Cet article contient 2 passages, qui n'ont pas grand chose à voir avec le sujet de l'article, mais qui sont très intéressant pour eux-même (bien plus que l'article dans son intégralité).
Le premier, sur les systèmes distribués. Rien de spécialement original, mais je trouve que c'est très bien expliqué, et ce de manière très concise :
More specifically, in the context of the CAP theorem, network partitions do happen, therefore we have to sacrifice either availability or consistency. This gives two major classes of algorithms: CRDTs and blockchains sacrify consistency, whereas Raft and Paxos sacrify availability.
Another way to try and get a reasonable solution is called eventual consistency, where a service initially sacrifies consistency, but trusts the internet to not remain partitioned for too long. This can also be seen as a weakening of the partition tolerance property. For example, in the particular case of bitcoin, consistency is restored by electing a leader periodically (every ten minutes or so, by mining), and hoping that the result of the election can be broadcast fast enough to the entire internet before another leader gets elected (meaning before the chain splits). If that fails, bitcoin users agree to use the longest chain, which causes data loss.
Et un passage (ou plutôt une note de bas de page) philosophico-historique:
The realisation that naming things is a discipline of its own has probably even been one of the greatest discoveries of the 20th century. Cantor probably started that, by rebuilding foundations for mathematics (definitions were particularly fuzzy before him), Wittgenstein established a link with philosophy, blurring the distinction between mathematics and philosophy. Kuhn even established a distinction between the scientists who name things (whom he called “revolutionary”) and the others (the “normies”). Deleuze restated the role of the philosopher as a creator of concepts (which also applies outside of science), or in other words, as a professional namer. And by the way, the history of Computer Science is full of such half-philosophical, half-mathematical discoveries, where naming is almost everything: Turing machines, Communication Complexity, Yao’s principle… ↩︎