Polymath Engineer Weekly #95
Fragmentation, Jepsen + Datomic, LISP, Jim Simons, AI Reading List, Payments Finality and OKRs
Hello again. We have some pretty cool stuff this week 😎
Comic of the week
Links of the week
The Internet is starting to Break - Here's Why.
Why big tech companies suck right now. Looking at you Amazon, Netflix, Uber, Spotify, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube...
Both log and indices are stored as persistent, immutable trees in a data store like Cassandra or DynamoDB. Because tree nodes are immutable, their backing storage only needs to guarantee eventual consistency. A small pointer to the roots of these trees provides a consistent, immutable snapshot of the database’s state. To commit a transaction, a transactor saves new immutable tree nodes to storage, then executes a compare-and-set (CaS) operation to advance the root pointer. This CaS operation must execute under Sequential consistency.
Even if you are not interested in Datomic or Clojure, give this article a shot. There is a lot of Distributed Systems knowledge distilled into it. I’m sure you won’t regret it.
The fact that you can start with a few building blocks and make a whole programming language that allows you to run any computation there ever will be is in itself mind blowing. But did McCarthy design those primitives, or as PG puts it, he discovered them? As it turns out, those building blocks could themselves be broken down into smaller pieces. Think of it like atoms in the universe that can be broken into sub-atomic particles. Surprisingly, these particles were found decades ago by Alonzo Church, the inventor of Lambda calculus long before electronic computers even existed!!
The Algorithm Behind Jim Simons's Success
Simons lived life on his own terms. The math prodigy became a code breaker for the NSA before chairing the Math Department at Stony Brook. He then abandoned his career in academia to build a hedge fund. Simons’s life unfolded in an unpredictable yet remarkable way because he followed his curiosity to interesting problems.
The Mysterious AI Reading List: Ilya Sutskever's Recommendations
John Carmack, the renowned game developer, rocket engineer, and VR visionary, shared in an interview that he asked Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder and former Chief Scientist, for a reading list about AI. Ilya responded with a list of approximately 40 research papers, saying:
If you really learn all of these, you’ll know 90% of what matters today.
Finality does not exist in payments
Younger generations might not appreciate this, but there was a very real question in the late 1990s (and across much of the world today) whether transactions could ever take place over the Internet without being able to look counterparties in the eye. “Aren’t hackers just going to take all money exposed to the Internet?” And low and behold, they did not, but a necessary precondition for answering that question was there being money exposed to the Internet. Credit card guarantees of reversibility substantially made that happen.
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Book of the week
Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs
Do you have any more links our community should read? Feel free to post them on the comments.
Have a nice week. 😉
Have you read last week's post? Check the archive.