Beyond Efficiency by Dave Ackley
Future of Coding
Exploring Robustness and Challenging Coding Norms
Exploring the challenges and reflections of adopting a robust-first approach, with intriguing references to a paper by Dave Ackley and Randy Newman's prediction on hardware determinism.
Dave Ackley's paper Beyond Efficiency is three pages long. With just these three pages, he mounts a compelling argument against the conventional way we engineer software. Instead of inflexibly insisting upon correctness, maybe allow a lil slop? Instead of chasing peak performance with cache and clever tricks, maybe measure many times before you cut. So in this episode, we're putting every CEO in the guillotine… (oh, that stands for "correctness and efficiency only", don't put us on a list)… and considering when, where, and how to do the robust thing.
Links
$ patreon.com/futureofcoding — The most recent bonus episode is a discussion with Stefan Lesser about new "laws of physics" we can invent inside the computer.
Don't destroy the earth, then make sure your thing can't be destroyed, then don't destroy your data, and finally, do your damn job, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.
- A Software Epiphany, and the accompanying HN discussion — giga viral, so sick
- PartyKit? Nice!
- What started as a simple todo list turned into an ocean of tech boy milk and, ultimately, the AI apocalypse.
- Jepsen is a rough, rugged, deeply thoughtful and fantastically cool approach to distributed systems testing, by Kyle Kingsbury. Also, we didn't talk about it, but his reversing / hexing / typing / rewriting / unifying technical interview series is essential reading.
- Ivan's examples of robustness vs efficiency were RAID, the CAP theorem, Automerge, the engineering of FoundationDB, and Byzantine fault tolerance— all of which stake out interesting territory in the efficiency/robustness tradeoff spectrum, all of which are about distributed systems.
- Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style?, a paper by John Backus.
- We Don't Really Know How to Compute!, a talk by Gerald Sussman.
- The Robust-First Computing Creed is rock solid.
- The Wikipedia article on von Neumann architecture did not come through with the goods.
- Ivan works with Alex Warth now, and thus may fairly speak in half-truths like "I've been working with constraints recently…"
- The Demon Hoard Sort
- Bogosort is never coming to Dreamberd
- The Witness was made by Jonathan Blow, who has Aphantasia, but he also made a game called Braid, and Braid is good.
- Datamosh is a creative misuse of the lack of robustness that comes from storing diffs instead of full state snapshots. Here's a lovely gallery of examples.
- Abstraction by xkcd
- Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine
- Can't let Lu get through the above without derailing onto Fiverr, PCP, Fight Club, and the Dust Brothers.
- Randy Newman was nearly quoted in Ackley's Indefinite Scalability for Living Computation — god help you if you read our show notes and don't listen to the episode.
- "It is difficult", says Upton Sinclair when asked about Jimmy Miller being Jimmy Miller, and how we all ought to approach our own sense of Jimmy Miller.
Music featured in this episode:
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