There’s a pattern you start to see after building systems for a while.There’s a pattern you start to see after building systems for a while.

A lot of “impossibility theorems” in computer science are true in theory, but almost meaningless in practice.

The reason is that theory deals with all possible cases, while the real world only ever touches a small, structured subset.

Once you focus on that subset, the “impossible” usually becomes straightforward, and the remaining overhead — the 2-bit tax — is small enough to ignore.