You write a record to disk before applying it to your in-memory state. If you crash, you replay the log and recover. Done. Except your disk is lying to you.
This is why people who've lost data in production are paranoid about durability. And rightfully so.
Why this matters: Hardware bit flips happen. Disk firmware corrupts data. Memory busses misbehave. And here's the kicker: None of these trigger an error flag.
Together, they mean: "I know this is slower. I also know I actually care about durability."
This creates an ordering guarantee without context switches. Both writes complete before we return control to the application. No race conditions. No reordering.
... I only got about halfway through. This is just phrasing, forget about the clickbaity noun-phrase subheads or random boldface.
None of these are representative (I hope!) of the kind of "sophisticated" writing meant to reinforce class distinctions or whatever. It's just blech LinkedIn-speak.
I agree. I think the point here was the self-appointed AI detectives, who will declare any writing style unfamiliar to them a product of ChatGPT. You might remember the Paul Graham "delve-gate" controversy on twitter last year. It was exactly this.
Yeah. But I will die on the hill that ChatGPT (today, at least) is a bad writer, and makes prompted writing worse in a way that isn't anything like the way schematic style or vocabulary rules might for an over-eager student.
For whatever combination of prompt and context, ChatGPT 5.2 did some writing for me the other day that didn't have any of the surface style I find so abrasive. But it could still only express its purported insights in the same "A & ~B" structure and other GPT-isms beneath the surface. Truly effective writers are adept with a much broader set of rhetorical and structural tools.
Here are some random examples from one of the (at least) half-dozen LLM-co-written posts that rose high on the front page over the weekend:
https://blog.canoozie.net/disks-lie-building-a-wal-that-actu...
You write a record to disk before applying it to your in-memory state. If you crash, you replay the log and recover. Done. Except your disk is lying to you.
This is why people who've lost data in production are paranoid about durability. And rightfully so.
Why this matters: Hardware bit flips happen. Disk firmware corrupts data. Memory busses misbehave. And here's the kicker: None of these trigger an error flag.
Together, they mean: "I know this is slower. I also know I actually care about durability."
This creates an ordering guarantee without context switches. Both writes complete before we return control to the application. No race conditions. No reordering.
... I only got about halfway through. This is just phrasing, forget about the clickbaity noun-phrase subheads or random boldface.
None of these are representative (I hope!) of the kind of "sophisticated" writing meant to reinforce class distinctions or whatever. It's just blech LinkedIn-speak.