My iPhone 4 has a transparent screen

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I just took a picture of my palm, and set it as the wallpaper to give the transparency effect. The trick worked well on some unsuspecting friends.

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Hints for Distributed Systems Design

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This is with apologies to Butler Lampson, who published the " Hints for computer system design " paper 40 years ago in SOSP'83. I don't claim to match that work of course. I just thought I could draft this post to organize my thinking about designing distributed systems and get feedback from others. I start with the same  disclaimer Lampson gave. These hints are not novel, not foolproof recipes, not laws of design, not precisely formulated, and not always appropriate. They are just hints.  They are context dependent, and some of them may be controversial. That being said, I have seen these hints successfully applied in distributed systems design throughout my 25 years in the field, starting from the theory of distributed systems (98-01), immersing into the practice of wireless sensor networks (01-11), and working on cloud computing systems both in the academia and industry ever since. These heuristic principles have been applied knowingly or unknowingly and has proven...
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The F word

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Back in 2005, when I first joined the SUNY Buffalo CSE department, the department secretary was a wonderful lady named Joann, who was over 60. She explained that my travel reimbursement process was simple: I'd just hand her the receipts after my trip, she'd fill out the necessary forms, submit them to the university, and within a month, the reimbursement check would magically appear in my department mailbox. She handled this for every single faculty member, all while managing her regular secretarial duties. Honestly, despite the 30-day turnaround, it was the most seamless reimbursement experience I've ever had. But over time the department grew, and Joann moved on. The university partnered with Concur, as corporations do, forcing us to file our own travel reimbursements through this system. Fine, I thought, more work for me, but it can't be too bad. But, the department also appointed a staff member to audit our Concur submissions. This person's job wasn't to hel...
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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 outsider looking at the architecture of these new agents and agentic system, I noticed something strange. The engineering tricks used to make AI smarter felt oddly familiar. They read less like computer science and more like … self-help advice . The secret to agentic intelligence seems to lie in three very human habits: writing things down, talking to yourself, and pretending to be someone else. They are almost too simple. The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Writing One of the most profound pieces of advice I ever read as a PhD student came from Prof. Manuel Blum, a Turing Award winner. In his essay "Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student", he wrote: "Without writing, you are reduced to a finite automaton. With writing you have the extraordinary power of a Turing machine." If you try to hold a complex argument enti...
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This is definitely not a "learn distributed systems in 21 days" post. I recommend a principled, from the foundations-up, studying of distributed systems, which will take a good three months in the first pass, and many more months to build competence after that. If you are practical and coding oriented you may not like my advice much. You may object saying, "Shouldn't I learn distributed systems with coding and hands on? Why can I not get started by deploying a Hadoop cluster, or studying the Raft code." I think that is the wrong way to go about learning distributed systems, because seeing similar code and programming language constructs will make you think this is familiar territory, and will give you a false sense of security. But, nothing can be further from the truth. Distributed systems need radically different software than centralized systems do.  --A. Tannenbaum This quotation is literally the first sentence in my distributed systems syllabus. Inst...
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Foundational distributed systems papers

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I talked about the importance of reading foundational papers last week. To followup, here is my compilation of foundational papers in the distributed systems area. (I focused on the core distributed systems area, and did not cover networking, security, distributed ledgers, verification work etc. I even left out distributed transactions, I hope to cover them at a later date.)  I classified the papers by subject, and listed them in chronological order. I also listed expository papers and blog posts at the end of each section. Time and State in Distributed Systems Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System. Leslie Lamport, Commn. of the ACM,  1978. Distributed Snapshots: Determining Global States of a Distributed System. K. Mani Chandy Leslie Lamport, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 1985. Virtual Time and Global States of Distributed Systems.  Mattern, F. 1988. Practical uses of synchronized clocks in distributed systems. B. Liskov, 1991. Exp...
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Building a Database on S3

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Hold your horses, though. I'm not unveiling a new S3-native database. This paper is from 2008. Many of its protocols feel clunky today. Yet it nails the core idea that defines modern cloud-native databases: separate storage from compute. The authors propose a shared-disk design over Amazon S3, with stateless clients executing transactions. The paper provides a blueprint for serverless before the term existed. SQS as WAL and S3 as Pagestore The 2008 S3 was painfully slow, and 100 ms reads weren't unusual. To hide that latency, the database separates "commit" from "apply". Clients write small, idempotent redo logs to Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) instead of touching S3 directly. An asynchronous checkpoint by a client applies those logs to B-tree pages on S3 later. This design shows strong parallels to modern disaggregated architectures . SQS becomes the write-ahead log (WAL) and logstore. S3 becomes the pagestore. Modern Aurora follows a similar logic : t...
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Advice to the young

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