Hi Will, I'm curious what your thoughts are about the Nix uniqueness problem, and the characterization of failures, or lack thereof under undefined behavior's f

Hi Will, I'm curious what your thoughts are about the Nix uniqueness problem, and the characterization of failures, or lack thereof under undefined behavior's failure domains. Exception handling generally requires a defined and deterministic state which can't be guaranteed given design choices to resolve DLL hell under Nix (i.e. its a stochastic process). I mention this since it is a similar form of the problem you mention in writing this piece of software, that can lead to madness. Also, operationally, the troubleshooting problem-space of keeping things running, segments nicely into deterministic and non-deterministic regions; which the latter ends up costing orders of magnitude more as a function of time to resolve since you can't perturb individual subsystems to test for correct function, without determinism and time in-variance (as system's properties), testing piecemeal has contradictions in stochastic processes. Hashing by rigorous definition is non-unique (i.e. its like navigating a circle), and there is no proof of uniformity. So problems in this space would be in the latter region. While, there are heuristics from cryptography that suggest using factional cubic roots to initialize the fields brings more uniformity to the examined space than not, there is no proof of such. When building resilient systems, engineers often try to remove any brittle features that promote failures. Interestingly, as a side note, ldd output injects non-determinism into the pipe by flattening empty columns non-deterministically (i.e. if you ldd ssh client, you'll see the null state for each input to output has more than a single meaning/edge on the traversal depending on object type, this ends up violating the 1:1 unique input-output state graph/map required for determinism as a property, though it won't be evident until you run use it as an input that problematically maps later in automation (i.e. grepping the output with RegEx will silently fail, providing what looks like legitimate output if one doesn't look too closely). PaX ended up forking the project with the fix, because the maintainers refused to admit the problem (reported 2016, forked in 2018), the bug remains in all current versions of ldd (to my knowledge). While based in theory, these types of problems crop up everywhere in computation and few seem to recognize them. Working with system's properties, and whether they are preserved; informs on whether the system can be safely and consistently used in later automated processes, as well as maintained at cheap cost. Businesses generally need a supportable and defensible infrastructure.