zinodaur

I love it. Any thoughts on allowing (value type) Pointers into a Region?

If you take their cookie for dropping their bombs - it seems like you’ve earned whatever blame comes your way for the people you kill. It never seems like much blame makes it back anyways

> metrics fit for warehouse workers

Maybe no one should be tortured by those metrics

I hope the rest of the world follows suit. Can you imagine the human misery venture capital could inflict by pursuing this vertical?

> Not building the technology deprives humanity of benefits or simply places AI in the hands of authoritarian powers

Can someone clarify this for me? How far along would the open weight models be without the frenzied pace of the frontier labs?

As a non-US citizen, which authoritarian powers is he referring to? As far as I'm aware, the US is the only country using frontier models to conduct air strikes on civilians and orchestrate assassinations of foreign governments.

I'm pretty new to choosing compression libraries - I started with zlib and was delighted at how much faster and smaller zstd made things.

Since we kind of need a default "Need to compress something? Use this!" setting - would you prefer zlib over zstd, or something else for that role?

Great read - the main takeaway I had was “Spokes has an insane replication protocol for a database (Git) with such low write rates”. Leader/follower + LSN Binlog, WAL, whatever - just not their distributed systems nightmare coordination system

For beings with finite lifespans, time is precious

Yes, but much more slowly. And if they realize halfway through implementation that there is a better way to do it, but they are under pressure to deliver, they wont have time to rewrite it and will live with the consequences of that decision forever

> The query planners have diverged between MySQL and MariaDB; which one are you talking about? Both have received improvements in recent years, so the specific version is relevant as well. And at least both systems have supported index hints

MySQL - we use the index hints 100% of the time because the query planner (still) doesn't work

> The real-world relevance is minor, especially since companies using external write-through caches are already making much worse inherent trade-offs in that area

I disagree - everyone knows that the cache value can be stale, and to be wary of it if your use case requires correctness. In my experience people tend to expect correct, up to date data from their database - which is why they usually have to opt in to read-replicas

> Do you have some novel academic solution for this that you can propose?

MySQL doesn't support synchronous replication - so semi sync is the next best thing. Then you wrestle with it to make it not crazy (e.g. - only count a tx as acked if it was acked by a replica that has all the other txes). Its not rocket science - maybe the big fanfare about synchronous replication made sense when a disk write was incredibly slow, but adding 2 ms of network latency and 5ms to persist it on another machine in order to not lose user data seems like a pretty straightforward choice to me. And if write performance matters that much to you - you shouldn't be using a dinosaur like MySQL anyways

- Its query planner is ancient and broken - it comes up with very bad plans. Every time we rely on it, we regret it eventually

- you have to use locks to prevent mangled write transactions, instead of the db handling it. Jepsen report is scathing

- its pretty hard to set it up in semi-sync replication mode, a.k.a. "only return from a transaction commit when the transaction is present on at least one other replica". Once you've set it up, you have to deal with insane things like transactions being visible on replicas before leaders, or even worse transactions visible on replicas briefly but never visible on leaders or other replicas

- every knob and feature contains subtle bugs, sometimes ones as scary as index corruption, that you only discover after it has caused you pain

I don't know why you would choose it unless you were already running it

As a big user of MySQL - moving off of it does seem like a good idea, if you can. The longer you wait, the harder it will be to flee

Very interesting piece! Does Vitess support xshard joins? How does it compare to things like TiDB?

Oh no, someone is profiting off of their work without proper attribution!?!?