Do the patch numbers jump around randomly? Does each new software version have a smaller number instead of bigger so it counts down?
best practice is to manually read the diff to determine if it’s a newer or older version before applying the patch
That sounds like a lot of work, so what I’ll do is travel into the future and ask my future self who’s already read the manual to tell me which update I should install.
There’s no way this could possibly go wrong.
Unfortunately, future me loves pranks.
Time machines are hardware only
Ha! I knew software was a distracting trap to arrest the development of human civilization, I just didn’t know what it was distracting from until now!
The version number is all of them at the same time. When you take a measurement you lock it temporarily into one configuration.
This happens with everything all the time. It’s most likely a certain way and you don’t notice it’s different because when it changes it was always that way, so that’s how you see it because that’s the environment your brain evolved in. Inside the field the machine generates it works differently and you can actually see the changes from look to look because your brain didn’t evolve that capability sort of like how you can’t detect most harmful radiation because there wasn’t any for your biological computer to train on. The really bad stuff all decayed long before we came along, and the new bad stuff doesn’t usually stick around long enough for us to adapt.
This has been my TED talk.
