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Reposted by Akshay Shah

Brad Fitzpatrick @bradfitz.com · 13/08/2026

On 2024-02-22 I reached out to @antithesis.com fanboying and wanting to use it for @tailscale.com. They were expensive & I couldn’t get people on board w/ buying their service. Instead, more time + money went to: tailscale.com/blog/sqlite-... Nerd sniped them and: antithesis.com/blog/2026/wa... 😅

antithesis.com

Breaking the WAL | Antithesis

I did this from a lawn chair on the Sunshine Coast.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 21/07/2026

Papers We Love is back this Thursday in downtown SF! I'm presenting "Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Critical Failures," an empirical evaluation of real distributed systems bugs with surprising conclusions. Come for the banh mi and drinks, stay for the conversation. luma.com/zorjnr9f

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 25/05/2026

San Francisco’s an option too :)

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 19/04/2026

I'd be so much more aggressive with AI for my email if Google didn't couple creating drafts and sending them into one "gmail.compose" OAuth scope. Some PM in Google Apps must be desperately searching for an AI project before the next promo season - be the hero we all need!

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 24/03/2026

Straight 90s vibes for me today: editing today's mega-doc in the Terminus font, lots of Eve, Nas, Dre, and Outkast in the playlist, and a too-large AWK script on the side.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 18/02/2026

Very excited about this - stateless workloads often don’t care much, but stateful workloads are always hyper-aware of topology and its effects on durability and networking cost.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 16/02/2026

“the attempt to inaugurate the expropriation of this expropriator of the political means” I am resisting Claude by a hair right now - mostly because I think I’ve read this before and I refuse to be dumber and lazier than past me.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 16/02/2026

Nothing like running face-first into a sentence including “prebendaries enfeoffed in kind or in money” to emphasize how long it’s been since I’ve read something fancy.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 15/02/2026

Don't miss Papers We Love Too this week! On Thursday (Feb 19), join us in downtown SF to hear Marco Primi present "Paxos Made Simple" - the most famous algorithm in distributed systems. RSVP on Meetup (www.meetup.com/papers-we-lo...) or just DM me your full name and email.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 11/02/2026

@paperswelove.org is back: on Feb 19, join us in downtown SF to read "Paxos Made Simple" with Marco Primi! We'll have banh mi, drinks, good papers, and good conversation. RSVP on Meetup (www.meetup.com/papers-we-lo...) or just DM me your full name and email.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 03/02/2026

Ain’t no city like my city.

The Golden Gate Bridge, viewed from the Presidio.

The Palace of Fine Arts with a full moon overhead.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 25/01/2026

Just wait until you defeat Antithesis 😈

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 13/01/2026

RSVP on Meetup: www.meetup.com/papers-we-lo... Big thanks to @antithesis.com for sponsoring the meetup - after getting to know everyone there, I can't think of a company that loves papers more ❤️

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 13/01/2026

After a few quiet, online-only years, @paperswelove.org is back in San Francisco! Our first in-person meetup is next Thu, Jan 22: @shadaj.me on "Perceus: Garbage Free Reference Counting with Reuse" and me on "Epidemic Algorithms for Replicated Database Maintenance."

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 03/01/2026

Come reboot Papers We Love in San Francisco! Shadaj Laddad and I will be kicking things off on Jan 22 with papers on garbage collection and gossip protocols.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 24/11/2025

I think Buck2 motivated Meta to write a Starlark implementation in Rust, so it may be just a crate away?

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 24/11/2025

Starlark is my favorite. It’s a real programming language, with the most egregious bad-for-config footguns removed.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 17/11/2025

Property-based testing's roots in academia and functional programming give it a bad rap. It's easy to get started, and it's a really high-octane investment for most projects.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 13/11/2025

The 2014 re:Invent talk from Al Vermeulen and Swami Sivasubramaniam that sparked all this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVvF...

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 13/11/2025

And don't even start with Kafka. It's a much higher-level component, the transaction model is painfully under-documented (but kudos to Jack Vanlightly for improving the situation!), and the implementation was fatally flawed until at least Kafka 4.0. issues.apache.org/jira/browse/...

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 13/11/2025

At Seattle Systems, Marc Brooker said that AWS's journal uses a variant of chain replication within regions, and multi-Paxos between regions. Sensible!

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 13/11/2025

Internally, AWS implements consensus as a platform primitive, which eventually evolved into a distributed, strongly consistent, transactional journal. It backs Kinesis, DynamoDB streams, & Aurora DSQL. I'm really surprised that there isn't a battle-tested OSS version.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 10/11/2025

Are premium, low-volume brands (Riese & Muller, Stromer, etc.) more financially viable?

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 06/11/2025

Baffling how the same people can be enraged by 5m builds and enthralled by multi-day async decision-making processes.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 06/11/2025

Mostly motivated by Google’s decision to have proto3 drop support for features that their own internal systems depend on, plus some optimizations for C++ gencode. More context: buf.build/blog/protobu...

buf.build

Protobuf Editions are here: don’t panic

Most Protobuf users should ignore Editions and continue using proto3. If you become an early adopter, we’ve been working closely with Google to ensure that Buf will support editions as soon as they’re...

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 28/10/2025

I'm still wondering what the observability best practices are for gossip-based systems. In my experience, observability is especially frustrating when the system is misbehaving and nodes have different views of the world.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 28/10/2025

There's also a nice shout-out for @antithesis.com! I'm biased, but I think it's pretty sweet and you should check it out for your next commercially-important distributed system.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 28/10/2025

Just in time for my recent re-obsession with gossip-based systems: Fly.io published a blog post on moving from multi-region Consul to Corrosion, their in-house, SWIM-based metadata store. fly.io/blog/corrosi...

fly.io

Corrosion

Corrosion is distributed service discovery based on Rust, SQLite, and CRDTs.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 26/10/2025

For everything today's models are bad at, I'm really happy with how the images in this presentation came out. Starting with our designer's Halloween images and a pic of myself, then riffing from there was fun! The model feels like an in-betweener in the hand-drawn cartoon days.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 25/10/2025

Gmail could crush this if it: - Delivered to other ppl within the company instantly - Displayed intra-company threads like iMessage by default - until some buzzkill sends more than a few sentences Google has tried 9 zillion chat apps but AFAIK hasn’t let Gmail evolve. (RIP Inbox.)

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 25/10/2025

Wow, that’s…impressive dedication. Feels like a massive miss for the platform that workflows like this are necessary though.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 25/10/2025

Slack’s default behavior of equating “I’ve seen this” with “I’m done with this, pls consign it to the void” is maddening as soon as anything serious gets discussed.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 25/10/2025

The only decentralized system like this I've ever operated was an operational nightmare. During outages, each node had a different view of the cluster. Reassembling some global notion of cluster state took obscene observability spend.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 25/10/2025

Link to the paper: dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

dl.acm.org

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 25/10/2025

🧵 OK, so I just read Google's "Firefly: Scalable, Ultra-Accurate Clock Synchronization for Datacenters." Lots of cool ideas. But how do people *monitor* decentralized systems like this?

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 24/10/2025

We have Hurd your complaints and are working on a free upgrade.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 23/10/2025

Who wants research, but just this flimsy, half-hallucinated facsimile of it? Feels like a parlor trick that’s captured the imaginations of the people who only listen to 5-minute summaries of business bestsellers.

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Reposted by Akshay Shah

shikhar @schmizz.net · 23/10/2025

she is @antithesis.com

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Reposted by Akshay Shah

Antithesis @antithesis.com · 15/10/2025

New mascot day! Here's @akshayshah.org introducing our new mascot to a packed audience at @leaddev.com NYC. We're very sorry about what happened to the old mascot.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 14/10/2025

"Popularized in Haskell" Denominators can really do a lot of work.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 13/10/2025

In honor of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand. “Fifty-two bit mantissa.”

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 05/10/2025

My recollection is that the catchphrase was “move the code to the data,” which seems borne out by Section 3.4 (“Locality”) of Google’s MR paper. I think Hadoop also tried to schedule mappers onto nodes with the relevant data, but I could be wrong - you’d certainly know.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 03/10/2025

Datadog must have been polishing this piece of ragebait for years. It's art, really. (But seriously, this API is like a cheese grater to the face.)

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 03/10/2025

Vibe-writing: www.theverge.com/news/787076/... Spreadsheet error rates (admittedly sketchy primary sources): faculty.tuck.dartmouth.edu/images/uploa...

theverge.com

Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Excel and Word

Vibe working is all about Office’s new Agent Mode.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 03/10/2025

Vibe-writing in Excel? No thanks 🤮 Unreliable tools can be incredibly useful - but you need a bulletproof test for their output. And spreadsheets are famously hard to get right! 94% of operational spreadsheets contain errors, and humans are exceptionally bad at catching them.

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Akshay Shah @akshayshah.org · 02/10/2025

Best convo on the internet right now @vicvijayakumar.com

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