iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 18/07/2026

and when I challenge this response at all the reaction isn’t “yeah I guess there are opportunities and possibility of a good life anywhere”, it’s “yeah I guess Europe is fucked, too” just blackpilling and hopelessness everywhere dare to be an optimist!!

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 18/07/2026

having lived in Russia for 5y+ it’s funny to see the same inability to distinguish visible politics and the government from real life. but it’s still surprising when applied to what should be a much more familiar culture with much more tourist and business exchange

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 18/07/2026

striking to go to a European conference and visit my hometown and every single old/new acquaintance asks the same first question “wait you want to live in and invest [your time/future] into the US?! Now?!??”

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 16/07/2026

It feels novel because most ‘realtime databases’ ask you to build an app around their hosted backend. Jazz makes each participant feel like it has a real local database, then turns synchronization into the substrate.”

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 16/07/2026

I do think we can delegate a lot to it, especially: - durable queues and consumer progress - atomic claims/reservations - idempotency and receipts - reactive wakeups - cross-device inspectors and control surfaces - permissions around who can observe or mutate

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 16/07/2026

That collapses several conventional layers at once: database client, API, websocket subscription system, cache invalidation, and a chunk of backend authorization.

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 16/07/2026

The local-first part is deeper than ‘SQLite with sync.’ Your process talks to a local replica as though it owns the data, while Jazz handles replication, reactive query updates, offline operation, permissions, and much of the consistency machinery.

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 16/07/2026

you know how the best marketing is saying the exact words your users say when describing your product to friends? this apparently includes the users’ LLMs now: “I’d describe Jazz as a replicated application state machine disguised as a pleasant relational database.” (contd.)

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 15/07/2026

I have an idea, but I’m going to continue this discussion assuming it’s about this unless your clarify bsky.app/profile/vfo....

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 15/07/2026

for visibility bsky.app/profile/anse...

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 15/07/2026

distorting superficial diversity metrics that are inherently noisy conf-to-conf, when an achievement of this community has exactly been diversity. Please pick better adversaries.

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 15/07/2026

Worthwhile movements depended on the support of far stranger bedfellows than this. Instead of focusing on stuff to help the movement you ragebait based on vilifying boring cloud vendors as some perceived enemy and…

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 15/07/2026

CF realistically doesn’t give a shit about local first, but @threepointone.bsky.social does. It is bottom up support from a long time member who can influence the sort of money that makes this big.

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 15/07/2026

The fact that this was possible is because local first is now big enough to attract sponsorship from big cloud companies, which as a signal helps the movement actually make a ripple in the mainstream.

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 15/07/2026

But this was the instance of the conf with the most new people from the most walks of life. And the most diverse set of topics of talks and the most new speakers. @martin.kleppmann.com’s talk was the most directly political call for a renewed meaning of the local first principles to that audience.

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 15/07/2026

Lu, you know how much I respect you and I say this as an attendee: I wish you actually came to the conf and contributed instead of torpedoing it from afar. I know you’re smarter than this. Was CFs copywriting tone deaf/presumptuous and their talk kinda offtopic? Sure. 1/n

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 15/07/2026

Wrapped up @localfirstconf.com in a summery Berlin beer garden yesterday. Always a special crowd to me because it’s where @jazz.tools got born 2 years ago. And where else can you hang out with Martin Kleppmann, Dan Ingalls and people who only use Mistral models at the same place?

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 14/07/2026

People have been yapping about Malleable Software forever now. I think we’re finally actually entering its golden age - loving the “medley of demos” around Patchwork by @pvh.ca and @inkandswitch.com at @localfirstconf.com

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 12/07/2026

history of distributed systems with the 🐐 at @localfirstconf.com

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 10/07/2026

I can’t say the same for Zig. Funnily enough, I admire Zig for its technical choices and innovations. But if Kelley’s ego, weird opinions and narrow worldview are more important than being in the arena and supporting the devs that use(d) it, it’s never going to be relevant.

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 10/07/2026

I haven’t seen enough internals to have an opinion on if Bun is slop, has always been slop and if the Rust version still is slop. But even if all of that is true, it’s extremely effective slop that has worked for a large audience and pushed the envelope for the entire ecosystem.

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 10/07/2026

The most striking aspect is the repeated attack of Jarred’s trajectory. “Groomed from a young age to uncritically embrace the Silicon Valley mindset” Extremely patronizing thing to say to someone who has found a way to build a beloved devtool, *defying* the VC playbook for years

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 10/07/2026

Some are defending Kelley with “he’s always been like this” and “his substance is correct and if the tone offends you, you just don’t get him” This reeks of old-guard autism-as-an-excuse toxic software discourse. There’s plenty of brilliant, opinionated devs who aren’t dicks.

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 10/07/2026

The reason that this is a bigger problem is that optics matter for devtools and their maintainers. In Rust vs Zig people focus on language features, but the one thing Rust has nailed is having an open, diverse community. As a result it has one of the best ecosystems out there.

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 10/07/2026

The transparent resentment, airing of supposed dirty laundry, and the most personal attack a dev could utter (“your code has always been slop”) is looser energy. “Unprofessional” doesn’t capture it and is beside the point. Abrasive tone is whatever, the substance is hostile!

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 10/07/2026

When someone stops using your stuff, your only reaction should be wanting to understand why. This is often the single biggest chance to learn what you can do better. This is still true if that person/org has been extremely personally annoying to you.

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 10/07/2026

Lost a lot of respect for Kelley today. I think it’s simultaneously true that 1) OSS owes you nothing 2) slop is bad 3) devtool maintainers should have service attitude First, you should be very mistrustful of your own “you’re holding it wrong” statements. (contd.)

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 04/07/2026

Okay but then you’re talking about maybe seconds of difference. If that matters for the semantics of your app you should either use local causality dependencies to make sure the edge server processes them in the right order, or just use proper exclusive transactions that get globally linearized

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 04/07/2026

No the only thing that matters is the order that these arrive on the server in

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 04/07/2026

No, give me an example of a situation you’re concerned about

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 04/07/2026

I’ve always felt more European than German, and more “of the Internet” than any real place I’m still a visitor of the USA (working on it), but this is the first place where I truly get to be myself. The first place that I want to help build. Today I’m coming out as American 🇺🇸

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 04/07/2026

although we are planning to implement WebTransport based multi-channels with different priorities, which can help in some head of line blocking cases

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 04/07/2026

yes, transport is a FIFO and the tier that you’re waiting for will process previous commits in that order

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 04/07/2026

No, the column contents literally merge with a per column merge strategy. Order only comes in as authored-at timestamp that deterministically influences the strategies

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 04/07/2026

See my reply up the tree re choose your own consistency. But agreed that this is quite novel and we need to nail docs. Thanks for mentioning jazz v2!

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 04/07/2026

The thing that seems to be missing from this discussion is that jazz v2 transactions are not just choose your own durability (which infra tier) but also choose your own consistency! default “mergeable” = eventually consistent, participates in merging or “exclusive” = traditional ACID, linearized!

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 24/06/2026

Prob very similar, and on-demand is also mostly the same thing, but I assume @siidorow.dev wanted to just preserve each author’s exact wording from the interviews. The diff between Jazz v2 and classic is that v2 also permits aggregate results to be synced (for counts etc) instead of all rows

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 24/06/2026

Can’t wait to see it! Would definitely benefit from a medium-length format. Please ping me when it’s done and I’ll repost

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 24/06/2026

Thanks for letting us know, please try the non direct link: bsky.app/profile/anse...

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 24/06/2026

For his master's thesis, @siidorow.dev interviewed me about how @jazz.tools fits into the landscape of sync engines and local-first DBs. Now that it's published (congrats!) I can say that it is *the* most rigorous & precisely categorized overview of our field! PDF: aaltodoc.aalto.fi/server/api/c...

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 10/06/2026

Fable @ high reasoning for hard questions & architecture & review + GPT 5.5 @ low reasoning for smart and fast implementation is an insane combo

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 02/06/2026

Sure, inference is also just next token prediction, but if next token prediction is good enough it *becomes indistinguishable from intelligence*. The mechanism doesn’t matter and I would argue a lot of human/animal intelligence is also rooted in prediction. Thanks for coming to my ted talk

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 02/06/2026

The whole new math proofs stuff was shocking, but this hits on a very concrete personally relevant level. The number and detail of concepts it has to “hold in its head” and cross-induce over goes far beyond what you could fairly call “just smarter autocomplete”.

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 02/06/2026

Because it understands stuff that I only know from behavior and invariants observed in real code that it has no access to and that are only extremely indirectly implied by the spec. A lot of the things in there are novel and idiosyncratic designs, too.

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 02/06/2026

It is better than I am at “mentally simulating” the system based on nothing but the spec and correctly predicting extremely complex, nuanced interactions between features and systems. How do I know it’s correct and complete?

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Anselm Eickhoff @anselm.io · 02/06/2026

I’ve found my personal reason to believe LLMs are intelligent: I’m (hand)writing a comprehensive spec for all of @jazz.tools and have Codex point out contradictions and gaps.

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