Super cool. Martin Kleppmann, the lead author on this paper, is the author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, which I haven't read but have heard pretty awesome things about.

What I have done: watched his other talks about CRDTs (conflict-free replicated data types). I'd recommend watching this video [1] for an overview of what CRDTs are, why he cares about them, and open problems (one of which he solves in this paper!).

A (potentially inaccurate) TLDR: local-first collaboration software presents is a compelling alternative to the current way collaboration is implemented in a client-server model. Specifically: if we build tooling that makes it easy to build collaborative experiences into your app without a server, then we'll potentially be able to achieve the goals of 'decentralization' (or, fuck the middleman or whatever you wanna call it) in some real sense. Note that I'm not talking about crypto coins here!

Very cool, very exciting!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qytg0Ibet2E

I must be missing something. The paper describes the algorithm of the CRDT and mentions that "timestamps ’t need to be globally unique and totally ordered".

Then it mentions multiple times that Lamport clocks/timestamp can be used as the timestamp in their system but as far as I know these only give a partial order of events. How is this reconciled in their system?

(Someone please fix the typo in the submitted title... @dang?)