TigerBeetle is actually another customer of ours. You might ask why, given that they have their own, very sophisticated simulation testing. The answer is that they're so fanatical about correctness, they wanted a "red team" for their own fault simulator, in case a bug in their tests might hide a bug in their database!
I gotta say, that is some next-level commitment to writing a good database.
Sure! I mentioned a few orthogonal concepts that go well together, and each of the following examples has a different combination that they employ:
- the company that developed Madsim (RisingWave) [0] [1] is tries hardest to eliminate non-determinism with the broadest scope (stubbing out syscalls, etc.)
- sled [2] itself has an interesting combo of deterministic tests combined with quickcheck+failpoints test case auto-discovery
- Dropbox [3] uses a similar approach but they talk about it a bit more abstractly.
Sans-IO is more documented in Python [4], but str0m [5] and quinn-proto [6] are the best examples in Rust I’m aware of. Note that sans-IO is orthogonal to deterministic test frameworks, but it composes well with them.
With the disclaimer that anything I comment on this site is my opinion alone, and does not reflect the company I work at —— I do work at a rust shop that has utilized these techniques on some projects.
TigerBeetle is an amazing example and I’ve looked at it before! They are really the best example of this approach outside of FoundationDB I think.
From the abstract, it sounds more like a toolkit for "Interactive / Hypermedia" papers. The paper itself is still dead.
I was hoping more for "Living" as in "active, uncertain, will grow over time".
A toolkit for expressing the research from beginning to the end - the state of the world as you understand it, highlighting the key uncertainties and experiments, and mechanisms for viewing the history.
As a motivating example for the type of "living research paper" that I'm thinking of, think of long-running software design decisions a la the implementation of `async/await` in rust.
> I was hoping more for "Living" as in "active, uncertain, will grow over time".
This is, I think, the very antithesis of what research papers are for.
The point of a publication is that at some point in time, you wrote down your thoughts and process and results and submitted that writing (and possibly a related artifact) to a committee who evaluated it and decided it was Good.
To have a publication that updates over time is just... it doesn't work. What if it stops being Good? What if you screw something up that invalidates the results? Also, do you just never publish a new thing? How do people learn about the recent changes if not a new publication? Do all researchers now need to subscribe to RSS feeds of every project they've been interested in?
That sort of stuff is what blogs are for — or, honestly, CVs. But a singular publication needs to be frozen in time, or else it honestly loses its value.
You forgot the most important point. Once, you publish the final version it can be referenced. If you keep changing (unless minor corrections), then no one else can reference the work.
Research literature is like an ongoing conversation. Picture a social media site, where each paper is a comment. You don't want a comment (paper) to be edited, because any replies or references to that comment would lose their context.
This can be nicely achieved with https://manubot.org, which produces a manuscript (a (possibly freely accessible) HTML, a PDF and a DOCX file) from a set of git-tracked Markdown files.
If that is the case, how would you describe the act of comparing English to languages which actually have consistent letter-phoneme pronunciation throughout the language (starting with e.g. the same number of available letters and phonemes and a 1:1 mapping between them)?
Funnily enough, Egyptian hieroglyphs were in fact phonetic: they just used recognizable pictures instead of abstract symbols to represent the sounds. It's possible they were sometimes used as ideograms too, but not the standard.
Chinese ideograms are not phonetic, because seeing the written character gives you no indication of what the sound of the spoken word is.
It's an alphabetic writing system where the letters largely correspond to sounds, in contrast to logographic writing system where the symbol corresponds to the entire word (like Chinese or Japan).
Yes, there are special rules and outliers that you need to learn in English, but it seems absurd to not classify it as phonetic because it's not purely phonetic. This is doubly so when discussing phonetic vs whole-word learning systems, as is the topic with "Sold a Story".
> Yes, there are special rules and outliers that you need to learn in English (...)
I think you're greatly understating it. It's most of English, it's present everywhere as you try to learn the language. It's present from the very beginning, when you need to figure out why "are" and "area" are not pronounced the same, until the very end, when you have mostly mastered the language but now need to be able to understand everyone else's pronunciation while also accounting for them most likely pronouncing some words incorrectly.
Japanese is phonetic, unlike English. In Japanese spelling is phonetic and pronunciation is consistent. Words sound like they look and look like they sound. Even someone who’s never studied Japanese before could read a text written in romaji and be understood without trouble (unlike someone studying French, for example).
Nit, Japanese has two phonetic alphabets. But, largely Japanese is not phonetic in written language, as they also have a logographic set which makes up a large portion of most texts.
English is highly non-phonemic. It's not absurd. If you considered English phonetic, you'd have to consider almost every modern language writing system phonetic. The distinction wouldn't mean much.
It's entirely possible for a distinction that contrasts a large majority with a small minority, or even an actually-existing totality with a hypothetical set of counterexamples, to be meaningful.
If it is not phonemic, what is it? It is not necessarily "regular" or "uniform" in the phonemes that are represented, but you can't consider it anything other than phonetic, as the characters represent phonemes. Pretty much period.
As said in other threads, you are not wrong that there are more direct 1:1 scripts to phonemes. You are wrong to think that is what phonetic means.
I'm assuming it isn't deception as much as it is a bit plain ignorance. I confess I have harbored the thought that English is not phonetic in the past. Is a common thing for folks to say; especially when trying to point out that English is hard.
If you don't mind sharing, what grade-level, decade, location were you taught this?
The key part about the pizza example is the demonstration of mathematical thinking completely disparate from what I experienced at a Catholic high-school in Chicago during the 2000s.
You have the math right, but the product wrong. They are looking for specific types of steel that are currently unavailable at almost any price. Their order size is too small to warrant returning a phone call from normal steel producers. Certain types of tool steel that are currently available sell for upwards of $3000/ton, but the type of steel they need is no longer a commodity, so the price is likely even higher.
They have 50 tons of scrap steel that is exactly what they need, but need a spot to melt it down for reuse. You can't (partially guessing here) just throw it in an existing smeltery while maintaining its purity. They have been collecting this scrap by talking to other users that also use the same material.
The article mentions they are in the Jura Arc. I didn't know this, but that is a reference to the watchmakers valley in Switzerland. If you're selling a $60k watch, it better be made from 99.999999% pure unobtanium.
I have seen similar situations before where when you start making a niche product, suddenly demand pops out of the background that wasn't there before because the product simply wasn't available. Even if it isn't profitable from day 1 it might eventually become profitable.
Are you sure about that "unavailable at almost any price" part? Their initial inputs seem to be be the scraps produced by the local manufacturers in a relatively tiny area over the last few years. If this grade of steel wasn't available, where did all these local manufacturers get a constant supply from? (I.e. there has to be an existing and supplied market, it's not like they're recycling the steel only from the scuttled German battleships in Scapa Flow or something.)
The use cases are quoted as "watchmaking and medical subcontracting", fwiw.
Yeah, I'm not sure about that unavailable at almost any price part. If you could put in an order for a million tons of steel you would get on the steel manufacturers order list, which is what I was thinking about when I mentioned almost any price. But it sounds like they have been working through their existing material for decades and are only now running out. The material may have last been produced a long time ago so the quantities they need are very small. That 50 tons of scrap may last them for another decade or two.
You would not be able to throw it in a ‘smelter’ and have it maintain its chemistry - smelters are huge mass production shops. A foundry could do this without problem. They exist to do small, chemically precise runs.
A few year ago, someone posted about designing a new stainless steel for ¿knives? Something about copying the properties of some well known iron alloy to a stainless version. IIRC you should add some chrome to make it stainless and vanadium to make it hard, and then some long explanation about the carbon content so there is not a lot of ¿chrome carbide? inside the steel. He hired a specialized foundry to make a small batch with very precise composition. It was very interesting but very above my metallurgy knowledge, so I don't' remember the details. And sadly I can't find the link now.
I believe it was this post? If not I'm curious about it if you remember. The link and discussion here was a fascinating look into another world for me.
