A humorous April Fools' Day post presenting 'PolitePaxos', a fictional consensus protocol variant where proposers replace the Prepare/Promise phases with a 'Polite Request' phase, complimenting acceptors on their uptime and page cache hit rates. The joke escalates as concurrent polite proposals cause an infinite mutual-deference livelock (dubbed the 'taarof livelock'), which is 'solved' by adding a Pre-Pre-Pre-Polite Vibecheck Phase — at the cost of 'leisurely' latency. Written by a researcher with genuine Paxos expertise (WPaxos, PigPaxos), the post cleverly satirizes real distributed systems concepts like livelock, ballot number dueling, and protocol phase proliferation.
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