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 fixwhy the logits were calculated inconsistentlywav2vec2 on arxiv and huggingfacethe openai whisper asr model announcementbeam search patiencetop notch guide to CTCthe 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 GitHubLitestreamLiteFS 

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 bugFastCDC paperPerkeep (once called Camlistore, oops)buprsyncI 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]