today's leftovers
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Merklizing the key/value store for fun and profit
If you and I care enough about making diffs efficient, we can both maintain a special kind of merkle tree called a Prolly Tree that allows us to skip large sections of shared entries and identify conflicts in logarithmic time. This “merkle syncing” capability is a powerful and versatile peer-to-peer primitive and can be used as a natural persistence layer for CRDT systems, an “rsync for key/value stores”, the foundation of a mutable multi-writer decentralized database, and much more.
Prolly Trees and their cousin Merkle Search Trees are new ideas but are already used by ATProto / BlueSky, Dolt, and others. There are some key differences that make the approach here particularly easy to implement as a wrapper around existing key/value stores.
We'll give a short overview of merkle trees in general, walk through the design of a merklized key/value store, see some example applications, introduce two reference implementations, and wrap up with a comparison to other projects.
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Generating pretty maps ready to be gift-wrapped
I have been toying with the idea of generating visually pleasing maps centered on a given address, to have them printed and framed. The way I see it, it would make an original and personalised gift for the person living there. So when Marcelo de Oliveira Rosa Prates' prettymaps blew up on Reddit, I decided to try it.
The library was great and the visuals looked incredible, yet, I felt it was lacking a couple of features if I were to print the maps.
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Think like a programmeR: the workshop
Learn how to program your own algorithms in R with us on June 22nd!
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Under-Engineered Patterns for #WCBUF
The slides for my talk are available as a tagged PDF (3.4MB). I am not posting the PowerPoint file as my slides have been taken and passed off as others’ work before.
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The Leadership Myth in Replicated Databases
In classical SMR, the answer to who is also simple: any server can propose a new command. This results in a surprising and powerful property: there is no primary / master / leader at the database layer. You get active-active or multi-master replication for free. Clients can contact any database server and get a linearizable / strictly serializable response. The replicated database is trivially serializable since its state corresponds to the serial execution of the commands in the SMR total order.
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LLMs and Open Source Software
The engineer went on to state that the “third faction” posing a competitive threat to Google and OpenAI was the open-source community.
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Michał on the joys of closing tabs
He agreed with me about the anxiety-inducing state of having hundreds of web tabs and applications open, though raised a good point about how the calculus is entirely different in mobile environments: [...]
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PC Classics, Right In Your Browser With EmuOS
[Emupedia]’s work to preserve computer history by way of making classic and abandoned games and software as accessible as possible is being done in a handy way: right in your browser with EmuOS.