A. Jesse Jiryu Davis

*thinking with low effort*

The Humanoid Lesson, or, Will AI Leave Anything for Database Researchers to Do? emptysqua.re/blog/review-...

For the MongoDB Research blog I wrote about our 12-year history of testing that all our drivers in different programming languages all conform to the same specifications, using a YAML-based interpreted test language: www.mongodb.com/company/rese...

I’m focusing for a while on the photos I can take with two feet on the ground: I’m taking portraits of people hanging out at the base of the cliff, instead of ascending a rope to take photos of them while they’re climbing. emptysqua.re/blog/crag-po...

On today's episode of the Bug Bash podcast, Jesse Jiryu Davis (@emptysqua.re), Senior Staff Research Engineer at MongoDB, joins Carl Sverre (@f0a.org) to talk about MongoDB's journey with formal verification – and his own.

According to legend, Zen’s Sixth Ancestor was chosen in a poetry contest. I discuss the facts behind the legend, and the role of ambition and jealousy in Zen practice. emptysqua.re/blog/huineng...

[Exit Queen.]

How does MongoDB test that our dozen drivers conform to a dozen specs in a dozen programming languages? emptysqua.re/blog/polyglo...

If you use Zotero and you keep accidentally importing the same files, Zotero's builtin duplicate-detector won't catch them all. I've released a new version of my duplicate-finder plugin so you can clean up your library: github.com/ajdavis/zote...

Fun fact: I drafted most of the original unified test runner spec from a quarantine hotel in Taiwan circa 2020. 😷

Every year, database research papers have more benchmarks, taking up more of the paper: more charts, more words, more effort. Let's stop this wasteful arms race and get back to fundamental research. emptysqua.re/blog/lets-no...

PSA: Command Strips never last. Whatever's dear and precious to you will someday fall and smash to pieces.

Chomsky: Recursion is fundamental to producing and parsing language. LLM researchers: Nah, just add more parameters. NY Times: "Colorado Governor Fires Officials Who Opposed Freeing Election Denier."

My dharma talk about my estranged, lying father has been featured in @tricyclemag.bsky.social tricycle.org/article/the-...

My recap of the SIGMOD 2026 database conference: SIGMOD 2026 recap: emptysqua.re/blog/sigmod-...

Trip report: what I saw and did in Bengaluru/Bangalore. I'm waiting in the airport to fly home right now. emptysqua.re/blog/bengalu...

My review of "Scalable Leader Leases For Multi Consensus Groups in CockroachDB", this one was tough for me to grok. emptysqua.re/blog/review-...

No, *this* is what they took from you -- small cars with physical buttons! marc-newson.com/ford-021c-co...

Nepal trek trip report: photos, videos, daily stats, packing list. emptysqua.re/blog/nepal-t...

Weird stuff going on at the MongoDB NYC office lately....

TLA+ is the gold standard for specifying distributed systems, but the syntax is a bear. This isn't a problem anymore, AI can write specs for you! But you still need to understand temporal logic. Here's a 20-minute intro to TLA+ for the LLM era: emptysqua.re/blog/intro-t...

My father’s dishonesty was frustrating and disappointing to many people, but I think he got the worst of it. Here’s a dharma talk I gave to New Paltz Zen Center and Village Zendo on May 10, 2026. emptysqua.re/blog/the-kid...

"Nothing is permanent, your printer is low on ink, Chrome will restart in 3 days." --Lord Buddha

Our worst fears have come to pass: AI does all the creative thinking, humans spend our days on two-factor auth.

When are we gonna have Star Peace, man? You ever think about that?

My notes from this year's Antithesis BugBash conference, about software verification and distributed systems: emptysqua.re/blog/notes-f...

[new blog post] BugBash'26 Morning of Day 1 muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/04/bugb...

Oh no, toilet, no.

I took some of my favorite Gunks climbing photos on Sunday!

Claude Code + Zotero is an incredible combo for organizing and understanding research papers. This zotero-mcp server was just updated with two patches I made to fix how it handles notes and annotations, try it out: github.com/54yyyu/zoter...

LeaseGuard: The Movie! Here's a half-hour presentation I gave on the new protocol that enhances Raft's consistency and time-to-recovery, developed with my MongoDB colleagues and published in SIGMOD this year. emptysqua.re/blog/leasegu...

The portion of people alive today, compared to the dead, is greater than ever before emptysqua.re/blog/the-dea...

AI: can it write a TLA+ spec of existing code? Can it write TLA+ at all? Let's find out! emptysqua.re/blog/review-...

What's an AI time horizon, how is it measured, and how fast is it growing? emptysqua.re/blog/review-...

What's it like at BugBash? We think it's great, but you don't have to take it from us. You can hear it from @isaacvando.bsky.social, @eatonphil.bsky.social, and @emptysqua.re instead. A few tickets left.

Dammit Claude just take my job, stop dicking around.