Nepal trek trip report: photos, videos, daily stats, packing list. emptysqua.re/blog/nepal-t...

Weird stuff going on at the MongoDB NYC office lately....

TLA+ is the gold standard for specifying distributed systems, but the syntax is a bear. This isn't a problem anymore, AI can write specs for you! But you still need to understand temporal logic. Here's a 20-minute intro to TLA+ for the LLM era: emptysqua.re/blog/intro-t...

My father’s dishonesty was frustrating and disappointing to many people, but I think he got the worst of it. Here’s a dharma talk I gave to New Paltz Zen Center and Village Zendo on May 10, 2026. emptysqua.re/blog/the-kid...

Zhihua Gan climbing Tiers of Fear (5.12a) in the Gunks.

"Nothing is permanent, your printer is low on ink, Chrome will restart in 3 days." --Lord Buddha

Our worst fears have come to pass: AI does all the creative thinking, humans spend our days on two-factor auth.

When are we gonna have Star Peace, man? You ever think about that?

My notes from this year's Antithesis BugBash conference, about software verification and distributed systems: emptysqua.re/blog/notes-f...

[new blog post] BugBash'26 Morning of Day 1 muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/04/bugb...

My review of "Automated Design of Agentic Systems", a 2025 paper about agents designing agents: emptysqua.re/blog/review-...

Oh no, toilet, no.

I took some of my favorite Gunks climbing photos on Sunday!

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