Claude Code + Zotero is an incredible combo for organizing and understanding research papers. This zotero-mcp server was just updated with two patches I made to fix how it handles notes and annotations, try it out: github.com/54yyyu/zoter...

LeaseGuard: The Movie! Here's a half-hour presentation I gave on the new protocol that enhances Raft's consistency and time-to-recovery, developed with my MongoDB colleagues and published in SIGMOD this year. emptysqua.re/blog/leasegu...

Yay, SIGMOD just published the paper I wrote with @muratdemirbas.bsky.social and Lingzhi Deng, it's about strengthening Raft's consistency and time-to-recovery lnkd.in/ef6qUJzw

The portion of people alive today, compared to the dead, is greater than ever before emptysqua.re/blog/the-dea...

AI: can it write a TLA+ spec of existing code? Can it write TLA+ at all? Let's find out! emptysqua.re/blog/review-...

What's an AI time horizon, how is it measured, and how fast is it growing? emptysqua.re/blog/review-...

What's it like at BugBash? We think it's great, but you don't have to take it from us. You can hear it from @isaacvando.bsky.social, @eatonphil.bsky.social, and @emptysqua.re instead. A few tickets left.

Dammit Claude just take my job, stop dicking around.

The New Paltz Zen Center's first meditation retreat, ending with a precepts ceremony for two members!

[new blog post] TLA+ Mental Models muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/03/tla-... #tlaplus

I gave a Zen talk, "The Dharma of Alex Honnold". He climbed a skyscraper and risked dying on live TV. Here’s what I learned from Honnold about climbing, living, and practicing the precepts. emptysqua.re/blog/the-dha...

For any given task right now I think, "How much can I make Claude Code do for me?" I think this XKCD automation joke is only half-true right now and might be obsolescing.... xkcd.com/1319/

I so rarely get both nerd sniped and aesthetically sniped by the same thing, this is rad.

Will the training of junior engineers be a tragedy of the commons? emptysqua.re/blog/junior-...

Do you care if an LLM sees you naked? What does privacy mean now? emptysqua.re/blog/what-do...

Never, ever reboot a Mac in the middle of an OS upgrade! "It seems stuck," you think. "Apple probly does an atomic swap between the old & new OSes, if I reboot it'll just clean up after itself. They're smart and they've heard of DB transactions," you think. You are wrong. I had to reformat my HD.

Novel sources of entropy for cryptographically secure random number generators: Whether the in-flight WiFi works. Whether my phone connects to the car by USB this time. How long the next macOS update will take. How many times today I’ll close the dialog asking if Chrome can connect to nearby devices

Joshua Tree, top of Lost Horse Wall at sunset.

Magnificent California.

That thing where you don't think you look very Jewish, and then you get to middle age and see pictures of yourself and you're like "Wow I look like a middle-aged Jew now."

My usual workflow for research is: stumble across a paper, add it to Zotero, forget I added it, stumble across it again.... Now I've made a plugin to find all the embarrassing dupes and clean up my Zotero library. emptysqua.re/blog/zotero-...

I'm speaking at UCLA next week about "Frankenlogic", a mad experiment to combine epistemic logic with TLA+. If you're on campus, come witness the horror! It's maybe a new way to check correctness & security of distributed protocols? Come and tell me what you think. www.cs.ucla.edu/upcoming-eve...

Normalize laughing derisively in men's faces when they deserve it.

If you don’t hear from me it’s because today I became first recorded death by Zoom fatigue

We felt very safe climbing at El Potrero Chico: A one-eyed dog chilled with us at the crag, and the next day showed up to guard the door of my hotel room. The vending machine warns climbers to "check your knout".

This week on the blog! By request of the ACOUP Senate (that is, patrons on Patreon at the patres et matres conscripti level), a very brief introduction to the Late Bronze Age Collapse, a collapse even more severe than the fall of the Roman Empire in the west! acoup.blog/2026/01/30/c...

Norwegian death metal band The Udder Ones new album 𝘔𝘰𝘰𝘦𝘥 𝘔𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘤 drops next Friday, featuring the single “Pasture Prime.”

[new blog post] CockroachDB Serverless: Sub-second Scaling from Zero with Multi-region Cluster Virtualization muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/01/cock...

My friend and I climbed TimeWave Zero yesterday in Mexico, 22 pitches of climbing and 22 rappels!

I gave a Zen talk about AI, although it's mostly math and only a little bit of Zen. What is an LLM? How does it work? Is it conscious? emptysqua.re/blog/ai-omg/

[new blog post] Rethinking the University in the Age of AI muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/01/reth...

I've finally completed my review of "Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment", a beautiful paper about logic and networked computers. In the final episode, clock skew meets epistemic knowledge, a battle to the death! emptysqua.re/blog/review-...

We're living in a time of unprecedented possibilities for minimum-viable-product code.

ETrade's hold music is (they say) original compositions by ETrade employees. This is superb, every company should do this.

[new blog post] Cloudspecs: Cloud Hardware Evolution Through the Looking Glass muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/01/clou...

Okay let’s talk about Richard Norman Shaw, who gave us this delightful mess and spearheaded an entire revolution in English domestic architecture

Metamora, Indiana. 12/26/25. #photography

This was an interesting 2023 paper about some Raft speedups, but it made a couple mistakes in my opinion. The worst was because of ... you guessed it, they used YCSB, which is a flawed benchmark. emptysqua.re/blog/review-...

Couldn’t you run a bunch of YCSB clients to fix this? Also, we have a modified version of YCSB that replays traces and support open-loop replay (though our validation tests focused more on the replay accuracy than on evaluating the limits of the open loop implementation). github.com/disel-espol/...

That's a wrap!

YCSB is obsolete. It's a closed loop benchmark that doesn't generate realistic load, and it can't push a system past its limit. Same goes for the TPC benchmarks, and even the new KVBench. We've known about the inaccuracies of these closed loop benchmarks for years. emptysqua.re/blog/ycsb-is...

time to pull out the seasonal favorites

Raft has a real problem guaranteeing Read Your Writes, because there might be two leaders serving reads at once. In theory, you could use a timed lease to ensure there's only one leader.

We introduce LeaseGuard: a Raft-specific lease protocol with a precise spec and fast recovery after crashes. Paper + Implementation linked in our joint (w Jesse @emptysqua.re) blog post below. muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/12/leas...

"It is evident that there must be changes in typography as long as our social habits are open to variation." --announcement of Times New Roman in 1932.

I’m running for Congress because we need leaders who will fight, not fold. I recognize this moment, and I’m ready to meet it. #FightDontFold #LanderForNYC #LanderForCongress

Last newsletter of the year! This one's light and just covers a few of the Fun Facts I know about software. Happy holidays and enjoy! buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

Once AI matches human artistic creativity, will we still value human art? Back in 1935, Walter Benjamin misforecast the effect of technology on art. I try to learn from his mistake and make a better prediction. emptysqua.re/blog/work-of...

New blog post! ✨ I argue that AI will make formal verification go mainstream. martin.kleppmann.com/2025/12/08/a... Three reasons for this: 1. LLMs are getting increasingly good at writing proofs using proof assistants. This will make formal verification vastly cheaper than it's been to date.

I Will Follow You Into The Dark is a Christmas song because only Rudolph could illuminate the nose on the vacancy signs.