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We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled

shopify.engineering

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Re: We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled

#231

Post by bijowo1676 »

soontimes wrote: post #168
bijowo1676 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i also work in big tech and know that a lot of bullshit design creeps into system design and prod, because everyone is overworked, overstressed, wants to just get things done for the quarterly performance review as to not get shitcanned with severance re concurrency, it is not a big issue at all. stock exchanges deal with HFT traders and can easily deal with concurrency of orders. Same can be implemented with shopify…

> re concurrency, it is not a big issue at all I would really appreciate it if you could write this up as an article. It would be an extremely interesting and valuable read

Martin Fowler's overview of LMAX Disruptor is one of the best reads on this subject re high-load system design

https://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html

Re: We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled

#232

Post by dilyevsky »

samudrijan wrote: post #203
energy123 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subheading and dot point spam, low density writing (the opposite of standard technical english), including useless detail (like enumerating stats on Shopify's scale), using contrastive parallelism, and other llm-isms. Even if it's not AI it's bad writing done by someone who has picked up AI's worst ticks. For example this subheading: > "The real bottleneck: connections, not CPU" That's two AI smells. AI likes to say…

Say the thing, not contrastive parallelism. Thanks for putting a name to that horrible LLM habit.

Clearly ai written comment

Re: We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled

#233

Post by thunky »

Semaphor wrote: post #226
thunky wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read TFA? Because all of your questions are answered clearly there.

Maybe they should show us their prompt so we don't have to read all the bullshitting to get to those answers

The article is fine. LLMs are just turning everyone into divas.

Re: We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled

#234

Post by jasonlotito »

nozzlegear wrote: post #39
jasonlotito wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's not hard to parse, but it's a dense pair of sentences that say nothing. It just pads the length of the article and gives readers mental fatigue trying to read between the lines to figure out what the point is.

> It's not hard to parse

That's what I said. Full stop.

> but...

a bunch of stuff that just pads the comment agreeing with me but adding nothing else of value.

Re: We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled

#235

Post by jasonlotito »

CoolestBeans wrote: post #44
jasonlotito wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I actually don't think this article was LLM generated but these two sentences suck. I think they were moved from another part of the article without being modified. First, "the hardest lesson". What lesson? It is out of context. Nobody was talking about lessons before this. Second, "the bottleneck wasn't what we were measuring and observing". Of course the bottleneck itself wasn't that. They couldn't discover what th…

> but these two sentences suck.

Sure. But that's not what's being discussed here. People are poor writers. People write, and they barely edit. But hard to parse? No, not at all.

Re: We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled

#236

Post by jasonlotito »

ares623 wrote: post #65
jasonlotito wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Sure, it's not technically hard to read. But it suuucks, making it hard to read, the same way (some) fast/junk food is hard to swallow. They have access to a trillion dollar writing machine god, and they choose to publish that.

Nope. Hard to parse. And it's not hard to parse.

> fast/junk food is hard to swallow.

Lots of people easily eat it so this doesn't make sense. Someone, like our friend above, might suggest this makes what you just said hard to parse.

> They have access to a trillion dollar writing machine god, and they choose to publish that.

Do they? Please, share with me the trillion dollar writing machine god. None of the LLMs I know of would be considered a writing machine god.

Re: We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled

#237

Post by kimos »

ramon156 wrote: post #143

Why even have a blog when you can't be arsed to write the posts. This is so obviously LLM-written. I have a positive view of Shopify engineers, but this kind of made a dent in that confidence.

I too have a positive view of Shopify engineers. But no longer Shopify management. It went from bottom up trust basted to top down AI first and for everything based. It’s very hard to express how deeply and completely the internal workings and culture of the company has changed. (Source: I am a long time former developer there.)

Re: We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled

#238

Post by Induane »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #189
briga wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly makes it "obvious" that this is written by AI? I could totally believe that AI was used to generate parts of it, but I really don't get the sense that the whole thing was written that way. I've seen way worse examples on this site. As software engineers we are constantly told that we need to heavily use these tools for our daily work. So is it surprising that software engineers use the same tools as writ…

Well, one thing to remember: AI learned from us (See what I did, there?) . The training these LLMs got, was from endless human-slop, on sites like LinkedIn, and marketing copy, everywhere. In fact, don't be surprised, if we start learning from AI; reversing the process. But I think that it's only a matter of time, before almost everything will be at least touched by AI. I posted this, yesterday[0]. It wasn't a partic…

I read your linked comment and I'm bummed out because I agree.

The thing is that I LIKE writing code. It's fun.

I don't LIKE coding with an LLM. It isn't fun.

We can't go back to a place where the professional code is all hand written. But at the same time I'm sad and tired. The joy has been utterly sapped and I don't think I'll be able to do this as a career for much longer.

Re: We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled

#240

Post by Espressosaurus »

KronisLV wrote: post #169
energy123 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subheading and dot point spam, low density writing (the opposite of standard technical english), including useless detail (like enumerating stats on Shopify's scale), using contrastive parallelism, and other llm-isms. Even if it's not AI it's bad writing done by someone who has picked up AI's worst ticks. For example this subheading: > "The real bottleneck: connections, not CPU" That's two AI smells. AI likes to say…

I really wish that slop writing was disincentivized in whatever RLHF they do. I don’t want to read the weird LinkedIn pop-sci tone for the rest of my life in such amounts. I wonder if the average reader is also getting annoyed like this or whether they just don’t care - especially seeing what seems to get upvoted on your run of the mill social media sites. They probably collectively shape things more than I do.

I don’t know how you stop the slop writing. What the LLM writes has the voice of whatever has been RLHF’d into the weights. There will be a voice. It will have ticks.

They can change it but it will be there.

I do like that I have a term for that “this, not that” phrasing that’s nails on the chalkboard for me after several years of reading slop.

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