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 order to balance LLMs cre...

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 mind for weeks. 2. Th...

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 advent of ChatGPT, and ...

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 Sicily, mainly occupi...

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 lists written in Rust...

(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 digitali. Lo trovate qu...

(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, and later I just scanne...

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 writing novels have many co...

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 you are supposed to d...

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, that were already kn...

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 the big news a...

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 “enterprise” ever mea...

[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 Italian time zone and...

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 was looking for advic...

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 issue: I’m starting to...

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 animals). I’ll use the ten ...

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 neat, also could signifi...

[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 of the server. Put in ...

For quite some time I’ve wanted to record a new video talking about code comments for my "writing system software" series on YouTube. However, after giving it some thought, I realized that the topic was better suited for a blog post, so here we are. In this post I analyze Redis comments, trying to c...

The last few days have been quite intense. One of the arguments, about the dispute related to replacing or not the words used in Redis replication with different ones, was the following: is it worthwhile to do work that does not produce any technological result? As I was changing the Redis source co...

Today it happened again. A developer, that we’ll call Mark to avoid exposing his real name, read the Redis 5.0 RC5 change log, and was disappointed to see that Redis still uses the “master” and “slave” terminology in order to identify different roles in Redis replication. I said that I was sorry he ...

Human beings have a strong tendency to put new facts into pre-existing categories. This is useful to mentally and culturally classify similar events under the same logical umbrella, so when two days ago I clarified that the Redis core was still released under the vanilla BSD license, and only certai...

Today a page about the new Common Clause license in the Redis Labs web site was interpreted as if Redis itself switched license. This is not the case, Redis is, and will remain, BSD licensed. However in the era of [edit] uncontrollable spreading of information, my attempts to provide the correct inf...

A bit more than one month ago I received an email from the Apple Information Security team. During an auditing the Apple team found a security issue in the Redis Lua subsystem, specifically in the cmsgpack library. The library is not part of Lua itself, it is an implementation of MessagePack I wrote...

A few days ago I started my day with my Twitter feed full of articles saying something like: “75% of Redis servers infected by malware”. The obvious misquote referred to a research by Incapsula where they found that 75% of the Redis instances left open on the internet, without any protection, on a p...

[This blog post is also experimentally available on Medium: https://medium.com/antirez/a-short-tale-of-a-read-overflow-b9210d339cff] When a long running process crashes, it is pretty uncool. More so if the process happens to take a lot of state in memory. This is why I love web programming framework...

I saw multiple users asking me what is happening with Streams, when they’ll be ready for production uses, and in general what’s the ETA and the plan of the feature. This post will attempt to clarify a bit what comes next. To start, in this moment Streams are my main priority: I want to finish this w...

Four days ago a user posted a critical issue in the Redis Github repository. The problem was related to the new Redis 4.0 PSYNC2 replication protocol, and was very critical. PSYNC2 brings a number of good things to Redis replication, including the ability to resynchronize just exchanging the differe...

Until a few months ago, for me streams were no more than an interesting and relatively straightforward concept in the context of messaging. After Kafka popularized the concept, I mostly investigated their usefulness in the case of Disque, a message queue that is now headed to be translated into a Re...

Today I read an interesting article about how the Wolfenstein 3D game implemented a fade effect using a Linear Feedback Shift Register. Every pixel of the screen is set red in a pseudo random way, till all the screen turns red (or other colors depending on the event happening in the game). The blog ...