alt Hacker News> kidnapped by the US Army.... You just can't defend against everything
Of course not.
The litmus test IMO should be "what would a normal intelligent human do in this situation?"
A human would copy every file it could, maintaining a list of issues. When you were available to address concerns, it'd present the options to you. The human would give up if the US Army showed up, but a human would restart a TCP connection automatically without asking for permission again (or more analogously, redial a phone call). A human would save their work automatically, and when you showed back up, would find that work for you.
(In 2026, things like "retry" should be automatic outside some very specific limitations too, because of course a human would try again if they failed).
Replies
> A human would copy every file it could, maintaining a list of issues.
Please not, I want my computer to be a dumb tool, who really only does what I told it to. I do not want to have it have it's own agenda.
> In 2026, things like "retry" should be automatic outside some very specific limitations too
No. I can tell the computer to retry, when I didn't it is because I didn't want it to.
> what would a normal intelligent human do in this situation?
Problem is that this requires testing what actual "normal intelligent human" would do, because very often programmer has other ideas and UI/UX people have other ideas.
> A human would copy every file it could, maintaining a list of issues.
How do you know? From your idea what should be done instead of current version? I would not do it like you said.
Also, there are many reasons for transfer not succeeding and depending on a reason why transfer didn't succeed, you should make different decisions. sometimes reasons are not predictable by a program (a new file transfer method over pidgeons was transparently added to the system and "carrier attacked by predator" was not included in "how to handle this reason").