Fresh Reads

I used AI with success 5 minutes ago. Just five minutes ago, I was writing a piece of software and relied on AI for assistance. Yet, here I am, starting this blog post by telling you that artificial intelligence, so far, has proven somewhat useless. How can I make such a…

By multiple accounts, the web is losing pieces: every year a fraction of old web pages disappear, lost forever. We should regard the Internet Archive as one of the most valuable pieces of modern history; instead, many companies and entities make the chances of the Archive to…

It’s not new, but it’s accelerating. People that used to say that LLMs were a fundamentally flawed way to reach any useful reasoning and, in general, to develop any useful tool with some degree of generality, are starting to shuffle the deck, in the hope to look less wrong. They…

We are destroying software by no longer taking complexity into account when adding features or optimizing some dimension. We are destroying software with complex build systems. We are destroying software with an absurd chain of dependencies, making everything bloated and…

I’m not the kind of person that develops a strong attachment to their own work. When I decided to leave Redis, about 1620 days ago (~ 4.44 years), I never looked at the source code, commit messages, or anything related to Redis again. From time to time, when I needed Redis, I…

The Raspberry Pico is suddenly becoming my preferred chip for embedded development. It is well made, durable hardware, with a ton of features that appear designed with smartness and passion (the state machines driving the GPIOs are a killer feature!). Its main weakness, the lack…

From a theoretical standpoint, the best reply provided by an LLM is obtained by always picking the token associated with the highest probability. This approach makes the LLM output deterministic, which is not a good property for a number of applications. For this reason, in…

My usual process for writing blog posts is more or less in two steps: 1. Think about what I want to say for weeks or months. No, I don’t spend weeks focusing on a blog post, the process is exactly reversed: I write blog posts about things that are so important to me to be in my…

I'll start by saying that this article is not meant to be a retrospective on LLMs. It's clear that 2023 was a special year for artificial intelligence: to reiterate that seems rather pointless. Instead, this post aims to be a testimony from an individual programmer. Since the…

The Idle scan was conceived at the end of 1998, evidenced by emails. I had moved to Milan a few months prior, having been there since September if I recall correctly, brimming with new ideas, unaware that my stay in that city would be brief. I spent the summer on the beaches of…

A few days ago, on Twitter (oh, dear Twitter: whatever happens I’ll be there as long as possible – if you care about people that put a lot of energy in creating it, think twice before leaving the platform). So, on Twitter, I was talking about a very bad implementation of linked…

(English translation of this post: http://antirez.com/news/136) Dopo due anni di lavoro, finalmente, Wohpe, il mio primo libro di fantascienza, ma anche il mio primo scritto di prosa di questa lunghezza, è uscito nelle librerie fisiche italiane, su Amazon, e negli altri store…

(Traduzione italiana di questo post: http://antirez.com/news/137) [Sorry for the form of this post. For the first time I wrote a post in two languages: Italian and English. So I went for the unusual path of writing it in Italian to start, translating it with Google Translate,…

One year ago I paused my programming life and started writing a novel, with the illusion that my new activity was deeply different than the previous one. A river of words later, written but more often rewritten, I’m pretty sure of the contrary: programming big systems and…

A new idea is insinuating in social networks and programming communities. It’s the proportionality between the money people give you for coding something, and the level of demand for quality they can claim to have about your work. As somebody said, the best code is written when…

When I started the Redis project more than ten years ago I was in one of the most exciting moments of my career. My co-founder and I had successfully launched two of the major web 2.0 services of the Italian web. In order to make them scalable we had to invent many new concepts,…

Finally Redis 6.0.0 stable is out. This time it was a relatively short cycle between the release of the first release candidate and the final release of a stable version. It took about four months, that is not a small amount of time, but is not a lot compared to our past records…

So it happened again, a new Redis version reached the release candidate status, and in a few months it will hit the shelves of most supermarkets. I guess this is the most “enterprise” Redis version to date, and it’s funny since I took quite some time in order to understand what…

[Note: this post no longer describes the client side implementation in the final implementation of Redis 6, that changed significantly, see https://redis.io/topics/client-side-caching] The New York Redis day was over, I get up at the hotel at 5:30, still pretty in sync with the…

Months ago the maintainer of an OSS project in the sphere of system software, with quite a big and active community, wrote me an email saying that he struggles to continue maintaining his project after so many years, because of how much psychologically taxing such effort is. He…

The new Redis data structure introduced in Redis 5 under the name of “Streams” generated quite some interest in the community. Soon or later I want to run a community survey, talking with users having production use cases, and blogging about it. Today I want to address another…

Ten years ago Redis was announced on Hacker News, and I use this as virtual birthdate for the project, simply because it is more important when it was announced to the public than the actual date of the project first line of code (think at it conception VS actual birth in…

Yesterday a concerned Redis user wrote the following on Hacker News: — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19204436 — I love Redis, but I'm a bit skeptical of some of the changes that are currently in development. The respv3 protocol has some features that, while they sound…

[EDIT! I'm reconsidering all this because Marc Gravell from Stack Overflow suggested that we could just switch protocol for backward compatibility per-connection, sending a command to enable RESP3. That means no longer need for a global configuration that switches the behavior…