DAY 207 / 210

Safety Properties in Distributed Systems

This day introduces core safety concepts that underpin reliable AI infrastructure at scale. Mastering the distinction between safety and liveness prevents subtle production failures that later days will harden against. It establishes the vocabulary Maku will use when auditing StartupTribunal's own distributed components.

⏱ 40 min target📝 2 quiz Qs

Resources

readingACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems
The Byzantine Generals Problem
Sections 1-3
25 min

Deliverable

Journal entry (1 page) mapping one safety property to a concrete risk in app/api/maku/brief/route.ts

Quiz · 2 questions

1. Which statement correctly distinguishes a safety property from a liveness property?

Safety guarantees something good eventually happensSafety guarantees nothing bad ever happensLiveness guarantees nothing bad ever happensBoth are interchangeable in practice

2. Give one real-world example where violating a safety property caused a distributed system outage.

Journal

Time spent (minutes)

Blockers

Commit / PR links (one per line)