3 ms·

Alas, Loro fails The Color of Pomegranates test as well. (JSON trace, really cool toy they got there: https://pastebin.com/6dSDc6Su https://pastebin.com/6dSDc6S

Alas, Loro fails The Color of Pomegranates test as well. (JSON trace, really cool toy they got there: https://pastebin.com/6dSDc6Su https://pastebin.com/6dSDc6Su)

satvikpendem 2y ago
Yes, it is as I mentioned in my 2nd paragraph, mathematical conflict resolution is not semantically relevant for humans much of the time. That is why I don't think automated merge conflict resolution with no human input can really work, that is why Git asks you to resolve merge conflicts before committing again. CRDTs can only really help when users edit disparate pieces of data, and if editing the same piece of data, some set of users need to be there, as in an online rather than offline capacity, to facilitate the merges, such as in Google Docs where if I edit a sentence with a spelling correction and you delete the sentence entirely, I will ask you directly what's up. Now, what some Git merge software is doing is using LLMs to coordinate merges, which I think might be useful to do so in plain text editing too, perhaps embedded into these CRDT libraries, but fundamentally, there must be someone to facilitate merges, whether it be a human agent or an AI one. It is impossible to do so with an entirely automated solution simply because the machine does not know the intents of all its users.
williamstein 2y ago
The text sync algorithm I wrote succeeds at the "The Color of Pomegranates" test. See https://cocalc.com/wstein/dev/share/files/2024-12-06.md https://cocalc.com/wstein/dev/share/files/2024-12-06.md for some details of the exact patches. This algorithm, which we came up with in 2015, is described at https://blog.cocalc.com/2018/10/11/collaborative-editing.html https://blog.cocalc.com/2018/10/11/collaborative-editing.htm... It's a different approach than that taken by Yjs, Automerge, and Egwalker, with signficant pros (and cons!) relative to those algorithms. It has been used in production in CoCalc for over 8 years, and was also used by the recently shutdown Noteable Jupyter notebook project.
- refulgentis 2y ago
  This is absolutely fascinating and immediately one of my favorite articles of all time, full stop. Along the way, it implicitly illustrates a path to successful engineering x product thinking path that I've never seen written down somewhere and I think is crucial for sustainable impact. Thank you!

Alas, Loro fails The Color of Pomegranates test as well. (JSON trace, really cool toy they got there: https://pastebin.com/6dSDc6Su https://pastebin.com/6dSDc6Su)

satvikpendem 2y ago

Yes, it is as I mentioned in my 2nd paragraph, mathematical conflict resolution is not semantically relevant for humans much of the time. That is why I don't think automated merge conflict resolution with no human input can really work, that is why Git asks you to resolve merge conflicts before committing again. CRDTs can only really help when users edit disparate pieces of data, and if editing the same piece of data, some set of users need to be there, as in an online rather than offline capacity, to facilitate the merges, such as in Google Docs where if I edit a sentence with a spelling correction and you delete the sentence entirely, I will ask you directly what's up. Now, what some Git merge software is doing is using LLMs to coordinate merges, which I think might be useful to do so in plain text editing too, perhaps embedded into these CRDT libraries, but fundamentally, there must be someone to facilitate merges, whether it be a human agent or an AI one. It is impossible to do so with an entirely automated solution simply because the machine does not know the intents of all its users.

williamstein 2y ago

The text sync algorithm I wrote succeeds at the "The Color of Pomegranates" test. See https://cocalc.com/wstein/dev/share/files/2024-12-06.md https://cocalc.com/wstein/dev/share/files/2024-12-06.md for some details of the exact patches. This algorithm, which we came up with in 2015, is described at https://blog.cocalc.com/2018/10/11/collaborative-editing.html https://blog.cocalc.com/2018/10/11/collaborative-editing.htm... It's a different approach than that taken by Yjs, Automerge, and Egwalker, with signficant pros (and cons!) relative to those algorithms. It has been used in production in CoCalc for over 8 years, and was also used by the recently shutdown Noteable Jupyter notebook project.

refulgentis 2y ago
This is absolutely fascinating and immediately one of my favorite articles of all time, full stop. Along the way, it implicitly illustrates a path to successful engineering x product thinking path that I've never seen written down somewhere and I think is crucial for sustainable impact. Thank you!