Significant Bits

Please read important erratum at end of these notes!
Astute listeners will notice that this is the first episode in over a year. I recorded not one but two awesome interviews...and then failed to edit and publish them. Guilt over this haunted me. I have finally accepted I must declare moral bankruptcy on this front to be able to continue the podcast; I apologize. (I may yet bring those episodes back to life, but I will no longer block on them.)
In this episode, Michael, Michael, and I discuss an awesome debugging adventure deep in the Go runtime and linux kernel.
Links:
* Go issue: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/73581
* Metastable Failures in Distributed Systems: https://sigops.org/s/conferences/hotos/2021/papers/hotos21-s11-bronson.pdf
* Sponsor: https://sketch.dev/
Erratum:
I described elided nil checks as working by mapping the page at 0x0 as read only. In fact, it is unmapped, so that reads will also fault. Silly me.

Links:
my little whisper.cpp bug fix
why the logits were calculated inconsistently
wav2vec2 on arxiv and huggingface
the openai whisper asr model announcement
beam search patience
top notch guide to CTC
the bitter lesson (and in meme form)
Errata:
* I referred in the show to LLMs as encoder-decoder models. Most modern LLMs are decoder-only.
* I messed up readability at Google. It means approvability, apparently. 🤷

In which I ramble about randomness and random algorithms. Now with theme music!

Paper Cuts planned reading: Habitability and Piecemeal Growth, in Patterns of Software (just pages 7–16 of the book, which is pages 25-32 of the PDF)
Selected links:
* SIEVE cache replacement algorithm
* Power of two random choices
* Marc Brooker's blog
* Random forests
* Count Min Sketch
* Monte Carlo Simulation
* Random projection
* T-Digest
* The fix for my embarrassing compiler bug

Shay Nehmad on how writing is the key to becoming a better engineer, how to do it, and more.
Links:
* Cup O' Go podcast
* Code Complete book
* Shay's blog
* Obsidian and Logseq

This was a fun and decidedly humbling conversation with Ben Johnson about SQLite, databases, Litestream, and LiteFS.
Links:
Ben on GitHub
Litestream
LiteFS