There are worse things, like switching off light and not using appliances for an "Earth hour", while making the power grid shedding the excess capacity frantically.
If you want to make a difference, do something small, but do it every day.
Yeah, I don't like these gestures that are tied to a specific day. It's blue tribe signaling with no real sacrifice necessary.
I believe the "minimalism" movement has been far more impactful in the long-run despite fewer adoptees, just by being a trend that capitalized on the benefits in its messaging. Those who optimize for minimalism consume less, but constantly.
Everyone: Please stop using ‘#’ as an href placeholder. Don’t make your ‘<a>’ elements rely on events. If you want to replace their events with others, go for it. But please make them work at the base level.
When the encoding relies on differentiating between lowercase and capitalized characters, you’re hitting a high level of ambiguity. Hexadecimal UUIDs don’t have this problem.
Yes. Even 64 bits is too many, really: at 6 bits per human-recognizable token, it's more than 10 tokens, which is outside the range of what almost any human can keep in their working memory. You can't even hold it in your head long enough to type it in a different window. 128 bits is completely beyond that; when confronted with 128-bits like a UUID, people just give up. Seriously, try actually typing in a UUID sometime. Even with the grouping it's incredibly difficult. Between 64-bits and 128-bits you discover that you absolutely need an automated way to transmit the data, and then how do you get it to that airgapped computer?
The more important requirement is that the id should not be guessable and not easily be brute-forced (example: YouTube private video listings). Now, what's the minimum required entropy to make it unguessable but also make it short enough to have people tell the id over the phone or something?
I don't think it's a matter of not being able to index on it, but that mostly random UUIDs (like v4) can lead to some interesting index fragmentation you have to stay on top of somehow.
It's particularly interesting that Microsoft SQL Server was designed to optimize indexing for UUIDv1 machine IDs. That makes a certain amount of sense for a database cluster if IDs are sorted by machine. Of course, developers don't let developers use UUIDv1 in 2023 because those machine IDs are not secure in a general sense and can be a privacy/data leak in the worst cases.
Other databases sort/index UUIDs differently. There's no real "standard" and optimizing the storage of a UUID key is a game of playing to the strengths of your specific database.
(On one project I put some work into matching the much-better-defined ULID sort order to MS SQL Server uniqueidentifier columns for better database locality.)
You already got multiple answers explaining the performance issue.
Now in many, typical applications you'd have to scale up quite significantly before this becomes a problem.
But if your application requires you to store small, new entries very quickly, you'll start to notice this even with moderate scale. Disk persistence is often the bottleneck already, and this might make it worse.
