Mark Burgess, a computer scientist and creator of CFEngine, writes about promise theory, distributed systems, configuration management and the CAP theorem.
HN commenters cite his posts on CAP, promise theory and layer 2 tunnels, and one questions his CAP proof; promise theory is credited as the basis for CFEngine.
There's an entire semi-formal language on promises, called promise theory. This includes promises autonomous agents (humans, back when this was conceived) make for other autonomous agents. Promise Theory was the basis for CFEngine, which spawned Puppet and Chef, but it's applicability is much broader. The kind of promises examined within this article can be described and analyzed by promise theory.
The central insight is understanding that promises are not obligations, and why and how that matters. From there, interesting things can be analyzed -- using types and contracts in a development team, unit tests, integration tests, specs, user interface and user experience, compliance, signaling, APIs, etc.
I think it is particularly useful now in the age of LLMs, agenic AIs, and autonomous robots that have to navigate spaces shared with humans.
https://markburgess.org/promises.html
Exactly. This is a deeper problem than commonly appreciated, and the cfengine author has written at length about that. http://markburgess.org/certainty.html
Dr. Mark Burgess just blogged "Why I stopped caring about peer review, and learned to love the work". http://markburgess.org/blog_peer.html
Thanks to mjb for the good list. To it I'll add:
http://markburgess.org/blog_cap.html
I think I also might write one up myself.
There is an excellent post about why you dont want layer 2 tunnels here http://markburgess.org/blog_broadcast.html
The proof is questionable. Read here: http://markburgess.org/blog_cap.html