We argue that the so-called paradox of reversible processes - or simply, the paradox of equilibrium thermodynamics - can be resolved if thermodynamics treats a large system as if it is a tiny system. This is natural given the purpose of thermodynamics - despite each subsystem itself with varying internal microscopic details, we can treat it as if it is a uniform subsystem. Relativity allows constructing a local rest frame for a tiny subsystem, where things are as if there is no instantaneous motion. General relativity thus allows us to model a tiny subsystem as if it is in an instantaneous equilibrium while also in a global disequilibrium. Since a subsystem cannot spread information faster than speed of light, each subsystem undergoing equilibriation with other subsystems must itself equilibriate over time. This implies that an intermediate thermodynamic variable in an equilibriation process must be interpreted with cautions - it represents a final equilibrium variable for a subsystem after completion of internal equilibriation when equilibriation with other subsystems is prematurely aborted.

In Jaksland and Linnemann (2020), it was claimed that the AdS/CFT correspondence is simply about two different ways of utilizing the same string theory on the anti-de Sitter (AdS) side. While this was traditionally so, with both string theory and conformal field theory (CFT) being local physics, recent developments in holographic gravity - holography of information and the islands proposal - complicate the story, with more roles played by non-locality and CFT. Some of these developments allow for interpreting AdS/CFT as a mapping from CFT predictions to observational reality in a bulk space, rather than just being an inter-representational duality. Two key questions - whether string theory is non-local and whether the Hilbert space of string theory is smaller than that of CFT - remain unsettled, as with the charge that these new developments are wrong extrapolations of AdS/CFT, conflating non-local mapping with theories being non-local. Given this state of affairs, it would be inappropriate yet to conclude that AdS/CFT is holography without holography.