it properly. How people can stand it is beyond me.
Browser does have local storage and you can assume it keeps the local storage.
The main difference is that browsers tend to be "OSes" for multiple apps.
A webapp has it's place. It is an inferior option but it is convenient for when you lack access to a proper client, doesn't make sense for them to target the same goals.
While it is easier to set up a "transient" web app client, it's also easier to get up a "permanent" web app client, and many people do use the very same computer and browser for accessing a web app just the same.