Decayfmt – a file format that corrupts itself a little every time you open it(github.com)

32 pointsby unprovable4 hours ago9 comments

BugsJustFindMean hour ago
This is NOT a file format that corrupts itself. This is a file reader that corrupts files. There's a big difference. Nothing about the format itself causes or requires corruption. A better tagline would be "decayfmt is a social contract enforced by pinky promise".

Reminds me of Tie::Hash::Cannabinol:

  Tie::Hash::Cannabinol is a completely useless demonstration of how to use Tie::StdHash to 
  pervert the behaviour of Perl hashes. Once a hash has been tied to Tie::Hash::Cannabinol, 
  there is a 25% chance that it will forget anything that you tell it immediately and a 
  further 25% chance that it won't be able to retrieve any information you ask it for. Any 
  information that it does return will be pulled at random from its keys.
  
  Oh, and the return value from exists isn't to be trusted either :)

[1] https://metacpan.org/pod/Tie::Hash::Cannabinol

jolmg2 hours ago
> This is a social contract
What's the other side of the contract? Why would a reader oblige to corrupt?
angeldimitrov942 hours ago
Seems like there is no mechanism to allow non-corrupting reads from authorized processes? Begs the question then of what the point of this is. Pure novelty, or truly something that could be used in practice?
dang2 hours ago
Kind of like how human memory works, if I understand correctly.
NDlurker3 hours ago
Should have patented it and licensed it to Snap
m3047an hour ago
You might look into (Norbert) Weiner functions.
m3kw92 hours ago
I thought something like this should be part of the file system to make it even more laborious to by pass
- dylan604an hour ago
  A company I was at had a disk array that would do something like this. It wasn't a documented feature mind you. During writes, it would randomly zero out data within a file. So at least it didn't get progressively worse, but it was a bear to isolate. These were large media files so a quick look at the head/middle/tail could easily miss the problem areas.
M95D2 hours ago
Would you please stop inventing more ways to enshittify the world?