Diego Ongaro Bottom Line Up Front I rate this 7.7. Raft is easier than Paxos to understand. Here’s how Raft works. Logs, pick a leader, commit once majority has written to disk. Elections rely on majorities. Write the correct things to disk, use random delays to break ties. Makes me want to read about Chubby. Summary Consensus algorithms allow a collection of machines to work as a coherent group that can survive some failures....

The paper which describes ZooKeeper, a service for coordinating processes of distributed applications. Bottom Line Up Front I rate this 7.2. ZooKeeper is hard to kill, clints think it is FIFO, writes are, reads are fast and loose. Sync allows cool tricks for when reads matter. Thoughts before reading Zookeeper is a distributed tree for small pieces of data and is intended to be the last thing to die during a cluster-wide train-wreck....

First chapter from Michael F Ashby’s book “Materials and Sustainable Development”. Bottom Line Up Front I rate this 5.7. Many very good visuals show that we’re using rarer materials and more of them.t Summary Michael starts by defining sustainable development. Not everyone perceives sustainable development the same way. Environment, Economy, Society. Development, in a purely technical sense, is just economic growth. Environment is something to be exploited to help progress society from farmers to industrial and beyond....

Everybody loves Dennard scaling and living in the Post-Dennard future. Here’s the paper that gives us Dennard scaling. Bottom Line Up Front I rate this 6.4. A technical paper outlining why very small transistors are difficult to make, how to make them, and why they’re so great. Highly technical specifics but key nuggets presented in a way a layperson can understand. Obvious why this became The scaling law. Summary Intro Starts describing the state of the art in 1974....

Bottom line up front I rate this 5.5. With zero formal ethics background, this did a good job of laying out definitions, problems, and solutions. The recommendations are good, but even the most optimistic author must have intended for these to be aspirational. Summary Preface Computing research community must address ethical and societal impacts of computing technologies. The National Academies has created a Committee on Responsible Computing Research. They have been tasked with coming up with practical guidelines....

The first “Your Computer Is On Fire” essay, the second part of the “Introductions” section. Written by Mar Hicks. Bottom line up front I rate this 3.2. A handful of insightful parallels to past disasters buried among a long-form version of May 2020’s liberal Twitter. Begins summarizing some of the worst of all of the usual suspects. Ends with a call for regulation, unionization, and protest. Summary This one will age like milk....

The titular essay from Thomas S Mullaney’s book “Your computer is on fire”. The book itself is a collection of arguments about how awful computing is for the environment. Bottom line up front I rate this 2.3. 8 pages of directors-cut feeling intro, the radio edit would only include the punchy bits of the first paragraph and the first half of the last paragraph. Summary Thomas is writing to me. Right out of the gate, he compares himself to a Luddite and then provides examples of excuses I would use to hand-wave away issues....

Bottom Line Up Front I rate this 1.2. Unreadable formatting. Too much jargon for an amateur. The paper is mostly describing the vomit of figures found on the last pages. It also introduces roughly a million acronyms (RaMA) that are never used again. More complex chips take more to build. Only considers manufacturing cost, not lifetime cost. Summary Intro Semiconductor manufacturing ignores life cycle assessments in favor of more performant technologies....