Paul Borrill

Physicist & CEO of DÆDÆLUS; Join the conversation on our evolving knowledge of the nature of time & causality. And how we make the world safe for transactions.

[Paul Borrill @plborrill]

OPEN ATOMIC ETHERNET. From Timeouts to Transactions, for Deterministic, Observable Layer-2 AI/ML Networks. Tomorrow [DEC-31] at 11am -Noon PST https://t.co/1bJRIUq39z

[Mark Burgess @markburgess_osl]

Nice, cc @plborrill

[Paul Borrill @plborrill]

@barabasi @skdh Almost all of Barabási’s papers are zero bullshit and genuinely move the field forward

[Paul Borrill @plborrill]

The insight that “idempotence comes in different shapes” is important, and it resonates deeply with how we think about consistency and correctness in distributed systems. In practice we often reduce idempotence to “retry safely” or “duplicate suppression,” but at its core it’s about the invariants that must hold when operations are repeated or reordered by the system. True idempotence isn’t just a property of a single request: it’s a protocol-level invariant that constrains how state evolves under concurrency, failure, and partial execution.

What’s missing from many discussions is how idempotence interacts with causality and feedback. Classical approaches treat operations as forward-only functions on state, but this leaves out the possibility of harnessing observed outcomes as part of the protocol semantics. That’s where frameworks like Open Atomic Ethernet (OAE) shine: they don’t merely avoid unintended effects on retries, they encode the behavior of operations into the channel logic itself so that the system knows what happened, not just that it happened. By making the causal and observational structure of operations explicit, OAE provides a richer foundation for invariants like idempotence — not as a safety afterthought, but as an intrinsic part of the communication model.

In other words: idempotence isn’t just about repeating a request safely — it’s about defining a shared ontology of effects that every node in a distributed system agrees on, even in the presence of uncertainty. OAE takes steps toward that by elevating the semantics of the channel beyond simple message passing, making idempotence a first-class citizen of the protocol design rather than an emergent property patched on by retry logic

[Eva Miranda @evamirandag]

Classical billiards can compute.

With @Isaacramr__ , we show that 2D billiard systems are Turing complete, implying the existence of undecidable trajectories in physically natural models from hard-sphere gases to celestial mechanics.

Determinism ≠ predictability. 🎱🧠@ETH_en

[DHH @dhh]

Microservices is the software industry’s most successful confidence scam. It convinces small teams that they are “thinking big” while systematically destroying their ability to move at all. It flatters ambition by weaponizing insecurity: if you’re not running a constellation of services, are you even a real company? Never mind that this architecture was invented to cope with organizational dysfunction at planetary scale. Now it’s being prescribed to teams that still share a Slack channel and a lunch table.

Small teams run on shared context. That is their superpower. Everyone can reason end-to-end. Everyone can change anything. Microservices vaporize that advantage on contact. They replace shared understanding with distributed ignorance. No one owns the whole anymore. Everyone owns a shard. The system becomes something that merely happens to the team, rather than something the team actively understands. This isn’t sophistication. It’s abdication.

Then comes the operational farce. Each service demands its own pipeline, secrets, alerts, metrics, dashboards, permissions, backups, and rituals of appeasement. You don’t “deploy” anymore—you synchronize a fleet. One bug now requires a multi-service autopsy. A feature release becomes a coordination exercise across artificial borders you invented for no reason. You didn’t simplify your system. You shattered it and called the debris “architecture.”

Microservices also lock incompetence in amber. You are forced to define APIs before you understand your own business. Guesses become contracts. Bad ideas become permanent dependencies. Every early mistake metastasizes through the network. In a monolith, wrong thinking is corrected with a refactor. In microservices, wrong thinking becomes infrastructure. You don’t just regret it—you host it, version it, and monitor it.

The claim that monoliths don’t scale is one of the dumbest lies in modern engineering folklore. What doesn’t scale is chaos. What doesn’t scale is process cosplay. What doesn’t scale is pretending you’re Netflix while shipping a glorified CRUD app. Monoliths scale just fine when teams have discipline, tests, and restraint. But restraint isn’t fashionable, and boring doesn’t make conference talks.

Microservices for small teams is not a technical mistake—it is a philosophical failure. It announces, loudly, that the team does not trust itself to understand its own system. It replaces accountability with protocol and momentum with middleware. You don’t get “future proofing.” You get permanent drag. And by the time you finally earn the scale that might justify this circus, your speed, your clarity, and your product instincts will already be gone.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

https://t.co/9zm9UbNTSO

[Quanta Magazine @QuantaMagazine]

For the first time, physicists have formulated quantum theory without imaginary numbers, overturning a 2021 claim that these unreal numbers are essential for describing the quantum world. @dangaristo reports: https://t.co/7bwRaUuDuf

[BusinessIntelligence @bimedotcom]

An efficient probabilistic hardware architecture for diffusion-like models
https://t.co/JLwEowaOfM
✍️ @andyJelincic @GillVerd @trevormccrt1 et al. via @arxiv @extropic @beffjezos

👉 This work proposes "an all-transistor probabilistic computer that implements powerful denoising models at the hardware level"
👉 "A system-level analysis indicates that devices based on our architecture could achieve performance parity with GPUs on a simple image benchmark using approximately 10,000 times less energy"

@Corix_JC @jeanyvesgonin @sonu_monika @JagersbergKnut @ahier @sim010101 @maponi @EstelaMandela @Shi4Tech @CEO_Aisoma @SpirosMargaris @IngridVasiliu @dinisguarda @mvollmer1 @RamonaEid @ChuckDBrooks @FernandaKellner @PVynckier @JoannMoretti @NeiraOsci @tlloydjones @SusanHayes_ @theomitsa @TarakRindani @FrRonconi @Nicochan33 @mikeflache @Khulood_Almani @TysonLester @CurieuxExplorer @KanezaDiane @Ym78200 @amalmerzouk @sulefati7 @pchamard @Analytics_699 @MaryRich78 @TheAIObserverX @NathaliaLeHen @sminaev2015 @jeancayeux @WillyRayNick @DanielleLargier @RLDI_Lamy

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

Some early HC employees will probably remember me joking that it was my divine mission to eliminate YAML from the world. I joked I started HC only to kill YAML. Like, back in 2013. And we (as an industry) were so close! Then Kubernetes came out and fucked it all up.

[Paul Borrill @plborrill]

@DominikTornow That’s exactly how I designed the kernel and scheduler for a Motorola 6809 Microprocessor controlled experiment i which flew on Spacelab 2 : the last successful flight of the Challenger

[Paul Borrill @plborrill]

Yes, and an Industry Fusion of OCP, Chiplet Summit and RISC-V International around self configuring, self healing and self organizing hardware and system management would make
It entirely feasible to have datacenters on the moon or Mars in less than 3 years

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

A permanently crewed lunar science base would be far more impressive than a repeat of what was already done incredibly well by Apollo in 1969

[Sam Lambert @samlambert]

Every now and then, the database world dips into a mania where really dumb ideas flourish. The separation of storage and compute at scale for OLTP is the latest. Making all your queries slower so you can shut your DB off quickly is an insane trade-off that nobody serious would make

[Paul Borrill @plborrill]

Join us for the 32nd OAE Plenary featuring Alan Karp (Ex-HP, Earth Computing) as he explores why Identity & Access Management systems often fail — and how choosing the right use cases changes everything.

Alan will unpack real-world IAM failures caused by oversimplified assumptions, share examples from decades of distributed systems design, and propose the simplest use case that actually captures all access-management hazards.

Wednesday October 8th, 9AM PT

Meeting link is on the OAE wiki: https://t.co/3ZzkSMmLpU

#OAE #OCP #IAM #AccessControl #IdentityManagement #Networking #Daedaelus #OpenComputeProject

[Paul Borrill @plborrill]

This is exactly why Open Atomic Ethernet was developed

[Ben Dicken @BenjDicken]

Never call an API in a transaction.

In relational databases, it's best practice to keep transactions as short-lived as possible.

Longer transactions lead to more resource contention. If each transaction acquires row locks, being longer-lived means higher likelihood of lock waits and execution delays.

Then there's MVCC. Postgres keeps multiple versions of rows for MVCC, and long-running transactions keep old rows from becoming autovacuum candidates. MySQL handles this with an undo log. When there are lots of long transactions, the log has to be kept around longer, log length and performance.

If you're using a connection pooler like PgBouncer in transaction pooling mode, long transactions can easily result in pool exhaustion producing failures on your clients.

The database is the most core part of your stack. Keep it as contention-free as possible.

[LaurieWired @lauriewired]

DDR5 is unstable garbage.

Max out your memory channels? Flaky.
Temperature a bit too hot? Silent Throttle with no logs.
Too “Dense” of a stick? Good luck training.

Last gen was rock solid by comparison. Here's what happened.

[Deutsch Explains @DeutschExplains]

.@mjgoldwater: Why do you have a positive vision for humanity?

@DavidDeutschOxf: Well, I think I'd rather use the word aspiration. So, I think that human beings are what I call universal explainers, which means that they're capable of arriving at any conclusion, but that's true or false. So, and we arrive at true ones via a history of false ones.

So, I think there is nothing beyond human capacity to create, to understand, to control, with the only limitation being the laws of physics. But equally, there's no limit to the size of error we can make. And we depend for both things on error correction.

So, error correction is the most important attitude of the mind, and it's also the most important institute, the most important characteristic of institutions in society.

@mjgoldwater: Sort of the most important mechanism. Yes.

So, just to drill down on that, why is error correction so important?

@DavidDeutschOxf: Because errors are inevitable. So, I'm a fallibilist, like Karl Popper. So, I believe that there's nothing infallible in the world.

There's no touchstone of truth that we can find somewhere in the garden and pick up and say, you know, is this true or not? And it'd be infallible.

@mjgoldwater: Sorry, whenever you say that, when I'm listening to you on your podcasts, I always think of the Pope.

@DavidDeutschOxf: Yes.

@mjgoldwater: Surely you must say, except for the Pope.

@DavidDeutschOxf: No. As I have often explained, even if the Pope is infallible, your theory that the Pope has said a particular thing is fallible.

Your theory that that is the Pope, you heard saying it, is fallible. Even if you break into the Vatican and hide somewhere, and by the way, he has to be sitting in the throne for it to be infallible.

@mjgoldwater: I didn't know that.

@DavidDeutschOxf: If he's not sitting in the throne, it doesn't count... So, he's sitting in the throne, you're hiding in the room, you see him sitting in the throne, and he says a thing.

You still can't be sure. You're not infallibly sure because you don't know that this is the day on which he's going to... Maybe he's doing a dress rehearsal.

@mjgoldwater: Or it could be a fake Pope. It could be a stand-in for the Pope.

@DavidDeutschOxf: So, these are all examples of the fact that in order to conclude that something is true on the grounds of papal infallibility, you have to assume fallibly a lot of other conditions, and you can't get past that.

There's no way of getting past that completely.

@mjgoldwater: So, we come to knowledge through fallibility. Is that what you're saying?

@DavidDeutschOxf: Yes.

[Paul Borrill @plborrill]

We are honored to welcome Professor Edward A. Lee to the next OAE Plenary.

In this talk, Professor Lee will explore the central thesis of his book Plato and the Nerd: that technology and human culture coevolve in a creative partnership. Engineers, through models and abstractions, build “artificial worlds” that reshape what society can do.

A key takeaway for our community: we are always building on standardized models. These models give us the discipline and determinism needed to design systems we can reason about. And if we want to innovate beyond the current boundaries—especially in how we treat time, concurrency, and determinism—we must work together toward new, standard models that the ecosystem can rely on.

Join us tomorrow, Wednesday 24th at 9AM PDT
https://t.co/LMSBEjFqgw

[Paul Borrill @plborrill]

@eligaultney @lauriewired Yes. That’s what I told customers when I was VP/CTO of VERITAS software. Then 9/11 happened.

[Paul Borrill @plborrill]

@SpringFord14 @lauriewired Never use counters. In firmware or protocols. They are all modulo something. Open Atomic Ethernet doesn’t need counting protocols. All transactions are conserved quantities. Which start from an equilibrium state and end back at the equilibrium when transfers are complete