A isFavorite: Bool is the most violent compression anyone's ever done to a feeling. "I loved that shot of espresso on a rainy Tuesday when the grind finally clicked" gets crushed down to a single byte. The heart icon is a one-byte shrine to a memory it can't actually hold.
The sad, nerdy part is that we know one byte is nowhere near enough to be true, and we also know it's exactly enough to be useful. So we ship it. A real model of why you loved something can't be computed, and even if it could, nobody's tapping through twelve screens to log it. A faithful record of the feeling is useless. A sliver of a truth you can query is gold.\nThat's what a favorite button really is. A quiet admission that we'd rather keep a searchable lie than an unsearchable truth.
\nAnd that's most of data modeling, honestly. The question is never "how do we represent reality?" It's "how much of reality can we throw away before the query stops coming back?"
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2026-05-29T11:36:32.763Z", "tags": [ "philosophy", "thoughts", "tech" ] }, { "id": "https://jottings.vishalvshekkar.com/jots/4820179286.html", "url": "https://jottings.vishalvshekkar.com/jots/4820179286.html", "title": "Philosophers spent two thousand years on the Ship of Theseus: replace every plank one by one, is ...", "content_html": "PS: A Bool is represented using a byte in most languages as opposed to a bit because the CPU can't directly address a bit.
\n
Philosophers spent two thousand years on the Ship of Theseus: replace every plank one by one, is it still the same ship?\nA programmer heard the question, ran the planks through a hash function, and said "no, it's a different ship, here's the receipt, can we go to lunch."
\nTurns out the riddle was only hard because everyone insisted the answer had to be profound. Ask "the same in what sense, and who's asking" and it stops being philosophy and becomes inventory.
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-29T06:56:41.792Z", "tags": [ "thoughts", "philosophy", "ship-of-theseus", "hash" ] } ] }