[asperous]

One advantage of uuids is they can be generated on several distributed systems without having to check with each other that they are unique. Only long ids make this reliable. Youtube ids are random and short, but youtube has to check they are unique when generating them.

Maybe one way is to split up a random assignment space and assign to each distributed node, but that would be more complex.

[imron]

And then there’s uuid5 which you can use to generate identical unique identifiers across multiple systems without having to check on each other. Very very useful to have in some circumstances.