Hugo Firth

Someone with a clock knows what time it is. Someone with two clocks is never sure.

On Mastodon @[email protected]

[Hugo Firth @hugofirth]

Firing this into the void in-case said void starts to crumble away:

I don’t know if it’s #TheNextBigThing and I don’t care much, but so far Mastodon has proved to be a pretty great life raft.

@[email protected]

[Hugo Firth @hugofirth]

@phil_eaton All recent (< 3 years) code in that area is closed source. But you can see the bones of the pattern in the old AGPL version (https://t.co/88kxlrZH3m) I believe. Look at RaftMachine and RaftMessageHandler implementations. Each message gets a fresh Handler with a ReadableRaftState

[Hugo Firth @hugofirth]

@phil_eaton This is effectively what we do at Neo4j. Every message is queued, when it is handled we get a snapshot of the raft state, then go through the process of appending, potentially committing/applying and driving changes to the state machines. Then finally spit out a new snapshot

[Hugo Firth @hugofirth]

@ElLazal Oh no doubt. We obviously don’t know the scale of the incidents but the user experience degrades pretty gracefully all things considered. Partly that’s the domain (no hard requirement for up-to-dateness or completeness) but mostly probably smart engineering from a while back

[Hugo Firth @hugofirth]

For people who are denying the technical challenges facing Twitter: the signs are already there. E.g. I’m still seeing a timeline, but it’s missing tweets from people I follow from the past several hours. Instead it seems to be cycling through follower likes and suggested topics

[Hugo Firth @hugofirth]

@dmofengineering 100% The Metastable failures paper is a pretty good treatise on this topic https://t.co/xXgnuX6geW

[Hugo Firth @hugofirth]

The terrible irony of an narcissistic clown with a god complex and $44B who buys Twitter "for freedom of speech", lays off a large % of its workforce then removes their tweets about being laid off because they "violate Twitters content policies"

[Hugo Firth @hugofirth]

@gunnarmorling That thread really E scala ted

[Hugo Firth @hugofirth]

@phil_eaton @AlexMillerDB Which is not to say that you couldn't introduce stable ordering between equally valid (i.e caught up) election candidates. You could definitely do that. Do you have a specific use case in mind?

[Hugo Firth @hugofirth]

@phil_eaton @AlexMillerDB Fundamentally I'm not certain any quorum system (like Raft or Paxos) could be deterministic in *that* sense, because they have to tolerate failures on a potentially random minority of servers.

[Hugo Firth @hugofirth]

@technige @WokChic Exactly. Hot-brown-mostly-water is central to what it means to be human. Coffee, Tea, Hot chocolate, Bovril…

Now I’m worried about who all these heathen non coffee drinking automata are liking the parent tweet.

[Hugo Firth @hugofirth]

@jimwebber Coxless because clearly no one is steering the boat?

[Hugo Firth @hugofirth]

@jimwebber Ha - I mean posters attached to accepted papers aren’t often separately reviewed right?

[Hugo Firth @hugofirth]

Reflecting recently on how brilliant The Morning Paper (https://t.co/E9JJZ76wO3) is/was at making CS research accessible and it occurred to me:

Why don't journals/conferences ask for longer abstracts in that kind of format alongside full-length submissions?

[Hugo Firth @hugofirth]

@rotnroll666 I use Moom. Feel like its already fairly minimal. Is there something it does that you feel is overweight or unnecessary?

[Hugo Firth @hugofirth]

@technige I was thinking as power rangers, but doctors would be good too

[Hugo Firth @hugofirth]

If you're one of those open source advocates who criticises a project's for changing license after version x but you *also* argue that maintainer's don't owe users anything/should be able to abandon projects at will: how do you reconcile those positions? Genuinely curious

[Hugo Firth @hugofirth]

Fucking Hell America… (United States of, obviously)

[Hugo Firth @hugofirth]

@MarcJBrooker The later work by the same group “A fault-tolerance shim for serverless computing” is an even more direct treatment of this topic. Thoroughly recommend if you haven’t read it (https://t.co/4a1Bx4Xc5Q).