antirez bsky social
@antirez
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Reproducible bugs are candies.
Sicily, Italy
Joined May 2007
My second short story release in English is ready: Tales of Illustrious Computer Scientists: Iola Varga, nun and computer scientist.
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Today I'm stepping down as Redis leader and maintainer. I published a blog post about this:. Thanks Redis community, you have my love <3.Thanks Redis Labs for the joint adventure so far.
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I look at the web today. Not as a programmer, but as a user of broken sites that are unable to obey the most basic rules of navigation and usability, terribly slow despite the hardware progresses. And I can only think that modern frontend development has failed.
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Flipper Zero: The Thread. I received a Flipper Zero a few days ago, and since I'm idling here at my parent's house, for the holidays, I spent a lot of time playing with it. This thread captures my impressions about the device.
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Some NoSQL databases came to earth and died for us, to teach us how to use Postgres.
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"After 20 years as a software engineer, I've started commenting heavily. I used to comment sparingly. What made me change was a combination of reading the SQLite and Redis codebases" <3 false myth: code should be auto-explaining. Comments tell you about the state, not the code.
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A few words about the coronavirus for my dear followers. I'm in Italy right now and we are closed in our homes. We reached a very critical situation because, when it was time to act, the measures required looked too restrictive from the POV of western countries culture.
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A little known story about how @paulg, writing a comment in the newborn Hacker News, inspired the creation of Redis. At some point he wrote that in certain Lisp programs he wrote there was this pattern of just storing data in memory, logging on disk what it was stored in memory.
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Dear friends, I'm rejoining Redis. It's a long story, so it deserved a blog post to explain all the details:
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In some way C is a fundamental language like Lisp, emerging from the nature of computation. C whole point is "struct" + low level memory access. The act of allocating a structure and have pointers to other structures maps 1:1 to how algorithms books represent data structures.
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The level of failure of LLMs at system programming tasks is incredible. They are almost useless, only good to provide memorized documentation. I guess system programming requires some more advanced reasoning? Because I don't believe it is under represented in training data.
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That was an awesome little experiment with my daughter Greta (6 yo). I explained her how Netflix transmits videos to our iPad with numbers, and the run length compression. Then I sent her numbers and in the end she had the same picture in the paper. Simple and effective to learn.
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I can't believe I'm receiving so much love and nice messages :) Even if a few sound like I'm dead LOL, it's a bit like attending your own funeral. Jokes apart, see you soon with more OSS code. I'll resume writing code ASAP.
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Best thing you can do for the web today? Switch to Firefox.
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@pmddomingos The average dream of an Eurooean citizen is not to get hyper rich. People may tell you Ohhhh if I had a few millions, but most of them don't really care, deeply. Here in Europe (even if we struggle to do so) the conversation is more about improving the average person life.
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So, yesterday LLMs where impossible to run without a super costly GPU and the most terrible stack ever produced in software (machine learning stacks are a terrible dependency hell). Then some hacker turns the (conceptually simple!) tensor operations in C:. make; ./chat.
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So now Google Assistant calls by voice a shop. Later shops will see this is useful for them as well to have AI to answer! We got two AIs talking. Optimization: handshake as bots and transmit data instead of talking. And we are back at modems and APIs again.
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Re-reading it. This @JohnOusterhout book is becoming one of the key books of my programming maturity.
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I tried to clarify this master-slave thing in a blog post, hoping that this is the final word and discussion about it:
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Redis 6.0.0 GA is out!. Blog post here: Highlights in this release:.
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Programming is cool. It's as cool as writing. Writing and programming make you touch the infinite. Maybe programming will become as irrelevant as writing, but it will continue to be one of the best things you can apply your mind to, making life worth.
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Twitter is in desperate decline. And social media, in general, is in terrible shape. That's our fault, dear friends. To exchange messages and pictures is a trivial internet function, not unicorn worth: we killed IRC and NNTP, dismissed RSS, and now that's the world we get.
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You should read @JohnOusterhout latest book ASAP. Even because like most of the best books it is a short book, where every sentence counts. This book is radicalizing me in certain approaches I've.
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Randomly found this. Good memories about nice people and the great databases scene that started around 2009.
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Github changing UI style is like when you are a small child and your father, that always used to have a beard, one day returns home fully shaven.
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Technologies like Copilot tell us two things:.1. How good AI is getting at reproducing and, in some way, abstracting patterns from a big corpus. GPT-3 and Copilot are stunning examples. 2. How much repetitive and empty of creativity most programming tasks are.
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My Hacker News comment about OSS software development and pressure.
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Repeat with me: Unix is no longer the complex jungle it was 30 years ago, and I no longer need a build system other than a Makefile with a few ifdefs for the *majority* of system software projects. I thereby promise to try very hard to keep things simple UNITL POSSIBLE.
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I followed the initial parts of the golang online tutorial, and probably it’s one of the best languages for a newbie to approach programming. Low level enough to understand what’s really going on, high level enough to start without fighting with machine-level concepts.
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News about the replacement of "slave" with "master" in Redis. First, together with other developers we agreed to pick "master-replica". This may not be the most exact terminology, but is surely very understandable by Redis users because such terminology was already used.
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Current frontend situation is more similar to the NFT 🤡 than actual well designed and reasoned programming. Layers of complexity to do trivial stuff.
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I believe that in 50 years from now, the complexity to all the levels of the tech stack that Google brought, in contraposition to the beauty and simplicity of the original Internet and web protocols, will be marked as one of the lowest points of technological design.
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Found a major design problem in Redis client side caching protocol (while writing the docs for it). Desperation. Walked 20 minutes thinking at it. Found the perfect design solution. Total Happiness. Will implement Monday.
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My father after taking a coffee: "Ok, I'm going to give Ubuntu a try". My mother: "Hey, isn't that a dating site?". Me: "No mom, it's all fine, it's a Linux distribution".
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After 1 years and 3 months since the release of Redis 4. Redis 5.0.0 GA is now out! Full story here:. Thread about what's new:.
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Github sponsor program is the first thing that is actually working in this direction. If this will become mainstream, fixing OSS development economics could be the *most important* thing that Github have done for the world. My fingers are crossed.
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LLMs and Programming in the first days of 2024 (blog post):.
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Me and daughter in one of the most friendly and fascinating places I ever visited: Crete.
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"For the third year in a row, Redis is the most loved database, meaning that proportionally more developers want to continue working with it than any other database." <3 Thanks StackOverflow users, very appreciated. Btw it's really great that we get this cool report every year.
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Ok I think I'm starting to seriously like this Twitch thing. 1. It's cool to stay with people while coding in some way, I felt less alone. 2. People see how fallible I'm, and it's great to put things in context. 3. I raise my standards because there is folks watching me. 4. Cool.
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I just posted this comment on Hacker News, maybe it could be of some interest here as well.
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I big thank you to all my Chinese followers for the big help their country is providing to Italy during such complex days.
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Huge amount of corporate-payed programmers to accomplish near-zero useful things, and many *key* OSS projects left to be developed in the free time of great folks. It's incredible how we were not able to fix this. 0.001% of what IT generates would be probably enough money.
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AI is not exploited enough at product level. WhatsApp, the most used IM app in the world: where are summarization of chats? Local audio transcription? Urgent chat detection? Automatic translation? And the list could continue.
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Thanks to the monument to human intelligence that the Internet is, we fortunately have a chance to stay at home while not being alone. Have fun in your collective chats, create new things, write programs, read about stuff you don't know, chat with your family. We can do it ;-).
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Hi friends! After 2 years of work my sci-fi novel (Italian version) is available on Amazon and in all the best Italians bookshops. The name of the novel is "Wohpe", and you can find it here:. Amazon paperback: Kindle edition:
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On a personal note, you may think that during this time of license change, forks, dramas, many persons would stress me out with questions or insults or forcing me in some way or the other. The reality? The community is simply exceptional. Zero questions, zero stress. Just smiles.
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However I quickly forgot about this idea and continued with my stuff. At some point a year or so later I was facing with a very write heavy application, and at that point it made sense to try doing exactly that. Ideas exchange is a key part of building things.
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After years of Redis, reasoning in terms of SQL tables is not exactly funny for certain use cases. I'm using SQLite for my Telegram bot, great API, but the Redis data model is a lot more natural for many things. (Maybe I just happen to be like minded with the Redis author?).
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If you are the author of a software library, and you often change the API in a breaking way, you are doing a great disservice not just to your users, but to the free software community at large. I'll explain why in this thread.
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In the times we live, a fundamental skill to survive is knowing what to ignore among the zillion things presented to us every minute, and on which few things to focus our attention. Be picky as shit.
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Today I took a pause from coding in order to blog. And in order to blog about Redis internals, I was reading code, and found two bugs because what I was writing in the blog post forced me to see things from a given POV.
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I just merged SSL support into Redis unstable. This feature has an interesting story that I want to tell you. It was kinda of a "process" to reach the right solution, or at least a solution that looks a lot better than the alternatives.
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So today I stepped into the Apple Store in Catania and purchased a MacBook Pro 16 M3 Max with 128GB of RAM for the price of a small car :D. I told the folks working there: it's the most expensive Mac I ever got, and also the best deal from Apple: because of unified memory + GPUs.
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Writing system software episode 5: how to build a small and broken chat server.
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Think at this: despite very limited reasoning capabilities, LLMs can pass various schools exams. This mainly means that those exams are very poorly conceived. They test a lot for memorisation and very little for reasoning and problem solving abilities.
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I love ChatGPT and I'm a better coder thanks to it (especially when coding with languages and libraries I don't know well). However if you are using the OpenAI API for your product and you didn't try if the task can be handled by fine-tuned (by LoRa or other means) Mistral 7B. .
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Most people that will claim that for a matter of productivity sleep 4 hours at night have something in common: they don't *produce* anything like a programmer, a writer or a designer does for instance. They jump between meetings all day.
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Refuse to learn anything that is an ad-hoc abstraction that people invented for some reason, but does not map to any big concept in computer science:
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More or less 18 years ago, a very big American company, having large operations in Rome because of deals with the Italian government, was in need for a service: they asked certain folks that decided to call me. The task at hand was to implement BGP on a system that lacked it.
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It's a bit confusing to see IT workers changing position every 12 months to reach incredibly high salaries, now playing the role of victims of the layoffs. Both things are totally nuts: to jump from one place to another continuously and to be fired in the matter of hours.
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I started the “writing system software” video series thinking that nobody would care, so it’s very nice to see that there is interesting, and pushes me to continue. Thanks folks.
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I just published the gguf-tools repository. It's far from being complete, but already contains some useful example of GGUF file parsing and gguf-tools, the command line utility that uses it to do random stuff.
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I just noticed that work on Redis resumed :D, it's cool to see a stream of commits. The feeling of leaving something, not abandoned, but in the hands of many people that will care about it, is great.
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Please note that the Redis license remains BSD. A few people misunderstood the @RedisLabs blog post. It applies only to modules developed at Redis Labs such as RediSearch. Modules developed by myself will be AGPL (that is, Disque). Redis core BSD as usually.
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40h per week are already a lot. Add to them the overhead like commute and the fact you need to sleep 7/8 hours to stay healthy, and the time to do any other activity is gone. Advocating for more than that does not make any sense and is something already obvious in Europe.
What’s so bizarre about this whole overwork debate is how utterly unambitious and banal my advocacy is! The fact that calling for a 40h work week counts as some sort of radicalism shows just how insane and extreme the entrepreneurial ideology has become.
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Abstractions are a mean do dominate complexity, not a way to write code that is different and more convoluted to show you are smart. Every abstractions that does not pay itself the same weight in gold, is bad. This is a crucial concept that who came before left to us.
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First: the Flipper should put many hardware companies to shame. The user experience is *so* good. Everything works well at the first try. The Android app immediately connects with the device and updates the firmware. It can stream the screen in real time, access the file system.
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Redis Labs changes company name to just "Redis" and restates, in times when everybody is moving away even from AGPL, that the Redis OSS Project will remain BSD licensed. A personal thank you to the company for showing with facts what to be committed to OSS means.
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Tempted to: join Google, gmail team. Fix the fact empty emails generate a draft. Leave the company the next day. Enjoy Gmail.
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I'm in the underground software community for enough time at this point to say with confidence: in the long run toxic people don't end very well. They may have good moments when their being mean is aligned with certain interests. But in the long run, they get isolated.
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If you were on Twitter during their first years, you surely remember the server error page with the whale. Now the three FB properties are down, Telegram is lagged because everybody is chatting there and, incredibly, Twitter is here rocking. Things change.
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One of the simplest abstractions in programming is also the one that still shocks me, because of it's beauty, purity, composability: the function. With functions you start with simple things, and layer after layer the end result can be a world of any complexity.
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In programming there is always one point where the community splits in two, in one side people that appreciate very simple languages, and in the other people that are fascinated with the powerful languages full of abstractions.
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My experience: your kids become your main project and your work your side project. The rest is some sleep if you are lucky (like me, sleeping babies both of them).
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Sometimes layoffs are needed. But in companies where the CEOs over-hired in a wicked way, in losing sectors, generating very little output, in such cases shouldn't the layoffs also include the CEO?.
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New blog post: LOLWUT, a piece of art inside a database command.
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Oh, and another thing about how biased IT is towards itself. People say "learn to write code, it's a superpower." You know what? Being able to write much better Italian prose *is* also a superpower. Programming is important, but in no way more important than other skills.
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The worst thing that happened once Twitter became this shithole, is that whole communities formed over decades were destroyed in the process. Such communities were vital to certain processes (software development is one, but there are many).
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Good Saturday! A crash course on IT marketing, because apparently very few people understand developers. We are gentle creatures mostly, and products should be advertised to us in a completely different way.
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Github rate limiting using Redis. A good blog post that even includes the bugs that there were in the initial release.
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This is the correct way to use AI for programming, IMHO.
I haven't found much use for AI in full-on writing large bodies for code for me, but I continue to be astounded by its ability to be a superb pair programmer. It knows all the APIs, we never need to Google anything, and its suggestions are often delightful. A+.
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Hacker News 2021 edition: yes, it has flaws, but it remains one of the few places on the internet where I continue to read intelligent and informative content, where many arguments are not made by precooked concepts and ideas, but actually thought.
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Have you ever thought that remote work, or instead the contrary of working closely every day, are two equally legitimate ways of doing things and you should just do whatever you want and stop criticizing people that don't think alike?.
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