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Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

> Computers suck at networking. We have _a lot_ of complex layers to help make it feel somewhat reliable.

I've got bad news pal: your SSD has a triple-core ARM processor and is connected to the CPU through a bus, which is basically a network, complete with error correction and exact same failure modes as your connection to the new york stock exchange. Even the connection between your CPU and it's memory can prodice errors, it's turtles all the way down.

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Computer systems are imperfect. No one is claiming otherwise. What matters more is the probability of failure, rates of failure in the real world, P95 latencies, how complex it is to mitigate common real world failures, etc, etc, etc.

"Turtles all the way down" is an appeal to purity. It's exactly the kind of fallacious thinking that leads to bad system design.

the difference of distributed (networked) systems is that they are expected to keep working even in the presence of partial (maybe byzantine) failures.

The communication between actor itself is not the problem, unreliable comunication between unreliable actors is.

If any of my CPU, RAM, Motherboard has a significant failure my laptop is just dead, they all can assume that all the others mostly work and simply fail if they don't.

Come now. Nobody can sever my connection to the CPU with a pair of hedge clippers in the backyard.

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