Comment by adyavanapalli
1 day ago
What you're talking about is so extremely rare that it's much more likely that the entire Earth is destroyed by an asteroid right this inst...
1 day ago
What you're talking about is so extremely rare that it's much more likely that the entire Earth is destroyed by an asteroid right this inst...
It is not quite as rare. I calculated it to be less common than being hit by a meteorite, and added a section about that and the Birthday Paradox to Wikipedia, to the article about UUIDs. It got removed / replaced a few years ago however. (If my source was correct, there was actually a woman hit by a meteorite, but she survived, with a leg injury.)
If you do have a UUID collision, chances are extremely high that it's either a software bug, or glitch in the computer. It could be a cosmic ray. Cosmic rays messing with the computer memory or CPU are actually relatively common.
About as rare as an asteroid typing an ellipsis and clicking the add comment button.
Well, this joke dates back to (at least) the dial-up days where {#`%${%&`+'${`%& NO CARRIER
That’s just a result of jounce from localized gravity effects and atmospheric pressure disturbances in the moments before impact.
Think the ultrasonic typing hacking scene in Pantheon combined with the keyboard bouncing due to rumbling.
It's very common if you improperly seed, as others in the thread brought up! Or in your framing, as rare as earth getting hit if it were surrounded by a sci-fi density asteroid field.
Well it would be statistically even rarer for that UUID collision to happen and the earth to be destroyed by an asteroid.
For a single database using UUIDs, yes, it's astronomically rare. But it's quite a different thing to say that no computer system on Earth has ever experienced a UUID collision. The number of systems out there is also astronomical.
>The number of systems out there is also astronomical.
Not even close
Sure it does. Planets are astronomical, and we only have 8 of those in our solar system.