Teleportation: if we ever get them, they absolutely MUST exhibit some behavioural commonalities with a relational database—notably they must exhibit ACID properties: atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability.
If teleportation isn't ACID you ain't getting me in that booth!
@cstross I’m now terrified to see @aphyr running Jepsen testing against various teleportation implementations. Just dropping in results of https://jepsen.io/analyses makes for some… exciting plot points?
Eg “When the partition heals, we have a new problem: it’s not clear which version of an object is authoritative.” From https://aphyr.com/posts/285-call-me-maybe-riak
What is this, accelerando?
@josephholsten@aphyr I must note at this point that it's a quarter of a century since I had to do anything serious involving databases, and back then it was MySQL ...
@josephholsten@aphyr@cstross I vaguely recall Accelerando just assigning a new identity to one of them, but I'm not sure if that was said on Fedi or in the book.
@lispi314@josephholsten@aphyr In the book, I think. (The FAQ for new arrivals on Saturn, which is being colonized to make room for the resimulated being sent into exile by the Vile Offspring.) And now I'm wondering how many more years it will take to get that book out of my head?!
@cstross Every time I think seriously about teleportation I think about Ilium by Dan Simmons, and to a lesser extent your own Glasshouse.
If teleportation booths work by destroying the original and building a copy somewhere else, it's not teleportation, it's a fax machine. And what wakes up at the other end is not the same person who got euthanised at the sending end.
@VZ I was thinking more along the lines of the one implementing bug-for-bug compatibility with Microsoft Access (you know, the so-called "database" that silently fucked up the US plutonium stockpile inventory in the 1990s and was only caught because they gave a copy to the Russians, who ran it in parallel with their paper-and-pencil accounting system for a few months before someone said "that's funny …")
@Aradiel@hittitezombie Why bother with a zombie army? Just offer a single mercenary as much money as they want, then clone them indefinitely. (Add collar bombs so you can terminate any who start asking inconvenient questions like where all the money is going to come from … or you could run it as a tontine.)
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