Tag
causality
- Aug 15, 2026 Wall-Clock Timestamps Do Not Order Distributed Events Why two machines reading the same instant produce different numbers, how far the disagreement grows between synchronizations, and what an interval-bounded timestamp can still support. distributed systems
- May 11, 2026 Version Vectors and Conflict Detection in Multi-Writer Replication How per-replica counters encode causal history, why vector comparison identifies concurrency that timestamps hide, and what the vectors cost in metadata and pruning. distributed systems
- Nov 14, 2025 Happens-Before and the Scalar Logical Clock How Lamport replaced physical time with a partial order defined by message passing, why one integer per process suffices for that order, and what the integer provably cannot tell you. distributed systems
- Apr 7, 2025 Bidirectional and Stacked Recurrence: Cost and Causality How a reverse pass and additional layers widen what a recurrent network can see at one position, what each costs in latency and parameters, and when causality forbids the reverse pass. deep learning
- Apr 3, 2025 Interval Tree Clocks and Membership Change How a tree-shaped stamp splits and joins without renumbering every process, why vector clocks break when the participant set changes, and what the fork and join operations cost. distributed systems
- Jan 1, 2025 Symptom-Based Alerting and the Cause Signals It Replaces Why paging on the metric that explains a failure produces more pages than paging on the failure itself, and how to tell a symptom from a cause when writing a rule. observability
- Dec 12, 2024 Vector Clocks and the Detection of Concurrency Why one counter per process turns the happens-before relation into a comparison, how the merge rule is defined, and the per-message size that makes the scheme expensive at scale. distributed systems
- Nov 1, 2024 Causality and Out-of-Thin-Air Values in the Java Model Why the Java Memory Model needed a causality order rather than happens-before alone, and how the happens-before consistency rules leave room for a value with no writer. memory systems
- Aug 30, 2024 Hybrid Logical Clocks: Physical Time With a Logical Counter How HLC timestamps stay close to wall-clock time while preserving causality, why the counter only appears inside the uncertainty window, and what a bounded timestamp costs. distributed systems
- Jan 18, 2023 Version Vectors and Hybrid Logical Clocks for Mobile Sync Ordering Why wall-clock timestamps cannot order edits made on different devices, how a version vector detects concurrent writes, and what a hybrid logical clock adds without needing agreement on time. mobile computing