It is interesting how much of our infrastructure relies on the assumption that 'close enough' is actually 'good enough' for uniqueness. When we move from UUIDs to things like ULIDs or Snowflake IDs, we are really just trading off coordination cost for a slightly higher collision risk that we will likely never hit in several lifetimes. Thinking about it on a 'cosmological' scale makes you realize how much of a luxury local generation is without needing a central authority. It is that tiny bit of entropy that keeps the whole distributed system from grinding to a halt.

>the assumption that 'close enough' is actually 'good enough' for uniqueness

i'm pretty sure it's "far enough" that makes it "good enough"