Viewing profile — pvh

It does indeed turn out to be a difficult and subtle problem. We've tried to balance minimizing novelty (always risky in cryptographic systems) with achieving the various security …

Ideally, you would use existing commodity infrastructure but we have found none of it is really super fit for our purposes. Failing that, we have been developing an approach to low…

Mechanical merge algorithms can perform better or worse on different kinds of conflicts (the specific example of editing deleted text is just one of many edge cases) but in the end…

Hey, thanks! I don't know what's regressed here but I've emailed the support people for buttondown.

Of course not. Kurt is up in Heaven now.

Automerge does indeed work with live collaboration, though apparently not currently as efficiently as some other solutions. Everyone working in this space is exploring and looking …

Robust undo/redo remains an ongoing research project. Leo Stewen's work was presented at PLF 2023 a few days ago. It turns out to be a subtle problem to really get completely right…

The sync protocol does indeed calculate the delta between peers and efficiently catches both sides up. The backends you see are the ones I use, but the API is a binary blob key val…

Please accept my unreserved apologies, Heather! No offense is intended. I can speak for everyone working on Automerge when I say that we've very much appreciated Matthew's work and…

Ink & Switch is behind it; or more expansively mostly Orion Henry, Alex Good, Martin Kleppmann, and myself. As an organization, we have been working on Automerge for about six year…

The way I think about it is that if the data should always travel together it should be in one document. For example -- if your TODO list always goes as a unit, then make it an arr…

Automerge is a library that anyone can adopt, and we are a research organization, not a product company. We have built a variety of projects with Automerge, both publicly and for u…

The benchmarks Matt Weidner has been working on are great and outside scrutiny is always welcome, but I should note that I find there's an element of artificiality to them. In part…

Thanks, Scott. This API should make it much, much easier for folks to build with Automerge and kind of just encapsulates everything we've been doing in-house over the last few year…

What fun, jake! I am really enjoying your series here. When we built Pixelpusher ( https://inkandswitch.com/pixelpusher ) that was the beginning of a long and ongoing journey into …

Just a note to suggest that giving away your hard work to those who will profit from it in the hope that they will remember you later seems like a pretty dubious exchange. Have a l…

To the former, curious people with an interest in how and why the world came to be as it is. To the latter, obviously "it" has improved, but ecosystem effects make certain changes …

Hey there! It's great to see more folks building more CRDTs. On behalf of the Peritext authors, Automerge, and Ink & Switch, welcome to the community.

We tried Web Bluetooth in a project. It was extremely flaky. Notably it also only works as a server, so you cant peer two browsers over it either.

Just so!

Thanks. We'll fix that before the next one.

The article has quite a few performance numbers in it. The short answer is that it's much, much faster but that we will continue to pursue improvements pretty much forever.

In fact, convergence is a very easy property to preserve in all distributed systems. The trivial but technically valid version of convergence is to throw away all the writes and al…

I prefer to think of Automerge as a form of version control: because the full history is retained, if you don't like the merge you can decide what you want to do instead.

Wonderful postmortem, Paul. Appreciate you taking the time to reflect and share what you learned.