We have all heard and dealt with regular issues where you need to reboot your computer while working on something important. Naturally, you save and continue your work after reboot since “it doesn’t take that long anyway”. It’s not only common, it’s an integral part of how computers are built:
Chaos and Determinism
Most systems are built around indeterminism and as pools of uncontrolled isolated blobs. There’s no real way of ordering the pool, and the indeterminism creates an uncontrollable flow.
Usually, after the system starts, it hands off resources to “unknown” processes which they then can choose to act with it without consultation against the system.
In the end, the system becomes unaware of the state it is in, as the pool is full of “unknowns” that can’t truly be controlled.
Determinism has always been a big issue in programming, ordering is usually costly or near impossible so we tend to accept chaos in it’s place.
Rebooting sucks
The unaware system usually requires a refresh of states because it has long lost context, which means a hard reboot. The costs could be minimalized through persistence, yet the context has to be redone, reconstructed, rebuilt from fragments all over again.
The limit
Continuity isn’t just the “live reload” of a system, it’s the promise of your machine to you, that it will live despite the chaos of what happens above in the yarn of indeterminism. It means refreshing without reload, reloading without loss, adding without removal, removing without reconstruction. It means non-linear reconstruction of what changed.
But everything has it’s limits, continuity is a concept of immortality, but everything has to die before it’s reborn. Processes have to die, components need to be reborn. It’s not a computational limit, it’s an euclidean concept, whereas replacement implies termination, as spatially, you could not replace an object in space without removing it.
Yet- Limit is only a threshold, not an obstacle. A system that is aware can live itself to keep whatelse alive, yet sacrifices itself when it reaches it’s limit.