Murat (Distributolog)
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muratdemirbas.bsky.social
Murat (Distributolog)
@muratdemirbas.bsky.social
1.6K followers 62 following 140 posts
Distributed systems,Database systems, Lightweight formal methods, TLA+

https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/
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muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

Are Database System Researchers Making Correct Assumptions about Transaction Workloads?

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/01/are-...
Are Database System Researchers Making Correct Assumptions about Transaction Workloads?
In this blog, we had reviewed quite a number of deterministic database papers, including Calvin , SLOG , Detock , which aimed to achieve hig...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
January 5, 2026 at 4:11 PM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

Too Close to Our Own Image?

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/01/too-...
Too Close to Our Own Image?
Recent work suggests we may be projecting ourselves onto LLMs more than we admit. A paper in Nature reports that GPT-4 exhibits "state anxi...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
January 4, 2026 at 7:21 PM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

The Agentic Self: Parallels Between AI and Self-Improvement

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-...
The Agentic Self: Parallels Between AI and Self-Improvement
2025 was the year of the agent. The goalposts for AGI shifted; we stopped asking AI to merely "talk" and demanded that it "act". As an outsi...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
January 2, 2026 at 11:15 PM
Reposted by Murat (Distributolog)
mikezaccardi.bsky.social
Buffalo recorded its strongest wind gust since 1980 today.. 79mph (think I heard that right)... max gusts bal-day: 40-55mph NYC-Boston
December 29, 2025 at 6:04 PM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

Rethinking the Cost of Distributed Caches for Datacenter Services

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/12/reth...
Rethinking the Cost of Distributed Caches for Datacenter Services
This paper (HOTNETS'25) re-teaches a familiar systems lesson: caching is not just about reducing latency, it is also about saving CPU! The ...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
December 29, 2025 at 9:52 PM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

Randomer Things

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/12/rand...
Randomer Things
I aspire to get bored in the new year I've realized that chess has been eating my downtime. Because it lives on my phone (Lichess), it is fr...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
December 28, 2025 at 10:10 PM
Reposted by Murat (Distributolog)
emptysqua.re
The "Open Versus Closed" paper was in 2006. The "coordinated omission" talk was in 2012. So why haven't we all switched to open loop benchmarks by now?
December 21, 2025 at 6:18 PM
Reposted by Murat (Distributolog)
emptysqua.re
YCSB is obsolete. It's a closed loop benchmark that doesn't generate realistic load, and it can't push a system past its limit. Same goes for the TPC benchmarks, and even the new KVBench. We've known about the inaccuracies of these closed loop benchmarks for years. emptysqua.re/blog/ycsb-is...
YCSB Is Obsolete, We Need New Benchmarks
Closed loop benchmarks are too polite, they don't push systems past their limits.
emptysqua.re
December 21, 2025 at 6:17 PM
Reposted by Murat (Distributolog)
emptysqua.re
@muratdemirbas.bsky.social and I are announcing today our new lease protocol for Raft, LeaseGuard. It's rigorously specified in TLA+, it's surprisingly simple, it adds no new messages to Raft, and it has cool optimizations to restore read and write availability quickly after a leader crash.
December 19, 2025 at 1:49 PM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
We introduce LeaseGuard: a Raft-specific lease protocol with a precise spec and fast recovery after crashes.

Paper + Implementation linked in our joint (w Jesse @emptysqua.re) blog post below.

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/12/leas...
LeaseGuard: Raft Leases Done Right!
Many distributed systems have a leader-based consensus protocol at their heart. The protocol elects one server as the "leader" who receives ...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
December 19, 2025 at 1:13 PM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

TLA+ modeling tips

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/12/tla-...
TLA+ modeling tips
Model minimalistically Start from a tiny core, and always keep a working model as you extend. Your default should be omission. Add a compone...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
December 15, 2025 at 6:25 PM
Reposted by Murat (Distributolog)
shriram.bsky.social
Our focus is specifically on getting *CS* people into formal verification, hence the name, "Logic for Systems" (as opposed to "Logic for philosophical syllogisms", say). There's a book accompanied by a verification tool specifically designed for education (not a lot are!).
forge-fm.github.io/book/
How to Read this book - Logic for Systems: Lightweight Formal Methods for Everybody
forge-fm.github.io
December 13, 2025 at 12:25 PM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
Our car pool turned into a brainrot field study.

I wrote about the language, the memes, the programming joke that went too far, and why I think the kids are alright.

Real tea inside.

[new blog post]

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/12/brai...
Brainrot
I drive my daughter to school as part of a car pool. Along the way, I am learning a new language, Brainrot. So what is brainrot ? It is what...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
December 8, 2025 at 3:58 PM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

Best of metadata in 2025

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/12/best...
Best of metadata in 2025
It is that time of year again to look back on a year of posts. I average about sixty posts annually. I don't explicitly plan for the number,...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
December 3, 2025 at 1:11 PM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

Mitigating Application Resource Overload with Targeted Task Cancellation

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/11/miti...
November 25, 2025 at 3:54 AM
Reposted by Murat (Distributolog)
the-goddess-speaks.bsky.social
Wow! Jesse Welles performed his song “Join ICE” on the Colbert Show last night. 🏆
November 20, 2025 at 3:04 PM
Reposted by Murat (Distributolog)
conorpower23.bsky.social
Registration is now open for CIDR 2026 from January 18th-21st in Santa Cruz! Hope to see you all there!

cidrdb.org/cidr2026/reg...
CIDR 2026 - Registration
The 16th Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR 2026), Registration Information
cidrdb.org
November 10, 2025 at 8:10 PM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

Disaggregated Database Management Systems

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/11/disa...
Disaggregated Database Management Systems
This paper is based on a panel discussion from the TPC Technology Conference 2022. It surveys how cloud hardware and software trends are re...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
November 11, 2025 at 6:17 PM
Reposted by Murat (Distributolog)
bgrueskin.bsky.social
Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer.

He is a computer safety researcher.

And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine.

In under 1600 words.

aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...
I Want You to Understand Chicago Politics Chicago 2025-11-08 I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time. Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning. A week later it happens again. An email arrives. Agents with guns have chased a teacher into the school where she works. They did not have a warrant. They dragged her away, ignoring her and her colleagues’ pleas to show proof of her documentation. That evening I stand a few feet from the parents of Rayito de Sol and listen to them describe, with anguish, how good Ms. Diana was to their children. What it is like to have strangers with guns traumatize your kids. For a teacher to hide a three-year-old child for fear they might be killed. How their relatives will no longer leave the house. I hear the pain and fury in their voices, and I wonder who will be next. Understand what it is to pray in Chicago. On September 19th, Reverend David Black, lead pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was praying outside the ICE detention center in Broadview when a DHS agent shot him in the head with pepper balls. Pepper balls are never supposed to be fired at the head because they can seriously injure, or even kill. “We could hear them laughing as they were shooting us from the roof,” Black recalled. He is not the only member of the clergy ICE has assaulted. Methodist pastor Hannah Kardon was violently arrested on October 17th, and Baptist pastor Michael Woolf was shot with pepper balls on November 1st. Understand what it is to sleep in Chicago. On the night of September 30th, federal agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter to execute a raid on an apartment building on the South Sho…
November 9, 2025 at 8:49 PM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

Taurus MM: A Cloud-Native Shared-Storage Multi-Master Database

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/11/taur...
Taurus MM: A Cloud-Native Shared-Storage Multi-Master Database
This VLDB'23 paper presents Taurus MM, Huawei's cloud-native, multi-master OLTP database built to scale write throughput in clusters betwee...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
November 10, 2025 at 4:36 AM
Reposted by Murat (Distributolog)
tedherman.bsky.social
@matsuzawa.bsky.social www.wsj.com/lifestyle/fo...
Fountain Pens Are More Popular Than Ever—and Purists Are Fuming
Chinese knockoffs are flooding the market, shaking up the community of enthusiasts still devoted to the old-timey instruments
www.wsj.com
November 9, 2025 at 1:16 PM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

Taurus Database: How to be Fast, Available, and Frugal in the Cloud

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/11/taur...
Taurus Database: How to be Fast, Available, and Frugal in the Cloud
This SIGMOD’20 paper presents TaurusDB, Huawei's disaggregated MySQL-based cloud database. TaurusDB refines the disaggregated architecture ...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
November 9, 2025 at 4:41 AM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

TLA+ Modeling of AWS outage DNS race condition

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/11/tla-...
TLA+ Modeling of AWS outage DNS race condition
On Oct 19–20, 2025, AWS’s N. Virginia region suffered a major DynamoDB outage triggered by a DNS automation defect that broke endpoint resol...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
November 5, 2025 at 10:48 PM
Reposted by Murat (Distributolog)
zicklag.dev
I love the point made here.

We actually _need_ to do the work, and feel the pain, of our existing situation to be motivated to understand and fix it.

I think often times we don't understand how important our suffering is to a victory that actually matters.

"Beware of unearned wisdom" - Carl Jung
Can clear insights distill without dust, tear, and sweat? One may argue that with machines handling the grunt work, the researchers would finally get more time for thinking. Our brains are --what?-- yes, lazy. Left idle, they will scroll Reddit/Twitter rather than solve concurrency bugs. I suspect we need some friction/irritation to nudge us to think in the background. And I suspect this is what happens when we are doing the boring work and working in the trenches. While writing a similar code snippet for the fifth time in our codebase, an optimization opportunity or an abstraction would occur to us. Very hard problems are impossible to tackle head on. Doing the legwork, I suspect we approach the problem sideways, and have a chance to make some leeway. Yes, doing evaluation work sucks. But it is often necessary to generate the friction and space to get you think about the performance, and more importantly the logic/point of your system. Through that suffering, you gradually get transformed and enlightened. Working in the trenches, you may even realize your entire setup is flawed, and your measurements are garbage due to using closed loop clients instead of open loop ones. What happens when we stop getting our hands dirty? We risk distilling nothing at all. Insights don't bubble up while we are sitting in comfort and scrolling cat videos. In an earlier post, Looming Liability Machines (LLMs), I argued that offloading root-cause analysis to AI misses the point. RCA isn't about assigning blame to a component. It is an opportunity to think about the system holistically, and understand it better, and improve. Outsourcing this to LLMs strike me as a very stupid thing to do. We need to keep exercising those muscles, otherwise they would atrophy alongside our understanding of the system.
October 23, 2025 at 1:53 AM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

Barbarians at the Gate: How AI is Upending Systems Research

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/10/barb...
Barbarians at the Gate: How AI is Upending Systems Research
This recent paper from the Berkeley Sky Computing Lab has been making waves in systems community. Of course, Aleksey and I did our live blin...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
October 23, 2025 at 12:15 AM