It turns out that the 'weakest' tic-tac-toe opening is actually the best one — if your opponent occasionally makes mistakes. New post on what games can teach us about coordination cost in distributed systems: jhellerstein.github.io/blog/two-com...

📄 New blog post! AI will soon write most distributed code. Distributed code is where our worst bugs —Heisenbugs— live. The real lever isn’t “test more,” it’s **aim better**: AI should target frameworks where correctness contracts are explicit and checkable. jhellerstein.github.io/blog/codegen...

Nebula Film Festival www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/nebula-fil...

Let’s collaborate on democratizing insights from tabular data in Amsterdam! ✨ PhD directions: 1) fundamental techniques for tabular foundation models, 2) reliable mechanisms for AI-powered tabular data analysis. Sharing w/ friends appreciated! ⬇️

The last blog post in my miniseries on CRDTs is up! jhellerstein.github.io/blog/crdt-in... Mix of pragmatism and formalism. There's actually a small result in there that may be novel: Strong Eventual Consistency !=> Determinism. Curious to hear whether they've seen this result elsewhere.

Next blog post in the CRDT Series is up! This one is for the developers... stay safe out there, folks. jhellerstein.github.io/blog/crdt-do...

Good thread. Thoughtful as always.

(Catching up to my LI feed). Next blog post is out! This is the first real post in a short series on CRDTs, an idea that has some currency in the distributed programming community, but one that comes with a number of sharp edges. Be careful out there! jhellerstein.github.io/blog/crdt-tu...

Blog relaunch! Bbye wordpress, hello github. If you're into SW dev, cloud, databases, distributed systems, automatic codegen ... or data and CS in general... check it out. As a warmup, I'm starting with a series of posts on CRDTs. Intro post up now: jhellerstein.github.io/blog/crdt-in...

Wow! @arvind.bsky.social giving an awesome keynote including discussion of VegaExpress and GoFish interactive vis libraries from his group. #EPICRetreat #UCBerkeley.

Here’s a provocative example from JD Zamfirescu-Pereira on ways that humans and LLMs can get misaligned on expectations. Is the LLM lying? Is it just emitting tokens? How do people interpret this? #EPICRetreat #UCBerkeley.

The SF Systems Meetup is back! On 2/27, we're excited to have headline talks from the creator of FizzBee and a research collaborator with Signal. This is going to be a super fun night diving deep into making distributed protocols work, hope you'll join us! lu.ma/vqjf30k3

In some kind of sad watershed, today was the day as a professor when I live-ChatGPT'ed the answer to a question in a Zoom with my PhD student and his undergrad mentees. But hey, let's paint it in a positive light: this was a demonstration of using the right tool at the right time.

Operationalizing Machine Learning: An Interview Study by @joehellerstein.bsky.social, @adityagp.bsky.social, et al. Particularly love the part on "Retrofitting Explanations". #MachineLearning #MLOps #Datascience. arxiv.org/pdf/2209.09125

Sunset in #Berkeley these days is a perfect field goal over the golden gate bridge. Shifts quite a ways north during the summer.

2025. What a time to be alive!

It’s incredibly beautiful that President Carter is our emissary on a Voyager probe. His words live on across our galaxy!

Thrilled to share that our paper “Flo: A Semantic Foundation for Progressive Stream Processing” (with @mpmilano.bsky.social, Alvin Cheung, and @joehellerstein.bsky.social) will appear at POPL 2025! Check out the preprint at arxiv.org/abs/2411.08274, and read on for more!

Sunset over SF looked promising again today so we went down to the bay to take it in.

Sunset over SF was stellar today.

Just when I thought I've seen it all, a PostgreSQL extension shows up that allows you to embed a SQLite database inside a table. github.com/frectonz/pgl...

The legendary Phil Bernstein talking @BerkeleySky about his work in sw libraries for DPUs. Phil was paving the way for relational DBs and transactions in the 70s, and is still doing deep, detailed technical work. @Berkeley_EECS @BerkeleyDataSci

HT Remy Wang, UCLA.

Berkeley Data Systems and Foundations (DSF) in the house! With special guests from the awesome Simons Institute semester of database theory (HT NEU db group).