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I recall sitting in a packed room with over a hundred devs at the 2004 Ottawa Linux Symposium while the topic of the number of filesystem bits was being discuss

I recall sitting in a packed room with over a hundred devs at the 2004 Ottawa Linux Symposium while the topic of the number of filesystem bits was being discussed (link: https://www.linux.com/news/ottawa-linux-symposium-day-2/ https://www.linux.com/news/ottawa-linux-symposium-day-2/). I recall people throwing out questions as to why we weren't just jumping to 128 or 256 bits, and at one point someone blurted out something about 1024 bits. Someone then made a comment about the number of atoms in the universe, everyone chuckled, and the discussion moved on. I sensed the feeling in the room was that any talk of 128 bits or more was simply ridiculous. Mind you this was for storage. Fast-forward 18 years, and it's fascinating to me to see people now seriously floating the proposal to support 256-bit pointers.

hughw 4y ago
The difference between "number of atoms in the universe" and "number of possible states of a system" are vastly different. The latter is a combinatorial problem, and if you're trying to to track the possible combinations of 100 variables that can take on 10 states each, you've got 10^100 combinations and are already beyond atoms in the universe (10^80). You can never enumerate them all, but the ability to work on large subspaces would be a help.