Does anyone actually use Paxos in real life? And let me ask the same question for all other academic distributed algorithms right away. I recall seeing a study some 10 years ago checking the major cloud providers for Byzantine fault tolerance and finding none of them to exhibit the qualities that the known algorithms would guarantee; apparently they would just rely on timing and hoping things don't get too twisted.
Yes, it's very widely used at Google through Chubby, which underpins many core pieces of infrastructure, including name resolution. (It used to be common practice to depend more directly on Chubby for synchronization of state via shared global files, but that fell out of favor about 6 years ago due to reliability risks associated with just blasting out changes globally without any canarying.)
> I recall seeing a study some 10 years ago checking the major cloud providers for Byzantine fault tolerance and finding none of them to exhibit the qualities that the known algorithms would guarantee.
I'm curious which study you're referring to. I could believe that while Paxos might be used as a building block, it might not be used in a consistent manner throughout.
Also, note that not all of the variations of Paxos handle Byzantine faults.
Yes, if you’re using any sort of multi master db, you’re using a variant of paxos, raft or something which you shouldn’t really trust until aphyr blasts it into the low earth orbit.
The paper itself is very approachable and worth spending an hour or so on.
I remember trying to read the paper and giving up somewhere early in the proof. I certainly don't think it gives a great intuition why the algorithm holds, so "approachability" is a matter of definition (does it tell a fun story? sure yeah).
But, on the other hand, it's hard to get researchers to read your paper, esp. in fast-moving areas. Every little thing might be the difference between reading the abstract or not. Reading the abstract might lead to reading the intro. And so on.
So, for better or worse, the competition for human eyeballs is real.
Ironically, in this case, "attention" is all that the authors want.
Here's a ChatGPT rewrite, focusing on a different end of the political spectrum:
---
The word "puritan" isn't very common now, but if you look up the definition, it might sound familiar. Google's version isn't bad:
“A person with censorious moral beliefs, especially about pleasure and sexuality.”
This sense of the word originated in the 16th century, and its age is an important clue: it shows that although *freedom conservatism* is a relatively recent phenomenon, it's just a modern iteration of an ancient habit.
There's a certain kind of person who is drawn to a rigid, dogmatic sense of virtue and demonstrates their superiority by policing anyone who steps out of line. Every society has these people. The only thing that changes is the rules they enforce. In Puritan New England, it was religious purity. In McCarthy's America, it was anti-communism. For the freedom conservatives, it’s about traditional values.
If you want to understand freedom conservatism, the question to ask isn’t why people act like this. Every society has moral busybodies. The question is, why are *our* moral busybodies obsessed with *these* ideas, at *this* moment?
The answer lies in the 1980s and 1990s. Freedom conservatism is a sequel to the culture wars, which started with Reagan's "family values" campaign and found new life in the early 2000s when people realized reality TV wasn't enough drama. Its second wind came with the rise of social media echo chambers, which peaked around the Great Meme Wars of the late 2010s.
What does freedom conservatism mean now? I’m often asked to define it by people who think it’s an empty buzzword, so here’s my attempt:
*An aggressively performative devotion to traditional values.*
In other words, it’s people being puritans about old-fashioned ideals. The problem isn't traditional values themselves—family, patriotism, etc., have their place. The problem is the *performance.* Instead of quietly living their lives and, say, mowing their lawn while humming "God Bless America," freedom conservatives focus on getting people fired for not standing during the anthem.
And of course, freedom conservatism started in the best possible place for self-serious, inflexible ideology: academia. Did it begin in hard sciences, where people have to deal with facts? Of course not. It began in the cushy chairs of humanities departments, where abstract ideas about morality and society are debated without anyone worrying about inconvenient things like lab results.
Why did it happen in the 1980s and not earlier? Well, the answer is obvious: the hippies of the '60s got jobs. Radical students grew up, got tenure, and traded in their flower power for bow ties and flag pins. Now they were the Establishment they'd protested against, and they weren't about to let anyone disrespect their shiny new rules.
Suddenly, campus life wasn’t about free expression anymore. Now, students were encouraged to rat out professors who said something insufficiently patriotic or questioned the sanctity of heteronormative nuclear families. It was the Cultural Revolution, but make it apple pie.
And what about the rules of freedom conservatism? Oh, they’re a hoot. Imagine explaining to an alien why it’s okay to chant “freedom” while banning books. Or how “family values” means yelling at teenagers about abstinence, but having your own scandalous tabloid history is perfectly fine. The rules are neither consistent nor logical—they’re just a list of traps, perfectly designed for the self-righteous to trip others up.
Freedom conservatism thrives on outrage. And boy, does social media deliver. If outrage were a currency, Twitter would’ve been the new Fort Knox. Freedom conservatives figured out that they could rally mobs online to cancel anyone not adhering to the prescribed "values." Ironically, this led to the thing they claim to hate most: cancel culture.
And let’s not forget the administrators and HR departments hired to enforce this ideology in workplaces. Their job titles often feature words like "patriotism" or "family," but their real goal is to make sure you don’t say anything remotely critical about their flag collection or their favorite founding father.
The sad thing is that freedom conservatism is not going anywhere. The aggressively conventional-minded are like weeds—they’ll always find a crack in the pavement. But the key to stopping them is simple: stop letting them create new heresies. The next time someone tries to ban a book or a word in the name of protecting “values,” maybe, just maybe, we should push back.
Because when freedom conservatism—or any performative moralism—runs wild, the number of true things we can say shrinks. And that’s a loss for everyone, even the puritans."
I don't get this line of thinking. AGI already exists - it's in our heads!
So then the question is: is what's in our heads magic, or can we build it? If you think it's magic, fine - no point arguing. But if not, we will build it one day.
The brain is such an intractable web of connections that it has been really difficult to properly make sense of it.
We can't really talk too much about the differences between the intelligence of a dog and the intelligence of a human; in real terms. It seems as though humans might have more connections, different types of cells but then again; there's species out there that also have types of neurons we don't have and more dense regions in areas of the brain than we do.
And on top of that, dive into a single neuron and you will find a world of complexity. The reason why a neuron might fire or not given a stimuli is an extremely complicated and often stochastic process; that's actually one of the reasons why we use non-linearities in the neural networks we create. But how nuance are we really capturing?
The reason we do mathematics the way we do has well studied neurological patterns, we come out of the box with understandings of the world. And many animals do, actually, similar neurological patterns are found in different species.
It's incredible to think of the precision and the complexity of the tasks a fly undertakes during their life, and we actually have mapped the entire brain (if we can call it that, i would) of a fly. Every neuron and every connection the fly has. There's experiments done with neural networks where we've tried to imitate these (the brain of a fly has less parameters [number of nodes and edges] than modern LLMs) with very interesting results. But can we say we understand them? Not really.
And finally, I want to bring up something that's not usually considered when it comes to these things but there's a lot of processes at the molecular level in our cells that actually make use of quantum mechanics, there's a whole field of biology that's dedicated to studying these processes. So yeah, I mean, maybe we can build it but first we need to understand what's going on and why, I believe.
What processes in our cells make use of quantum mechanics? (I mean in some sense everything is quantum mechanics, but cells are quite big in a quantum mechanics sense. I’d imagine they are mostly classical).
Expert beginner problem. If you can count a grain of sand, and measure the distance of one centimeter, then surely you can measure the exact length of a coastline and count the exact number grains of sand! (The length and number of grains goes to infinity as you get more detailed)
It is less magic, just insanely complicated. We therefore very well might not build it one day. Your claim we would solve it one day is not obvious and needs solid evidence. Some cryptographic problems require millions of years of compute to solve, why cant it be the case that AGI requires petayears of compute? A billion fold increase in compute still won't do it, hence, maybe not ever. 4 billion years and a trillion fold increase in compute might not be enough. (Assuming we have that long. Dawkins was most concerned about humanity surviving the next 500 years.)
One factual issue: "The university had previously announced that this player was transferring from Louisiana State to Michigan." This is not true. Underwood had committed to LSU but then switched his commitment to Michigan. He was still in high school at the time, and has never attended LSU.
But, do you really expect a funny database prof to know much about football?
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