I’ve been looking at synchronization-related concepts lately. It’s been really nice to revisit some ideas/concepts from my PhD years (e.g. consistency models for shared data in distributed environments). ‘Optimistic concurrency’ is a term I’ve encountered a lot and I just read the “Optimistic concurrency – a false panacea” post by Yaro Goland (via Mark Baker). Interesting!
I am not going to try to disagree with the arguments since I am just learning this area and I don’t have the much needed real world experience 🙂 However, I would like to point out that I’ve encountered systems where optimistic concurrency works relatively well (always apply the right tool for the right job!). A couple of examples come in mind: Active Directory and Windows Server Distributed File System. Granted, these are not transactions systems but they do optimistically propagate updates given their multi-owner nature for shared data. Perhaps I am not comparing similar things.
A good paper to read is “Optimistic Replication” by Saito and Shapiro.
I am embarking on a side project that involves memory and multimodal understanding for an…
I was in Toronto, Canada. I'm on the flight back home now. The trip was…
The BBC article "How we fell out of love with voice assistants" by Katherine Latham…
Like so many others out there, I played a bit with ChatGPT. I noticed examples…