Gordon Meyer
Lindsey Kuper"Carol's Causal Conundrum", the newest zine from my research group, is out today! 🎉 Read online and print your own free copies: https://decomposition.al/zines/
Thread! 👇
I've been making zines with undergrads since 2024. Here's an older thread about our first zine, "Communicating Chorrectly with a Choreography", and how I got started doing this: https://recurse.social/@lindsey/113600885289101469
After the success of our first zine project, I began looking for a student who wanted to work on a follow-up. Ayush Manocha, who had just taken my undergrad PL course, was keen to help, and we began tossing around ideas.
My grad students Yan Tong and Nathan Liittschwager and I had been working on a new protocol for causal message delivery. We called the protocol Cykas, which stands for "Can you keep a secret?", and Ayush liked the idea of collaborating on a zine to explain the Cykas protocol!
We quickly realized that to explain the Cykas protocol, we'd have to back up and explain what causal message delivery even *was*, and say something about the classic approaches to implementing it. So our zine became a bit less about Cykas and a bit more about causal delivery generally. We went through lots of iterations on the writing. One of our goals was to explain concepts precisely without needing to introduce a lot of jargon. Feedback from @b0rk and @omarieclaire helped *a lot* with this!
We had to leave out a lot of details -- for example, we mention logical clocks in passing but don't explain how any particular logical clock algorithm works. Even so, this zine ended up almost twice as long as the choreography one!
Because so many of the ideas we're discussing are quite old, I ended up going back to primary sources many times, sometimes learning new things myself in the process. There's a lot of enlightenment to be found in dusty old papers from the last century. ❤️
Working with Ayush on this zine has been an absolute pleasure. Ayush did all the illustrations, and we collaborated on the text. We sweated every detail -- I think we went through eleven drafts. Ayush was also new to page layout software, but learned the ins and outs of it just for this project!
Happily, just as we were wrapping this project up, the Cykas paper was accepted for presentation at the PaPoC workshop, and I'll be presenting it there in a couple weeks! https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14690
Working on zines has been very rewarding. I've handed out lots of copies of the first zine at conferences, and I've gotten emails from people around the world who have printed out copies and handed them out or left them for folks to find, anywhere they think the zine might find an audience.
I hope that happens with this new zine, too! Zines are meant to be printed and shared physically. If you like our zine, I would love for you to print one and leave it where someone else will pick it up. ❤️
The blog version of this thread: https://decomposition.al/blog/2026/04/09/carols-causal-conundrum-is-out/
Thalia Archibald@lindsey @wiersdorf have you seen this?
@thalia @wiersdorf Ashton was actually the first (and, as far as I know, only) person to cite our choreography zine in an academic publication! ❤️
John Regehr@regehr @thalia @wiersdorf I don't know what "they" you mean, but in my case, for the two zines we've done, my students have done 100% of the art -- it's part of why the project appealed to them. Ali (the student who worked on the first zine) was a pretty practiced artist. Ayush (the student who worked on the second zine) was maybe less so, but that didn't stop him!
The cover concept was mine, check out my extremely profesh sketch:
@regehr @thalia @wiersdorf anyway, to me, part of the point of making zines is the DIY ethos, so doing the art ourselves is important to me even (maybe especially) if it's amateurish
Johan@lindsey @wiersdorf I'm happy you guys have collaborated! It's a very cute and informational zine :)
@thalia @wiersdorf We haven't actually collaborated, but maybe one day!
Ashton Wiersdorf@wiersdorf @lindsey We need more Unserious Academia™ like SIGBOVIK.
@thalia @wiersdorf Yeah, so I view SIGBOVIK and my zines as very different, though I love both! SIGBOVIK is academics making light of academia for the amusement of academics -- it's only going to be funny or legible to those who recognize what it's a parody of, and in and of itself, it doesn't do anything to invite people *into* academia (and I think that's okay; not everything has to be outreach!).
Philip Guo@lindsey wow! also what is that cup design?
@pg It's the logo of the LIP (Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallélisme) research lab at ENS de Lyon, where this photo was taken! https://www.ens-lyon.fr/en/research/research-units/laboratories/laboratoire-de-linformatique-du-parallelisme
@lindsey btw i just stumbled upon this while looking up someone else's work (ucsd alum yay) https://ykotturi.github.io/zines/
shom
Benjamin Turner@lindsey Great zine, thank you! I'm curious... if Bob can't take any externally-observable actions once he receives Alice's eager message, then he still can't make dinner reservations until Carol acknowledges Alice's message and Alice sends Bob the You Can Tell message. Is the CYKAS method actually providing better throughput than synchronous messaging in this scenario?
@kindjar Ooh, good question! Here, "externally observable" means "observable to other processes in the system". Making a reservation doesn't count because other processes in the system can't see it happen.
(You could imagine a kind of side channel where Alice or Carol could call the restaurant and ask if Bob has made a reservation! But if communication can occur over side channels like that, then you're already out of luck with respect to any guarantee of causally ordered communication.)