22 ms·

This Message Does Not Exist

818 points by sebtron 2y ago

fifteen1506 2y ago
Open in Thunderbird, it will be there, probably. 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.
playingalong 2y ago
The commentary is golden. 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".
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- wild_pointer 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - ileonichwiesz 2y ago
    [flagged]
- tempodox 2y ago
  Which only goes to show that the bad habit of using imprecise terms is liable to produce total confusion.
klysm 2y ago
This is the most Microsoft error message I have ever seen
- fragmede 2y ago
  This message will delete itself after this. Please save its contents if you with to retain it.
- m463 2y ago
  Wouldn't a more microsoft message be about competing products failing to exist? I've seen teams messages on firefox and safari about features not existing "download the teams native app!"
  - beefnugs 2y ago
    More microsoft would be a 5 minute message on screen promising that they have never and will never misplace any of your messages, right before this monstrosity appears
- frankthepickle 2y ago
  task failed successfully!
- uyzstvqs 2y ago
  Only for a while until someone changes it to "Something went wrong"
  - 2four2 2y ago
    With a large :( to redundantly communicate that something bad happened, in case the user didn't even read the simplified message.
  - caseyy 2y ago
    Don’t forget “Oops!” — the element of surprise. 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?
    - IshKebab 2y ago
      Damn straight. This came up in an earlier discussion about languages that rely heavily on exceptions - they sensibly don't want to expose backtraces so you get this `try: response_handler() except: print("oops!")` nonsense because the programmer literally doesn't know what went wrong and they're sure as hell not going to give you the details. I find it as infuriating as you.
- smrtinsert 2y ago
  Fatal Error: Operation completed successfully.
- consumer451 2y ago
  SharePoint is supposedly one of the keystones of Microsoft. 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?
soulofmischief 2y ago
Excellent reflection on an absurd premise, thanks for sharing.
thwarted 2y ago
I've had similar philosophical thoughts about a transaction rollback. Consider this definition from go's database/sql package. func (tx *Tx) Rollback() error Rollback can fail, indicated as such by it can return an error. What are the cases where rollback could fail and what's the recovery mechanism? Does a failed rollback mean (logically) that the transaction is still open and uncommitted? But really, invoking rollback can never fail to abort the transaction, so the error result has little use. 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.
- thriftwy 2y ago
  Obviously, transaction may fail to be rolled back and leave dangling locks. Not sure about the specifics.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    That's a bug in your database, not something you specify on your API.
    - thriftwy 2y ago
      What if it's a connection problem? DBs are normally remote. It's also OK to specify potential bug surface on your API.
      - thwarted 2y ago
        The bug being referred to isn't the connection problem, the bug is that in the event of a loss of communication with the client, the transaction isn't fully cleaned up, including the release of held locks, when the transaction enters an abortive state.
        2y ago
kazinator 2y ago
It's very easy. "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.
- kelnos 2y ago
  Perhaps not, but if one encounters a false statement, then it is reasonable to assume any following (and previous) statements are suspect as well. 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.
  - kazinator 2y ago
    The statement has a true interpretation. "This message" can be interpreted as referring to some object in a back-end database represented by text you see in the UI. The thing you see on the screen corresponds to no persistent representation in the system. "This person does not exist" under an AI-generated image similarly tells the truth; the image is not the person.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
pieresqi 2y ago
I find the message self explanatory. 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.
- lupire 2y ago
  That's not the ntresteing is part.
Waterluvian 2y ago
Any semantic pedantics that involve discussing ontology is always a fun time. This was a fun read.
rzzzt 2y ago
> 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. https://archive.org/details/The_Peter_Norton_Programmers_Guide_IBM-PC/page/253/mode/2up?q=%22I%27m+not+here%22 https://archive.org/details/The_Peter_Norton_Programmers_Gui... To me it sounds like that the service hogging interrupt 47 is saying that it can't be used for print spooling purposes.
rufus_foreman 2y ago
Nor will it ever exist.
kreeben 2y ago
Me: Browser: Server: WTAF are you trying to do, here, man? Message: Hi everybody!
mrmanner 2y ago
It has ceased to be
- berryg 2y ago
  :-) The Dead Parrot Sketch, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Parrot_sketch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Parrot_sketch
projektfu 2y ago
... As always, should you or any member of your IM Force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow all knowledge of your actions.
joezydeco 2y ago
Currently working in a Microsoft-enabled corp with a very aggressive document retention (i.e. deletion) policy. This message doesn't surprise me at all. Stuff just...disappears. All the time.
cortesoft 2y ago
Oh, finally a chance to put my Philosophy degree to use! 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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Rastonbury 2y ago
  "the message does not exist in our system, only in your browser as text, copy and save it if you want to keep it, if you refresh this page the text will disappear"
  - stall84 2y ago
    this cracked me up !
- tikhonj 2y ago
  It's still funny that the text of a message can exist without being a message itself. That must make sense in the specific context of Outlook, but it shows that the conceptual design of the software does not match how we want to think about the domain abstractly.
  - sherburt3 2y ago
    I don’t think the model is that far off. In real life I can read a letter and retain the contents in my mind, then burn the letter.
    - Wolfenstein98k 2y ago
      But this is claiming that the letter does not exist, while allowing you to read the contents of the letter. If it can show you the content, the container must exist!
31337Logic 2y ago
Excuse me but Kant would like a word with this dev.
ttfkam 2y ago
Ceci n'est pas un message.
chuckadams 2y ago
Reminds me a lot of "The operation failed with an error: success"
layer8 2y ago
This message means something analogous to: “You loaded a file, but now the file doesn’t exist anymore (on disk), so I can’t update it with your changes. You can discard the loaded copy, but consider copying its contents first and create a new file from it, because for some technical reason I can’t do this myself.”
ggarnhart 2y ago
This reminds of a choice I once saw between the following: “Save this Credit Card” Or “Never save this Credit Card” With hashing and things, the latter is certainly possible, but I got a good chuckle out of it.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  Along those lines, "Don't use cookies on this site".
  - recursive 2y ago
    Uses localStorage of course.
MikePlacid 2y ago
I do not think you need a philosophical degree to handle this. A law degree is enough. Just add “legally” before “exist” and everything makes its perfect legal sense again. 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).
routerl 2y ago
Isn't all of this just equivalent to a pointer? "This variable doesn't exist" is a reasonable error message when you're, for example, dereferencing a pointer with a wrong data type: it could be the equivalent of "there's no integer at this address" or "this integer doesn't exist". 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.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  Your pointer scenario could have the same warning, but it does not match the scenario in the post. In the post, we have """the message""" displayed on screen. It's not a simple dangling pointer, the contents are right there. 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.
  - routerl 2y ago
    I'm sorry, I miss things nowadays, but I don't see where the post states that the message is still available. 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.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      > I'm sorry, I miss things nowadays, but I don't see where the post states that the message is still available. 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.
NayamAmarshe 2y ago
The message is the glue that binds reality and unreality. It exists, existed, never existed, all at the same time. It is the paradox of creation, of existence, of dissolution and of consciousness.
satisfice 2y ago
My favorite Windows error message: "Unknown device (not found)"
jacobsenscott 2y ago
I suspect it means the message only exists client side, and they are able to detect that somehow. So if you browse away, or refresh, or whatever, it is gone.
sva_ 2y ago
The koan of the message that never existed.
astrea 2y ago
Wait until the author learns about pointers.
redbell 2y ago
We used to hear that LLMs hallucinate but, apparently, we are witnessing the hallucination of apps now! 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-error-message-youve-ever-seen https://thenextweb.com/news/this-is-the-funniest-windows-err...)
- dfox 2y ago
  Exchange did this thing well before there were any practical LLMs. And well, while the resulting state and error message is somewhat hilarious, it is not that hard to trigger this behavior intentionally.
lisper 2y ago
Everyone is snickering at this and talking about philosophy, but there is actually a legitimate point being made here, albeit obliquely: how do you explain to a non-technical user that their data has been deleted on the server, but that their client still has a cached copy that they might want to try to salvage somehow? I submit that this is a nontrivial problem worthy of serious consideration.
- klysm 2y ago
  I find most apps give up an enumerating the possibly modes of consistency violation that can occur in an app. I’ve tried and failed to do it “right” before and it’s incredibly difficult.
- mrmanner 2y ago
  Maybe pose it as a question to the user, rather than an error message: “This message has been deleted from the server. Do you want to: - discard it permanently - store this version on the server - save as a file to your computer”
- mkl 2y ago
  > how do you explain to a non-technical user that their data has been deleted on the server, but that their client still has a cached copy that they might want to try to salvage somehow? 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."
  - femto 2y ago
    A typical person's head will explode at the mention of the words "cache" and "server". They will then go into a blind panic that their data is going to be "permanently deleted".
    - rovr138 2y ago
      "locally", "the cloud"
canadaduane 2y ago
It is messages like this that revealed to me a culture of learned helplessness at Microsoft, and I made a decision to switch to Linux.
infotropy 2y ago
There is no Antimemetics Division
sczcas 2y ago
[dead]
slashtmpslash 2y ago
“…Outlook…” Yeah it is gonna be some palmface story.
lopkeny12ko 2y ago
Why does the author find this so difficult to understand? I read the error and both immediately know what the problem is, and can guess a likely series of events that caused it. 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.
galaxyLogic 2y ago
The problem is that the message does not speak the truth. If you can read a message it clearly must exist because you cannot read non-existent messages, can you? Can anyone? CAN ANYONE HERE READ NON-EXISTENT MESSAGES? 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.
- streamfroster 2y ago
  While this is the most sane and logical sounding way to put it, it would lose the 'philosophical' vagueness of the original notification. I still prefer the original wording
- layer8 2y ago
  Of course you can read non-existent messages, for example when an AI hallucinates one, or when someone shows you a photoshopped screenshot of one, or even just when you copied one to a text document before deleting the message.
  - madeofpalk 2y ago
    > Of course you can read non-existent messages, for example when an AI hallucinates one This message clearly exists. It's could be not factually correct, but a lie still exists.
    - layer8 2y ago
      No, it’s a citation of a message that does not exist. I wasn’t talking about a message sent by an AI, I was talking about an AI reproducing the alledged content of a purported message. 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.
Shopnow247 2y ago
[flagged]
Shopnow247 2y ago
[flagged]
NotYourLawyer 2y ago
> I have some ontological questions. My sides.
krispyfi 2y ago
From the headline, I expected this to be a site that randomly presents you with an AI-generated message, in the style of "This person does not exist".
waltbosz 2y ago
Reminds me of the time I wrote on the break room whiteboard at work: "Please to not read this sentence."
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
temporallobe 2y ago
While the warning may seem obtuse, it’s obviously referring to a message in a state of limbo. It exists in some kind of cache (and therefore only locally) but all traces of it have been deleted on the remote storage. It actually makes sense to me, and I think MS handled this edge case very well. I actually cannot think of a better way to handle it.
Illniyar 2y ago
I was sure this was going to be a gen-ai site that is going to generate messages on the fly.
- k8svet 2y ago
  Even after I've read and enjoyed it, I skim the title in the list and still think that's what it must be.
elwell 2y ago
Schrödinger's email
dudeinjapan 2y ago
All messages in Outlook exist only in the liminal dreamspace of Clippy.
michaelgiba 2y ago
This is art
phaedrus 2y ago
I once screen-shotted an intranet application at my work asking the unintentional koan, "One does not exist", next to a button that said, "Create".
dfabulich 2y ago
I think this is an example of the "answering machine paradox," which philosophers have been writing about since the 1970's. https://philpapers.org/rec/SIDTAM 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.)
- tempodox 2y ago
  This is ludicrous. Failure to distinguish the person (“I”) from their recorded voice does not make a philosophical problem. It's pure and unadulterated stupidity.
  - Y_Y 2y ago
    When you say "this", I assume you are referring to the message you were writing at the time.
  - skyechurch 2y ago
    Alternatively: placing finger on the peak of Olympus Mons on Martian map "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.
    - bravetraveler 2y ago
      > leads me to think philosophers lead blessed, problem-free lives. 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 As my life became more blessed I could afford more philosophy. 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.
    - 2y ago
rvnx 2y ago
The fix is to add "on the server" to the sentence. "This message cannot be saved because it no longer exists on the server.", and then it's all solved.
Tojot 2y ago
Dangling pointer. Case closed. Period. Period period. :)
tempodox 2y ago
Leave it to Microsoft to come up with nonsensical stuff, be it names or something like this. They must have an ample supply of specialists for braindead language.
weinzierl 2y ago
"You don't exist. Go away!" said the server.
nyfresh 2y ago
You could argue from the perspective of the server this is a true statement. The message does not exist. If the server stored a history of messages, current and deleted, it would not be in the logs. What you received is something different. Like a message but not a message.
wwilim 2y ago
I want to ask a simpler question - why don't I have a button to make the message exist again if I have the content?
- kunley 2y ago
  Imagine the meetings and comitees to decide how such a button should be named. They would brobably involve "AI" somehow
- yetihehe 2y ago
  That would probably allow inserting any message you want into history. Malicious messages too. "Your honor, server chat history shows that the defendant indeed sent that explicit message to my client". Inserting on server messages sent to you seems pretty crazy idea for anyone who ever programmed any chat functionality.
tjoff 2y ago
I've gotten this message and it kind of illustrates one of the many aspect as to why web-browser apps are so terrible, that the storage is disconnected from the app and the connection is unreliable (and in most cases (if not on mobile) it is just that the server is unreliable, because it has to handle 10 million other connections). > 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.
- michaelmior 2y ago
  The problems you cite with Web apps are not unique to the Web, but to client-server apps in general.
  - tjoff 2y ago
    It is much worse than that because a proper client can have storage as well. The key difference is that the browser is not a proper client but a general purpose interpreter and that webb applications don't have a choice no matter how bad of a fit it is.
    - phantomathkg 2y ago
      Web app have storage. It is only because the app you use doesn’t use it properly. Even gmail has offline mode.
      - tjoff 2y ago
        But it can't trust the storage. Maybe you are in incognito. Maybe you are not using your own computer etc. Not particularly likely it will ever sync again.
pavlov 2y ago
Computers can stop time because they don’t have to execute instructions. In a sense this is an example of what that affords. 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.
- robryk 2y ago
  As with race conditions, making things faster doesn't change things but only exposes preexisting problems. The preexisting problem I see here is sloppy definition of existence for the message: if you can see the message on a burning piece of paper, it should be considered to still exist (just as a message being sent with smoke signals does not disappear the moment it's committed to smoke). 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.
  - alpinisme 2y ago
    It’s not the word “exists” that causes the problem (although it definitely gives it an added air of strange mystery). It’s the word “this.” Consider the case of a draft email I am writing on my laptop, but have to leave before finishing. Later, I resume composing the email on my phone and I hit send. But I do it in a hurry and mostly forget about it. The next morning, though, I open my laptop and I see the still unfinished draft I left there. 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.
- dsign 2y ago
  It used to be so during the golden age of personal computers or if you run Linux and have tweaked it so. But modern-day operating systems will bend the nature of reality itself if they have to, in order to restart and install updates, or to force you to change your password which is already 120 seconds old, or to log you out for security reasons if you stop moving the mouse. You better save that message promptly.
hollander 2y ago
This is typical Microsoft logic. And 'logic' should be quoted, because Microsoft has the most stupid texts in their products. They make translation errors, grammatical errors, use incomprehensible and stupid comments.
- xorcist 2y ago
  Didn't Jobs say something along the lines of that the problem with Microsoft is that they don't care about their products? Things like this shows how literally that is true. Make a product, sell a product, what could possibly be the problem with that?
runlaszlorun 2y ago
This comment does not exist.
- AlienRobot 2y ago
  This is not a comment.
hacker_88 2y ago
Microsoft BSOD message Team were moved to Microsoft 365
Angostura 2y ago
Presumably this is shorthand for ‘The message is no longer stored in the system’
jhbadger 2y ago
I was expecting this would be another version of This X does not exist (where X is a cat, person, molecule, etc.) where generative AI has been trained on messages and gives a plausible message that has never been given before.
slackr 2y ago
Reminds me of a joke where a Jewish kid asks his dad “what’s the holy trinity?” And the dad replies, “there’s only one God and in this house we don’t believe in him.”
graycat 2y ago
One relatively simple but informal description of the problem is that the statement is self-referencing. 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????
necovek 2y ago
One of the best executed statements of the sort was "I've been murdered" from an old movie D.O.A. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwzjpwdqay0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwzjpwdqay0
nakanaa 2y ago
A related thought I had thinking about this: 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?

818 points by sebtron 2y ago

Open in Thunderbird, it will be there, probably. 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.

playingalong 2y ago

The commentary is golden. 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".

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
wild_pointer 2y ago
[flagged]
- ileonichwiesz 2y ago
  [flagged]
tempodox 2y ago
Which only goes to show that the bad habit of using imprecise terms is liable to produce total confusion.

klysm 2y ago

This is the most Microsoft error message I have ever seen

fragmede 2y ago
This message will delete itself after this. Please save its contents if you with to retain it.
m463 2y ago
Wouldn't a more microsoft message be about competing products failing to exist? I've seen teams messages on firefox and safari about features not existing "download the teams native app!"
- beefnugs 2y ago
  More microsoft would be a 5 minute message on screen promising that they have never and will never misplace any of your messages, right before this monstrosity appears
frankthepickle 2y ago
task failed successfully!
uyzstvqs 2y ago
Only for a while until someone changes it to "Something went wrong"
- 2four2 2y ago
  With a large :( to redundantly communicate that something bad happened, in case the user didn't even read the simplified message.
- caseyy 2y ago
  Don’t forget “Oops!” — the element of surprise. 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?
  - IshKebab 2y ago
    Damn straight. This came up in an earlier discussion about languages that rely heavily on exceptions - they sensibly don't want to expose backtraces so you get this `try: response_handler() except: print("oops!")` nonsense because the programmer literally doesn't know what went wrong and they're sure as hell not going to give you the details. I find it as infuriating as you.
smrtinsert 2y ago
Fatal Error: Operation completed successfully.
consumer451 2y ago
SharePoint is supposedly one of the keystones of Microsoft. 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?

soulofmischief 2y ago

Excellent reflection on an absurd premise, thanks for sharing.

thwarted 2y ago

I've had similar philosophical thoughts about a transaction rollback. Consider this definition from go's database/sql package. func (tx *Tx) Rollback() error Rollback can fail, indicated as such by it can return an error. What are the cases where rollback could fail and what's the recovery mechanism? Does a failed rollback mean (logically) that the transaction is still open and uncommitted? But really, invoking rollback can never fail to abort the transaction, so the error result has little use. 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.

thriftwy 2y ago
Obviously, transaction may fail to be rolled back and leave dangling locks. Not sure about the specifics.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  That's a bug in your database, not something you specify on your API.
  - thriftwy 2y ago
    What if it's a connection problem? DBs are normally remote. It's also OK to specify potential bug surface on your API.
    - thwarted 2y ago
      The bug being referred to isn't the connection problem, the bug is that in the event of a loss of communication with the client, the transaction isn't fully cleaned up, including the release of held locks, when the transaction enters an abortive state.
      - 2y ago

kazinator 2y ago

It's very easy. "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.

kelnos 2y ago
Perhaps not, but if one encounters a false statement, then it is reasonable to assume any following (and previous) statements are suspect as well. 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.
- kazinator 2y ago
  The statement has a true interpretation. "This message" can be interpreted as referring to some object in a back-end database represented by text you see in the UI. The thing you see on the screen corresponds to no persistent representation in the system. "This person does not exist" under an AI-generated image similarly tells the truth; the image is not the person.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

pieresqi 2y ago

I find the message self explanatory. 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.

lupire 2y ago
That's not the ntresteing is part.

Waterluvian 2y ago

Any semantic pedantics that involve discussing ontology is always a fun time. This was a fun read.

rzzzt 2y ago

> 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. https://archive.org/details/The_Peter_Norton_Programmers_Guide_IBM-PC/page/253/mode/2up?q=%22I%27m+not+here%22 https://archive.org/details/The_Peter_Norton_Programmers_Gui... To me it sounds like that the service hogging interrupt 47 is saying that it can't be used for print spooling purposes.

rufus_foreman 2y ago

Nor will it ever exist.

kreeben 2y ago

Me: Browser: Server: WTAF are you trying to do, here, man? Message: Hi everybody!

mrmanner 2y ago

It has ceased to be

berryg 2y ago
:-) The Dead Parrot Sketch, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Parrot_sketch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Parrot_sketch

projektfu 2y ago

... As always, should you or any member of your IM Force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow all knowledge of your actions.

joezydeco 2y ago

Currently working in a Microsoft-enabled corp with a very aggressive document retention (i.e. deletion) policy. This message doesn't surprise me at all. Stuff just...disappears. All the time.

cortesoft 2y ago

Oh, finally a chance to put my Philosophy degree to use! 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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Rastonbury 2y ago
"the message does not exist in our system, only in your browser as text, copy and save it if you want to keep it, if you refresh this page the text will disappear"
- stall84 2y ago
  this cracked me up !
tikhonj 2y ago
It's still funny that the text of a message can exist without being a message itself. That must make sense in the specific context of Outlook, but it shows that the conceptual design of the software does not match how we want to think about the domain abstractly.
- sherburt3 2y ago
  I don’t think the model is that far off. In real life I can read a letter and retain the contents in my mind, then burn the letter.
  - Wolfenstein98k 2y ago
    But this is claiming that the letter does not exist, while allowing you to read the contents of the letter. If it can show you the content, the container must exist!

31337Logic 2y ago

Excuse me but Kant would like a word with this dev.

ttfkam 2y ago

Ceci n'est pas un message.

chuckadams 2y ago

Reminds me a lot of "The operation failed with an error: success"

layer8 2y ago

This message means something analogous to: “You loaded a file, but now the file doesn’t exist anymore (on disk), so I can’t update it with your changes. You can discard the loaded copy, but consider copying its contents first and create a new file from it, because for some technical reason I can’t do this myself.”

ggarnhart 2y ago

This reminds of a choice I once saw between the following: “Save this Credit Card” Or “Never save this Credit Card” With hashing and things, the latter is certainly possible, but I got a good chuckle out of it.

kstrauser 2y ago
Along those lines, "Don't use cookies on this site".
- recursive 2y ago
  Uses localStorage of course.

MikePlacid 2y ago

I do not think you need a philosophical degree to handle this. A law degree is enough. Just add “legally” before “exist” and everything makes its perfect legal sense again. 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).

routerl 2y ago

Isn't all of this just equivalent to a pointer? "This variable doesn't exist" is a reasonable error message when you're, for example, dereferencing a pointer with a wrong data type: it could be the equivalent of "there's no integer at this address" or "this integer doesn't exist". 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.

Dylan16807 2y ago
Your pointer scenario could have the same warning, but it does not match the scenario in the post. In the post, we have """the message""" displayed on screen. It's not a simple dangling pointer, the contents are right there. 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.
- routerl 2y ago
  I'm sorry, I miss things nowadays, but I don't see where the post states that the message is still available. 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.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    > I'm sorry, I miss things nowadays, but I don't see where the post states that the message is still available. 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.

NayamAmarshe 2y ago

The message is the glue that binds reality and unreality. It exists, existed, never existed, all at the same time. It is the paradox of creation, of existence, of dissolution and of consciousness.

satisfice 2y ago

My favorite Windows error message: "Unknown device (not found)"

jacobsenscott 2y ago

I suspect it means the message only exists client side, and they are able to detect that somehow. So if you browse away, or refresh, or whatever, it is gone.

sva_ 2y ago

The koan of the message that never existed.

astrea 2y ago

Wait until the author learns about pointers.

redbell 2y ago

We used to hear that LLMs hallucinate but, apparently, we are witnessing the hallucination of apps now! 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-error-message-youve-ever-seen https://thenextweb.com/news/this-is-the-funniest-windows-err...)

dfox 2y ago
Exchange did this thing well before there were any practical LLMs. And well, while the resulting state and error message is somewhat hilarious, it is not that hard to trigger this behavior intentionally.

lisper 2y ago

Everyone is snickering at this and talking about philosophy, but there is actually a legitimate point being made here, albeit obliquely: how do you explain to a non-technical user that their data has been deleted on the server, but that their client still has a cached copy that they might want to try to salvage somehow? I submit that this is a nontrivial problem worthy of serious consideration.

klysm 2y ago
I find most apps give up an enumerating the possibly modes of consistency violation that can occur in an app. I’ve tried and failed to do it “right” before and it’s incredibly difficult.
mrmanner 2y ago
Maybe pose it as a question to the user, rather than an error message: “This message has been deleted from the server. Do you want to: - discard it permanently - store this version on the server - save as a file to your computer”
mkl 2y ago
> how do you explain to a non-technical user that their data has been deleted on the server, but that their client still has a cached copy that they might want to try to salvage somehow? 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."
- femto 2y ago
  A typical person's head will explode at the mention of the words "cache" and "server". They will then go into a blind panic that their data is going to be "permanently deleted".
  - rovr138 2y ago
    "locally", "the cloud"

canadaduane 2y ago

It is messages like this that revealed to me a culture of learned helplessness at Microsoft, and I made a decision to switch to Linux.

infotropy 2y ago

There is no Antimemetics Division

sczcas 2y ago

[dead]

slashtmpslash 2y ago

“…Outlook…” Yeah it is gonna be some palmface story.

lopkeny12ko 2y ago

Why does the author find this so difficult to understand? I read the error and both immediately know what the problem is, and can guess a likely series of events that caused it. 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.

galaxyLogic 2y ago

The problem is that the message does not speak the truth. If you can read a message it clearly must exist because you cannot read non-existent messages, can you? Can anyone? CAN ANYONE HERE READ NON-EXISTENT MESSAGES? 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.

streamfroster 2y ago
While this is the most sane and logical sounding way to put it, it would lose the 'philosophical' vagueness of the original notification. I still prefer the original wording
layer8 2y ago
Of course you can read non-existent messages, for example when an AI hallucinates one, or when someone shows you a photoshopped screenshot of one, or even just when you copied one to a text document before deleting the message.
- madeofpalk 2y ago
  > Of course you can read non-existent messages, for example when an AI hallucinates one This message clearly exists. It's could be not factually correct, but a lie still exists.
  - layer8 2y ago
    No, it’s a citation of a message that does not exist. I wasn’t talking about a message sent by an AI, I was talking about an AI reproducing the alledged content of a purported message. 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.

Shopnow247 2y ago

[flagged]

Shopnow247 2y ago

[flagged]

NotYourLawyer 2y ago

> I have some ontological questions. My sides.

krispyfi 2y ago

From the headline, I expected this to be a site that randomly presents you with an AI-generated message, in the style of "This person does not exist".

waltbosz 2y ago

Reminds me of the time I wrote on the break room whiteboard at work: "Please to not read this sentence."

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

temporallobe 2y ago

While the warning may seem obtuse, it’s obviously referring to a message in a state of limbo. It exists in some kind of cache (and therefore only locally) but all traces of it have been deleted on the remote storage. It actually makes sense to me, and I think MS handled this edge case very well. I actually cannot think of a better way to handle it.

Illniyar 2y ago

I was sure this was going to be a gen-ai site that is going to generate messages on the fly.

k8svet 2y ago
Even after I've read and enjoyed it, I skim the title in the list and still think that's what it must be.

elwell 2y ago

Schrödinger's email

dudeinjapan 2y ago

All messages in Outlook exist only in the liminal dreamspace of Clippy.

michaelgiba 2y ago

This is art

phaedrus 2y ago

I once screen-shotted an intranet application at my work asking the unintentional koan, "One does not exist", next to a button that said, "Create".

dfabulich 2y ago

I think this is an example of the "answering machine paradox," which philosophers have been writing about since the 1970's. https://philpapers.org/rec/SIDTAM 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.)

tempodox 2y ago
This is ludicrous. Failure to distinguish the person (“I”) from their recorded voice does not make a philosophical problem. It's pure and unadulterated stupidity.
- Y_Y 2y ago
  When you say "this", I assume you are referring to the message you were writing at the time.
- skyechurch 2y ago
  Alternatively: placing finger on the peak of Olympus Mons on Martian map "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.
  - bravetraveler 2y ago
    > leads me to think philosophers lead blessed, problem-free lives. 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 As my life became more blessed I could afford more philosophy. 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.
  - 2y ago

rvnx 2y ago

The fix is to add "on the server" to the sentence. "This message cannot be saved because it no longer exists on the server.", and then it's all solved.

Tojot 2y ago

Dangling pointer. Case closed. Period. Period period. :)

tempodox 2y ago

Leave it to Microsoft to come up with nonsensical stuff, be it names or something like this. They must have an ample supply of specialists for braindead language.

weinzierl 2y ago

"You don't exist. Go away!" said the server.

nyfresh 2y ago

You could argue from the perspective of the server this is a true statement. The message does not exist. If the server stored a history of messages, current and deleted, it would not be in the logs. What you received is something different. Like a message but not a message.

wwilim 2y ago

I want to ask a simpler question - why don't I have a button to make the message exist again if I have the content?

kunley 2y ago
Imagine the meetings and comitees to decide how such a button should be named. They would brobably involve "AI" somehow
yetihehe 2y ago
That would probably allow inserting any message you want into history. Malicious messages too. "Your honor, server chat history shows that the defendant indeed sent that explicit message to my client". Inserting on server messages sent to you seems pretty crazy idea for anyone who ever programmed any chat functionality.

tjoff 2y ago

I've gotten this message and it kind of illustrates one of the many aspect as to why web-browser apps are so terrible, that the storage is disconnected from the app and the connection is unreliable (and in most cases (if not on mobile) it is just that the server is unreliable, because it has to handle 10 million other connections). > 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.

michaelmior 2y ago
The problems you cite with Web apps are not unique to the Web, but to client-server apps in general.
- tjoff 2y ago
  It is much worse than that because a proper client can have storage as well. The key difference is that the browser is not a proper client but a general purpose interpreter and that webb applications don't have a choice no matter how bad of a fit it is.
  - phantomathkg 2y ago
    Web app have storage. It is only because the app you use doesn’t use it properly. Even gmail has offline mode.
    - tjoff 2y ago
      But it can't trust the storage. Maybe you are in incognito. Maybe you are not using your own computer etc. Not particularly likely it will ever sync again.

pavlov 2y ago

Computers can stop time because they don’t have to execute instructions. In a sense this is an example of what that affords. 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.

robryk 2y ago
As with race conditions, making things faster doesn't change things but only exposes preexisting problems. The preexisting problem I see here is sloppy definition of existence for the message: if you can see the message on a burning piece of paper, it should be considered to still exist (just as a message being sent with smoke signals does not disappear the moment it's committed to smoke). 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.
- alpinisme 2y ago
  It’s not the word “exists” that causes the problem (although it definitely gives it an added air of strange mystery). It’s the word “this.” Consider the case of a draft email I am writing on my laptop, but have to leave before finishing. Later, I resume composing the email on my phone and I hit send. But I do it in a hurry and mostly forget about it. The next morning, though, I open my laptop and I see the still unfinished draft I left there. 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.
dsign 2y ago
It used to be so during the golden age of personal computers or if you run Linux and have tweaked it so. But modern-day operating systems will bend the nature of reality itself if they have to, in order to restart and install updates, or to force you to change your password which is already 120 seconds old, or to log you out for security reasons if you stop moving the mouse. You better save that message promptly.

hollander 2y ago

This is typical Microsoft logic. And 'logic' should be quoted, because Microsoft has the most stupid texts in their products. They make translation errors, grammatical errors, use incomprehensible and stupid comments.

xorcist 2y ago
Didn't Jobs say something along the lines of that the problem with Microsoft is that they don't care about their products? Things like this shows how literally that is true. Make a product, sell a product, what could possibly be the problem with that?

runlaszlorun 2y ago

This comment does not exist.

AlienRobot 2y ago
This is not a comment.

hacker_88 2y ago

Microsoft BSOD message Team were moved to Microsoft 365

Angostura 2y ago

Presumably this is shorthand for ‘The message is no longer stored in the system’

jhbadger 2y ago

I was expecting this would be another version of This X does not exist (where X is a cat, person, molecule, etc.) where generative AI has been trained on messages and gives a plausible message that has never been given before.

slackr 2y ago

Reminds me of a joke where a Jewish kid asks his dad “what’s the holy trinity?” And the dad replies, “there’s only one God and in this house we don’t believe in him.”

graycat 2y ago

One relatively simple but informal description of the problem is that the statement is self-referencing. 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????

necovek 2y ago

One of the best executed statements of the sort was "I've been murdered" from an old movie D.O.A. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwzjpwdqay0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwzjpwdqay0

nakanaa 2y ago

A related thought I had thinking about this: 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?