swid

One thing you should absolutely not count on, but might be a course of actions for large clients, is to contact support and ask them to restore accidentally / maliciously deleted files.

I would never use this as part of the backup and restore plan; but I was lucky when a bunch of customer files were deleted due to a bug in a release. Something like 100k files were deleted from Google Storage without us having backup. In a panic we contact GCP. We were able to provide a list of all the file names from our logs. In the end, all but 6 files were recovered.

I think it took around 2-3 days to get all the files restored, which was still a big headache and impactful to people.

I’m pretty sure that isn’t true for real programs. The computer has a finite number of possible states depending on its physical properties or theoretical architecture - if you return to a state, there is a cycle and it will not terminate. Eventually it will hit the cycle or terminate.

Yes - this is true. A program will either halt or not, and if you could pluck that answer from somewhere, you would know.

But my point is in practice, this is just not possible, because the problem spaces are too large.

A related problem is the Busy Beaver Problem - how many steps can a program take as a factor of the number of turing instructions it contains. If we could determine that, we would "solve" the halting problem, in that we would know a program that is still running after N steps will never terminate.

However, even for very small programs, N is so large to be incomprehensible; ie, all the stars will have burned out even with all the compute in the world running until that happens.

If you believe in encryption, no matter of intelligence can help you solve the halting problem. As in, if you believe the only way to decrypt some messages is to have the private key, then you will need to try a lot of keys to know if the following pseudocode terminates.

    key = 0x0000...
    while (decrypt(key, ciphertext) != plaintext) {
        key++ // add 1, rollover to zero at the end of keyspace
    }
    return

The stars would burn out before anyone could answer this, without defeating the encryption algorithm.

I was also hoping the title was more accurate. In the lines of the famous story of not being able to send an email 500 miles.

https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles

Common Weakness Enumeration - like a public bug report related to security, which is not managed by the developers of the software / hardware.

https://cwe.mitre.org/

If people are looking for a way to put encrypted files into git, you can use LockGit https://github.com/jswidler/lockgit.

Note cards are great, but I think a really big factor with a good spaced repetition system is to be able to essentially pick the best card to show you at any time. Based upon your history, which card you are most likely to have forgotten and need a refresher on, and would be most beneficial to show you next.

This would be practically impossible with a physical system. In addition to the fact that your memory of a new cards fades faster than cards you saw a long time ago; taking the time to approximate such a system would be a large burden that software can just handle for you.

It does though. Proof (if you want to call it that, I accept it is not formally valid) via contradiction:

There is the immaterial economy which which might theorize can perpetually grow.

There is also the material economy which is rooted in real physics - ie, materials, energy (it will always take some energy to heat up water and prepare food, for instance). Can we rule out that buying metal and building material become completely free? Or that the cost of energy will be reduced to zero? If there is limited supply, there must be some cost and if that cost is too low, someone will buy it up, corner the market, and start charging the correct price.

If so, the material economy cannot grow forever (outside inflation, which is not real economic growth).

If the material economy cannot perpetually grow, but other parts can, then eventually that part of the economy will completely eclipse the non-material economy. As the part that perpetually grows goes to infinitely, the relative value of the part of the economy rooted in physical limits will be worth relatively nothing.

Which contradicts the earlier point part of the economy can perpetually grow when some parts do not, unless the parts which cannot perpetually grow simply become free.