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Is something bugging you?

antithesis.com

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41–50 of 438 posts

Re: Is something bugging you?

#41

Post by ComputerGuru »

I was mentally hijacked into clicking the jobs link (despite recently deciding I wasn’t going to go down that rabbit hole again!) but fortunately/unfortunately it is in-person and daily so, so flying out from Chicago a week out of the month won’t work and I don’t even have to ask!

More to the point of the story (though I do think the actual point was indeed a hiring or contracting pitch), this reminds me a lot of the internal tests the SQLite team has. I would love to hear from someone with access to those if they feel the same way.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#42

Post by rdtsc »

vinnymac wrote: post #17

I wonder if they are working on a time travel debugger. If it is truly deterministic presumably you could visit any point in time after a record is made and replay it.

That’s what rr-project does essentially?

Re: Is something bugging you?

#43

Post by FirmwareBurner »

jimbokun wrote: post #35

> The biggest effect was that it gave our tiny engineering team the productivity of a team 50x its size. I feel like the idea of the legendary "10x" developer has been bastardized to just mean workers who work 15 hours a day 6.5 days a week to get something out the door until they burn out. But here's your real 10x (or 50x) productivity. People who implement something very few people even considered or understood to…

Your definition is also vague. Someone still needs to do the legwork. One man armies who can do everything themselves don't really fit in standardized teams where everything is compartmentalized and work divided and spread out.

They work best on their own projects with nobody else in their way, no colleagues, no managers, but that's not most jobs. Once you're part of a team, you can't do too much work yourself no matter how good you are, as inevitably the other slower/weaker team members will slow you down as you'll fight dealing with the issues they introduce into the project or the issues from management, so every team moves at the speed of the lowest common denominator no matter their rockstars.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#44

Post by timwis »

Gosh, I know it's a bit late, but I wish they'd called the product _The Prime Radiant_

Fans of Asimov's _Foundation_ series will appreciate the analogue to how this system aims to predict every eventuality based on every possible combination of events, a la psychohistory.

P.S. amazing intro post. Can't wait to try the product.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#45

Post by amw-zero »

I'm trying to avoid diving into the hype cycle about this immediately - but this sounds like the holy grail right? Use your existing application as-is (assuming it's containerized), and simply check properties on it?

The blocker in doing that has always been the foundations of our machines: non-deterministic CPUs and operating systems. Re-building an entire vertical computing stack is practically impossible, so they just _avoid_ it by building a high-fidelity deterministic simulator.

I do wonder how they are checking for equivalence between the simulator and existing OS's, as that sounds like a non-trivial task. But, even still, I'm really bought in to this idea.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#46

Post by coldtea »

llm_trw wrote: post #12
Rygian wrote: post #4

The writing is really enjoyable. > Programming in this state is like living life surrounded by a force field that protects you from all harm. [...] We deleted all of our dependencies (including Zookeeper) because they had bugs, and wrote our own Paxos implementation in very little time and it _had no bugs_. Being able to make that statement and back it by evidence must be indeed a cool thing.

I have proved my code has no bugs according to the spec. I do not make the claim my spec has no bugs.

With formal proof systems, you can also claim that for your spec.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#47

Post by getoffmycase »

kretaceous wrote: post #22

This might be the best introduction post I've read. Lays the foundation (get it?) for who the people are and what they've built. Then explains how the current thing they are building is a result of the previous thing. It feels that they actually want this problem solved for everyone because they have experienced how good the solution feels. Then tells us about the teams (pretty big names with complex systems) that ha…

The entire testing system they describe feels like something I can strive towards too. They make you want their solution because it offers a way of life and thinking and doing like you've never experienced before

Re: Is something bugging you?

#48

Post by rvnx »

timwis wrote: post #44

Gosh, I know it's a bit late, but I wish they'd called the product _The Prime Radiant_ Fans of Asimov's _Foundation_ series will appreciate the analogue to how this system aims to predict every eventuality based on every possible combination of events, a la psychohistory. P.S. amazing intro post. Can't wait to try the product.

It would be the opposite of the product:

For a software not interacting with the real world, there is only one possibility for frame N+1, if you know the state of a system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism

PRNG are illusions, just misunderstood by humans.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#49

Post by voidmain »

btrettel wrote: post #26
Rygian wrote: post #4

The writing is really enjoyable. > Programming in this state is like living life surrounded by a force field that protects you from all harm. [...] We deleted all of our dependencies (including Zookeeper) because they had bugs, and wrote our own Paxos implementation in very little time and it _had no bugs_. Being able to make that statement and back it by evidence must be indeed a cool thing.

The earliest that I've seen the attitude that one should eliminate dependencies because they have more bugs than internally written code was this book from 1995: https://store.doverpublications.com/products/9780486152936 pp. 65-66: > The longer I have computed, the less I seem to use Numerical Software Packages. In an ideal world this would be crazy; maybe it is even a little bit crazy today. But I've been bitten too…

In the specific case in question, the biggest problem was that dependencies like Zookeeper weren't compatible with our testing approach, so we couldn't do true end to end tests unless we replaced them. One of the nice things about Antithesis is that because our approach to deterministic simulation is at the whole system level, we can do it against real dependencies if you can install them.

I was a co-founder of both FoundationDB and Antithesis.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#50

Post by svieira »

coldtea wrote: post #46
llm_trw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have proved my code has no bugs according to the spec. I do not make the claim my spec has no bugs.

With formal proof systems, you can also claim that for your spec.

A formal proof is only as good as what-you-are-proving maps to what-you-intended-to-prove.
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