Your Database Has Rollback - But Does It Have Rollback Netcode?

Bulk ingestion of data into a database can be a massively time-consuming operation. It can also be time-sensitive, especially if the data being ingested are coming from a real-time feed and being used for modelling. Delays in the data stream caused by changes in network latency or other disruptions can propagate onwards and cause other delays.

This is a known - and solved - problem in other fields. Fighting games, in particular, have to deal with the problem of receiving input from a remote user and applying it to the current local game state. While some merely apply a constant delay to local input in order to buy time to sync it up with remote input, this is rarely a satisfactory arrangement. A much more well-liked solution is “rollback netcode”.

In rollback netcode, the local system assumes that any delayed input will be the same as the previous input, and applies it as if that were the case. When the delayed input arrives, if that assumption was incorrect, the local system rewinds the game state, applies the newly-acquired remote inputs along with the corresponding local inputs, and displays the new game state. While this can lead to small disruptions as the game state jumps from one position to another, overall it provides a much smoother and more satisfying user experience.

In this paper, we propose applying this principle to bulk ingests. When input is delayed, the database simply assumes that the next record will be the same as the previous one and applies it, allowing whatever is processing the data to continue. If that assumption is later found incorrect, the transaction that added it can be rolled back, and it can be replaced with the correct data. Acknowledging the correction and re-processing it is left to the application using the data and is beyond the scope of this paper.

why censor it like this

some physicist somewhere is trying to figure out what the fuck "penjses" are.

I think you mean to say "electrical engineer", physicists do use i :P

look i'm a mathematician i can't tell them apart

people will say "why cant the eldritch gods just be nice to humans :((" and then kill a bug for existing near them

my dearly beloved mutual you cant just leave this in the tags

While exploring a vast and inscrutable city which seems to predate life on earth I am gently picked up by something incomprehensible with the higher-dimensional equivalent of a cup and piece of paper, then lovingly set outside in my natural habitat. Unfortunately the being exists outside of time and can't really tell human cities apart from one another so I appear without warning in ancient sumer.

Comic I made a few years ago for an anthology

oh my god this is wonderful

why censor it like this

some physicist somewhere is trying to figure out what the fuck "penjses" are.

Never trust an asexual who says “for fuck’s sake.” They do not hold stock in the sake of the fuck they are lying and manipulating you

"I did it for you" has gotta be my favorite form of betrayal. You gave me a gift I never asked for, and now I have to look around at the world you destroyed with the knowledge that it was gift wrapped and addressed to me.

i spend so much time talking to people who feel guilty because it was their parents that did that to them

i have a nearly complete collection of what's michael, and i think we had all of them once. i would buy a collected edition so fast. honestly sorta love the writer.

The Choctaw-Irish Brotherhood(via)

I love stuff like this. Didn’t a tribe in Africa send America some cows after 9/11? Like this is holy and the most valuable thing we have. We hear your suffering and want to do anything in our power to help

It was not a potato famine. The famine didn’t happen because of the potato yeald failing. Ireland was actually producing more than enough food. However it was almost all land owned by Brittish landowners, who took all of the food out of the country to sell in UK. Potato was what the Irish farmers ate, because it was cheep and could be produced in worst parts of the land, where more profitable food couldn’t be grown. When there were no longer potatos, the decision for the farmers was to either starve and sent the food as rent to the landlords or loose their homes and then starve.

The Brittish goverment was unwilling to do anything for two reasons. First was the laissez-faire capitalistic ideology, that put the rights of property owners to make profits above human lives. Rent freeze was unthinkable and they even were unwilling to do proper relief efforts as free food would lower the cost of food. The second reason was distain for the Irish, and the thought that they were “breeding too much” and the famine was a natural way to trim down the population, aka genocidal reasoning.

This is why it’s important to stress it was not a potato famine. The potato blinght was all over Europe but only in Ireland there was a famine. The reasons behind it had nothing to do with potatos and everything to do with the Brittish.

Apparently what made Choctaw want to offer relief to Irish was the news about the Doolough Tragedy. Hundreds of starving people were gathered for inspection to verify they were entitled to recieve relief. The officials would for *some reason* not do that and instead left to a hunting lodge 19 kilometers away to spend the night and said to the starvqing people they would have to walk there by morning to be inspected. The weather conditions were terrible and many of them died completely needlessly during the walk thoroung day and night.

This apparently reminded the Choctaw of their own very recent (and much more explicit and bigger scale) experiences of ethnic clensing, where they were forcibly relocated. It was basically a death march and thousands of Choctaw died from the terrible conditions also completely needlessly.

In 2015 a memorial named Kindred Spirits was installed in Southern Ireland to commemorate the Chactow donation.

Then in 2020:

Choctaw Nation has now added a monument of their own:

pessimistic and miserable or whatever but I wish every grim/venty type piece of art didn't inevitably prompt someone to make a vaguely condescending Happy Ending followup

it reminds me so much of this post every time

those are some very evocative descriptions.

by the way, quietly bottling your discomfort with someone and just hoping they'll "get the hint" until you can't take it anymore and then taking it to the nearest moderator isn't "setting a boundary" or "being victimized," it's actually called "being a huge piece of shit" and "expecting people to read your mind."

Sorry about your conflict aversion, but you actually need to tell people when they're making you uncomfortable. like, with explicit, clear, unmistakeable words that don't give you a safe cover of plausible deniability with which you can back out and "still be the good guy." It is kinder to let someone down face-to-face so they can hurt and move on knowing what went wrong than it is to lead someone on and then stab them in the fucking back, you know?

Also, I cannot stress this enough, it is not actually someone else's fault for making you uncomfortable when you literally make a point to lie to them about how much you like them by pretending you're enjoying their company more than you are. That's your fault. That's called making a bed to lie in. Maybe just desperately hoping someone who has already misinterpreted how close they are to you will just happen to pick up on the subtle signs of you desperately hiding your discomfort is, frankly, fucking stupid, and you need to get over yourself and say real words to them instead of getting some third party to punish them for your own inability to communicate.

Sorry this one isn't as nice as my other posts, but some of you need a wake-up slap. Stop fucking burning autistic people and trans women one-by-one because being a coward is easier than being a villain. It's not fucking nice, it's not cute, and the more I see it happen, the less forgivable it gets. Grow the fuck up and change in the scary but necessary ways.

Because it's kinder to tell someone when they're fucking up than it is to let them make the same mistakes in ignorance until you've secretly tallied enough transgressions to safely write them off as unforgivable, and thus disposable. Because I care about you, and everyone else, enough to give you a real chance to actually correct your harmful behaviors by being honest to you about the harm they cause. Because I believe people can make hurtful mistakes while still being genuine unintended mistakes, and that they can change.

Hint, hint.

Turns out there's an ideal concentration of mercury that makes you immortal but Qin Dynasty Chinese alchemists didn't have the chemical equipment or purity of cinnabar available to reliably hit that and missing it by a microgram just gives you mercury poisoning.

within minutes of interacting with dimethyl mercury, you are almost certainly never going to be killed by anything else

The thing about ADHD is that the "lack of reward chemicals in your brain" doesn't just mean that you don't want to do any tasks that don't feel particularly yummy :(, it means that your brain will look at chores and tasks that need to be done like "doing this would be painful and tedious for absolutely nothing to gain from it, Do Not Do That." The same thing that your brain tells you about everything else that would feel really bad and hurt the entire time that you're dying. The part of your brain that stops you from doing the thing is the same part that keeps you from shoving your arm into a wood chipper.

With unmedicated, unmanaged ADHD, "I have to do this assignment or I fail and my life will be ruined and I die" feels like a SAW trap, every single time.

Articles written by neurotypicals will be like “ADHD children find the external motivation of the SAW traps is very effective. Here’s how to build SAW traps to maximize their productivity.”

I once explained to someone that writing emails can be the mental equivalent putting my hand on a hot stovetop: you know it will hurt and is dangerous. Putting your hand on a hot stovetop knowingly is very hard! You don't want to! You're afraid! It will hurt and it really won't be worth it!

Writing emails can be the same for me. My brain blocks it. I reach out to the hot stovetop by opening my email on my browser. I might even manage to open the email I need to reply to and the anxiety piles in about how do I phrase this, what if I sound boorish, what if I make a fool of myself, or if it's an unpleasant subject, what if I ruin the delicate subject, and my hand can feel the heat of the stovetop washing over it, starting to prickle the hairs on it... and that warning is enough to shortcircuit my attempt to put the hand directly on the very hot surface. Why would I want to burn myself? There's no point to it. And thus I don't write the email.

The difference is that there are times I can actually write emails with little difficulty, and I can't predict it reliably, I don't know why the stove top is off!

But when the stove top is on... the only way to write an email is to be threatened by a burning poker waved threateningly at you so you go burn your hand at the stovetop, and the experience is frightening and painful! It's not good for you! Your heart is racing, your hands are sweaty, you are near tears.

Now add to that the mental anguish of knowing that other people can touch the hot stove top with no problem. They're immune or resistant to the burns. So there's something wrong with YOU that you can't do that, that you need to be threatened into it by something even more painful.

No wonder people with ADHD often get traumatized and burnt out and get increasingly anxious about tasks they struggle with.

You might find something like this on your property or along public forest trails. It’s about the same size and shape as a ketchup packet and smells like rotten fish. Believe it or not, this little packet protects you, your pets, and your family. The USDA drops these in areas (including Hamilton County) where raccoon-variant rabies has been known to occur. Raccoons find the packet and eat the contents, and it provides them with immunity to rabies. If you find one, simply leave it where it is, or, if it’s in an area accessible to a pet or child, just put on a pair of gloves and move it. Don’t worry, though— even if it was handled by a human or pet, it doesn’t pose any danger besides an unpleasant odor.

~ For Fox Sake Wildlife Rescue

Because everything like this should have a clickable source, first one is a news report second one is the NYC department of health official site.

“i also choose this guy’s dead wife” was easily the #1 funniest thing to ever be written on the internet.

you can know the punchline but you can’t stop it from punching you.

i do also feel the need to add that phil8248 really liked the joke. he said his wife had always had a dark sense of humour, even about her illness and death, and seeing the joke made him feel like he was laughing with her one last time.