Tootfinder

The chanciness of time
John M. Myers, Hadi Madjid
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08611 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08611 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.08611
arXiv:2511.08611v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Digital network failures stemming from instabilities in measurements of temporal order motivate attention to concurrent events. A century of attempts to resolve the instabilities have never eliminated them. Do concurrent events occur at indeterminate times, or are they better seen as events to which the very concept of temporal order cannot apply? Logical dependencies of messages propagating through digital networks can be represented by marked graphs on which tokens are moved in formal token games. However, available mathematical formulations of these token games invoke "markings"-- global snapshots of the locations of tokens on the graph. The formulation in terms of global snapshots is misleading, because distributed networks are never still: they exhibit concurrent events inexpressible by global snapshots. We reformulate token games used to represent digital networks so as to express concurrency. The trick is to replace global snapshots with "local snapshots." Detached from any central clock, a local snapshot records an action at a node during a play of a token game. Assemblages of local records define acyclic directed graphs that we call history graphs. We show how history graphs represent plays of token games with concurrent motions, and, importantly, how history graphs can represent the history of a network operating while undergoing unpredictable changes.
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I do like #NextCloud but sometimes it can drive me crazy. For example, fresh update, hundreds of errors with astoundingly unhelpful messages. Consider:
chmod(): Operation not permitted at /var/www/nextcloud/apps/recognize/lib/Migration/InstallDeps.php#169
ok, so what do we find at line 169? a call to chmod() on presumably a filename, wrapped in an exception Catch.
I realize this is very much non-trivial software with oodles of hours of difficult work by so many kind people, but, really, how much effort would it have been to include the errant target FILENAME in the exception message?
Similarly, a deprecation warning is, by definition, a Warning, not an error.
None of this affects my using Nextcloud, but it does really clutter the log and who knows, maybe some of these Errors are actually important?