Lindsey KuperMar 19

I've gotten like four emails now from a professor in France who watches my distributed systems videos. The most recent one, today: "With time passing, I came a fan of your class on distributed systems CSE138. It is an amazing work, and I am recommanding it to my students as a class very consistent with what we are teaching. Also your american is slow and very understandable, so it is also a reason to listen your videos !"

My American is slow and very understandable 👍

Show threadLindsey KuperMar 19

Questions he's asked me:

- can he use one of my blog posts to help design an exam? (yes)
- does Liquid Haskell have any particular support for reasoning about physical time? (nope)
- are the sequence numbers used by Paxos the same thing as Lamport clocks? (not quite)
- do I have a video on Chord? (not specifically, but I have one on consistent hashing)

I love this guy

Show threadalecsMar 19
@lindsey What would "reasoning about physical time" look like? Is there a PL that allows that?
Show threadLindsey KuperMar 19
@bool Well, some languages have a more or less "native" notion of "time", which might or might not correspond particularly closely to physical time. There's stuff like the ChucK language, but I honestly don't really understand it!
Show threadLindsey KuperMar 19
@bool In my research group (cc: @Twisol), we've studied abstractions that preserve key aspects of physical time, like the notion of causality. You could have a programming language in which causality-violating programs cannot be expressed.
Show threadLindsey KuperMar 19
@bool @Twisol But real time is continuous (or...seems to be, anyway? I dunno, you'd have to ask a physicist), and so it seems like we can talk about real time with computers only to the extent that we can talk about continuous data with computers. And that is really not something I know much about!
ShadSterling1d ago
Show threadShadSterling
@lindsey @bool @Twisol (IIRC, if time is quantized, the quanta are no larger than the Planck Time, and it’s not expected to be possible to directly test for quantization at smaller scales. Some theories, including variants of String Theory, hypothesize quantized time, but AFAIK no methods for experimentally testing any of those theories have yet been devised)
Mar 19 at 9:23pmIceCubesApp
Show threadShadSterlingMar 19
@lindsey @bool @Twisol (We’ve begun to be able to investigate the process of the photoelectric effect - rather than treating it as an instantaneous change - without getting close to the Planck Time limit. So yeah, for every demonstrable purpose, time is continuous)