Good Morning! AI coding startup Magic aims for a $1.5 billion valuation as it seeks to revolutionize software development with advanced AI capabilities. The Saga pattern, a distributed systems architecture that helped Halo scale to 11.6 million players, offers robust solutions for managing data across large, complex systems. Apple's decision to create Quartz for Mac OS X instead of adapting the X Window System highlights the company's commitment to developing tailored, high-performance graphics technologies.

— Forrest Knight & Meghanadh Vasireddy

AI Coding Startup Magic Aims for $1.5B Value

Magic AI, a company in San Francisco, wants to raise over $200 million. This would make the company worth $1.5 billion, which is three times more than just five months ago. Interestingly, Magic AI doesn't sell anything yet.

What Magic AI wants to do:

• Make AI that can write whole computer programs from simple instructions

• Do more than current tools like GitHub Copilot, which only help finish code

Magic AI is working on making its AI smarter, especially at handling more information at once. They say they use new ways to deal with lots of data, different from usual AI methods.

If Magic AI succeeds, it could change how people make software in the future. This is why investors are interested, even though the company doesn't make money yet.

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Scaling Distributed Systems with the Saga Pattern

Halo, the popular game, grew to 11.6 million players using this pattern. It helps keep data correct in large systems that are spread out.

It's a way to manage data across many separate databases. It has three main parts:

1. Orchestrator: This controls the smaller tasks across different parts of the database.

2. Distributed Log: It keeps track of how tasks are going.

3. Compensating Transactions: These are special actions that can undo tasks if they fail.

The Saga pattern works well for online stores, travel booking sites, and banking systems.

Why It's Helpful:

• It can grow bigger without causing problems with data in other places.

• You can add more database parts over time easily.

• It keeps data accurate even when the system is very spread out.

The Saga pattern is great for systems with lots of small parts. It stops these parts from being too dependent on each other and helps the whole system grow larger.

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Apple's Quartz

Apple created Quartz for Mac OS X instead of using X Window System. Mike Paquette, who helped design Quartz, explained why.

What is Quartz?: Quartz is a system for managing windows that works with many types of graphics. It can handle windows with and without memory buffers, and it supports see-through effects and special ways of blending colors. Quartz plays nicely with other systems like QuickDraw, OpenGL, and even X11.

To make X work for Mac OS X, Apple would have needed to:

• Make fonts look smoother

• Add new ways to draw shapes

• Put in color management

• Make sure it worked well with 3D graphics and video

These changes would have meant redoing most of X, so there wasn't much point in using it. Instead, Apple built Quartz to be fast, flexible, and work well with new graphics technologies.

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🔥 More Notes

• Fighting distractions as a software developer

• Why you shouldn't use AI to write your tests

• Russia forces Apple to remove VPN apps from the App Store

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