Significant Bits

Please read important erratum at end of these notes!

Astute listeners will notice that this is the first episode in over a year. I recorded not one but two awesome interviews...and then failed to edit and publish them. Guilt over this haunted me. I have finally accepted I must declare moral bankruptcy on this front to be able to continue the podcast; I apologize. (I may yet bring those episodes back to life, but I will no longer block on them.)

In this episode, Michael, Michael, and I discuss an awesome debugging adventure deep in the Go runtime and linux kernel.

Links:

* Go issue: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/73581
* Metastable Failures in Distributed Systems: https://sigops.org/s/conferences/hotos/2021/papers/hotos21-s11-bronson.pdf
* Sponsor: https://sketch.dev/

Erratum:

I described elided nil checks as working by mapping the page at 0x0 as read only. In fact, it is unmapped, so that reads will also fault. Silly me.

Links:

• my little whisper.cpp bug fix
• why the logits were calculated inconsistently
• wav2vec2 on arxiv and huggingface
• the openai whisper asr model announcement
• beam search patience
• top notch guide to CTC
• the bitter lesson (and in meme form)

Errata:

* I referred in the show to LLMs as encoder-decoder models. Most modern LLMs are decoder-only.
* I messed up readability at Google. It means approvability, apparently. 🤷 

In which I ramble about randomness and random algorithms. Now with theme music!

Paper Cuts planned reading: Habitability and Piecemeal Growth, in Patterns of Software (just pages 7–16 of the book, which is pages 25-32 of the PDF)

Selected links:

* SIEVE cache replacement algorithm
* Power of two random choices
* Marc Brooker's blog
* Random forests
* Count Min Sketch
* Monte Carlo Simulation
* Random projection
* T-Digest
* The fix for my embarrassing compiler bug

Shay Nehmad on how writing is the key to becoming a better engineer, how to do it, and more.

Links:

* Cup O' Go podcast
* Code Complete book
* Shay's blog
* Obsidian and Logseq

This was a fun and decidedly humbling conversation with Ben Johnson about SQLite, databases, Litestream, and LiteFS.

Links:

• Ben on GitHub
• Litestream
• LiteFS 

No guest for this inaugural episode--just me this round.

I cover the basics of rolling hashes and FastCDC, which appears to be the state of the art in content defined chunking.

Mentioned in the episode:

• 8 bit hash bug
• FastCDC paper
• Perkeep (once called Camlistore, oops)
• bup
• rsync

I know the audio is slightly subpar (to say nothing of the content). But I think I know how to improve for next time. Finding my feet. :)

Feedback welcome: [email protected]

The plan: Guests teach me substantive topics in software engineering, and I ask dumb questions.

Please send guest suggestions, topic ideas, excitement, and monopoly money to [email protected]