Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 6d

My recollection is that the catchphrase was “move the code to the data,” which seems borne out by Section 3.4 (“Locality”) of Google’s MR paper. I think Hadoop also tried to schedule mappers onto nodes with the relevant data, but I could be wrong - you’d certainly know.

Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 8d

Budweiser 😂

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 9d

Datadog must have been polishing this piece of ragebait for years. It's art, really.

(But seriously, this API is like a cheese grater to the face.)

Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 9d

Inspired by a fascinating talk with @drmaciver.bsky.social this morning. For more on building reliable tools on unreliable foundations, stay tuned to the Bug Bash podcast from @antithesis.com.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGdM...

Scaling Correctness: Marc Brooker on a Decade of Formal Methods at AWS

How do you prove the correctness of services that underpin a huge portion of the internet? At the scale of Amazon Web Services, traditional testing falls short. In this episode, we talk with Marc…

www.youtube.com

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 9d

Vibe-writing: www.theverge.com/news/787076/...

Spreadsheet error rates (admittedly sketchy primary sources): faculty.tuck.dartmouth.edu/images/uploa...

Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Excel and Word

Vibe working is all about Office’s new Agent Mode.

www.theverge.com

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 9d

Vibe-writing in Excel? No thanks 🤮

Unreliable tools can be incredibly useful - but you need a bulletproof test for their output. And spreadsheets are famously hard to get right! 94% of operational spreadsheets contain errors, and humans are exceptionally bad at catching them.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 9d

Best convo on the internet right now @vicvijayakumar.com

Reposted by Akshay Shah

Cynthia Dunlop @cynthiadunlop.bsky.social · 9d

How AWS S3 serves 1 petabyte per second on top of slow HDDs // Stanislav Kozlovski

Obscure feature + obscure feature + obscure feature = bug // Michael Gibson, @antithesis.com

%CPU utilization is a lie // @brendanlong.bsky.social

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 10d

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYT2... for anyone else fascinated by this bit of history. Thanks for the pointer!

The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet OOPSLA 97 Keynote (VPRI 0719)

YouTube video by Yoshiki Ohshima (大島芳樹)

www.youtube.com

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 10d

This is *so* clever! At least in my head, this rhymes with the MapReduce philosophy of moving compute to the data.

Andy Pavlo @andypavlo.bsky.social · 10d

Our F3 files embed small WASM programs to decode data. If somebody creates a new encoding and the DBMS does not have native impl, it can still read data using WASM passing Arrow buffers. Our experiments show WASM is 15-20% slower than native. We use @spiraldb.com's Vortex encoding impls.

Overview of F3's decoding pipeline with WASM support.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 12d

I’d rather write statsd to the wire by hand than descend into the Lovecraftian horror of the OTel Go docs.

Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 12d

Finally, the madeleine pans we’ve always deserved! Why settle for a vaguely seashell-inspired lump when you can have THIS?!?

www.lodgecastiron.com/products/dol...

Dolly Parton Butterfly Cake Pan

Create six butterfly mini-cakes with this unique cast iron pan made in partnership with Dolly Parton. Durable design perfect for fans.

www.lodgecastiron.com

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 13d

Poor Joe. I knew him before his radical sourdough ways.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 13d

Unexpected benefit of saving PDFs of all the papers and @oreilly.bsky.social books I’ve read over the years: I have the most awesome NotebookLM session for distributed systems.

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Reposted by Akshay Shah

The New Stack @thenewstack.io · 13d

Find out why AI code gen delivers only partial wins today. Join us on Oct 9 for a live webinar with @antithesis.com's Will Wilson & @akshayshah.org. They'll share how to bridge the gap between AI generation and real engineering productivity.

Don't miss it ➡️ bit.ly/Antithesis-A...

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 14d

It’ll be no surprise that a bug very similar to this one led to the creation of goleak!

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 14d

HBR is usually hot garbage, but you gotta respect whoever came up with “workslop” 💯

hbr.org/2025/09/ai-g...

AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity

Despite a surge in generative AI use across workplaces, most companies are seeing little measurable ROI. One possible reason is because AI tools are being used to produce “workslop”—content that appea...

hbr.org

Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 16d

“Antithesis’s deterministic simulation and active exploration remove the blindfold, enabling a systematic and reproducible search for bugs.”

- Marek Siarkowicz, Kubernetes maintainer

www.cncf.io/blog/2025/09...

Autonomous Testing of etcd’s Robustness

As a critical component of many production systems, including Kubernetes, the etcd project’s first priority is reliability. Ensuring consistency and data safety requires our project contributors to…

www.cncf.io

Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 17d

Appreciate the shout-out for automaxprocs, but it’s not usually necessary anymore (finally). Go 1.25 does the right thing by default! go.dev/blog/contain...

Container-aware GOMAXPROCS - The Go Programming Language

New GOMAXPROCS defaults in Go 1.25 improve behavior in containers.

go.dev

Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 17d

…but Go 1.25 has finally shipped with cgroup-aware defaults! go.dev/blog/contain...

We’d been asking for this since we wrote automaxprocs.

Container-aware GOMAXPROCS - The Go Programming Language

New GOMAXPROCS defaults in Go 1.25 improve behavior in containers.

go.dev

Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 17d

That doesn’t take into account cgroup quotas. Exceeding quota makes your application VERY slow.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 18d

Shmargaret Shmitchell, indeed.

Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 18d

Is the “modern tooling” a pro or a con?

Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 19d

Kyle’s Maelstrom project also includes services that implement weaker consistency models than linearizability/strict serializable - and of course, Kyle makes sure that you see all these behaviors!

github.com/jepsen-io/ma...

github.com

Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 19d

To their credit, Oxide’s (and @bcantrill.bsky.social’s) personality shines through all their writing and speaking. An unadorned, “No, because it suggests that you don’t really want the job,” would be wildly off-brand.

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