the tldr of this blog post is "today's invalid states are often tomorrow's feature requirements" and i found myself nodding along in agreement

https://www.seangoedecke.com/invalid-states/

i have encountered the "no optional fields on network messages" argument before, often from nominative type likers

but in practice, new fields are always optional: clients need to be able to downgrade requests to talk to old servers

and servers have to be able to upgrade old requests to avoid having 200 code paths

really you only have two types of network message: every field is optional

and the three or four cases where that's not true, like "vec3"

@tef I daydream of a CRM which would serve as a notetaking app for a murder mystery novel - you're not recording platonic truths about reality, you're taking statements from a variety of variously reliable sources, aggregating them together and seeing what statements cause a conflict with the others. i.e. managing conflict rather than trying to ban it

@jackeric @tef previously joked about a *cough* sales oriented customer who was a CRM fan that actually what they needed was a Lies Management System to keep track of the conflicting truth each of their own customers was presented with

@jackeric @tef not quite that, but one day I’m going to snap and build some project management software which requires a confidence level to be provided along with all estimates, then returns schedules as a date range.

@jackeric sounds like you want to learn prolog

@jon @jackeric congrats you have invented a tool that encourages managers to punish the most honest employees heh

@tef @jackeric god damn it, tef. Can I not have one nice thing?