Sparse Notes

Weekly Paper Notes — the Seminal Paper of the Week for the 2026-10-31 digest. Area: Programming Languages. Author: Robin Milner (University of Edinburgh) Published: Journal of Computer and System Sciences 17(3), December 1978, pp. 348–375. DOI: 10.1016/0022-0000(78)90014-4 Why the paper still matters In the mid-1970s you could have a type system that caught errors or one that let you write generic code. Pascal and Algol 68 were checked but monomorphic, so a list-reversal function had to be written once per element type....

David Abitbol runs AI operations at Revolut, a European digital bank with about 80 million customers. In under twelve minutes at AI Engineer New York he covers how Revolut moved most of its coding-agent traffic from frontier APIs to a self-hosted open model, and he brings numbers: engineer lead times from a 2,000-person sample, GPU count, latency targets, cost per million tokens, and the tuning changes that mattered. It’s one of the more concrete inference-economics talks this year....

Ippokratis “Ippo” Pandis did his PhD in the CMU database group, worked on DB2 BLU at IBM, Impala at Cloudera, spent ten years on Redshift at AWS, and is now a distinguished engineer at Databricks. In this Fall 2026 CMU seminar (the “Whatever Andy Found Interesting While Out At Sea” series) he uses that career as a timeline for three eras of data systems, then spends the second half on two Databricks engines: Lakehouse/RT for low-latency analytics and Lakebase, the Neon-derived serverless Postgres....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-10-31 CS paper digest. Area: Databases. Authors: Zebin Ren (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Biao Cao, Zhihui Yin, Qiushi Chen, Jielong Jian, Jiwei Xiong, Xinxing Wang, Yan Xing, Liguo Duan, Ran Zheng, Xianjun Meng, Zhenyu Hou (Baidu), Kang Chen (Tsinghua University, now Peking University) arXiv: 2610.32247 · PDF TL;DR Most large storage systems now keep their namespace in a distributed database: Facebook’s Tectonic on ZippyDB, Google’s Colossus on Bigtable, HopsFS on NDB....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-10-31 CS paper digest. Area: AI / ML. Authors: Randall Balestriero (Brown University, AMI Labs), Yann LeCun (NYU, AMI Labs) arXiv: 2610.39302 · PDF TL;DR In 2024 Huh, Cheung, Wang and Isola observed that vision models and language models trained separately end up with increasingly similar representations as they scale, and conjectured that they converge on a shared statistical model of reality....

In December 2011 Cory Doctorow gave the 28C3 keynote “The coming war on general computation”. His argument was that regulators who want “a computer that runs every program except the one that bothers me” can only get one thing, a computer with spyware built in. Eight months later he gave this sequel at Google, after trying it out at the Long Now Foundation and DEFCON. Its premise is that the freedom side wins the first war, and its question is what follows....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-10-24 CS paper digest. Area: AI / ML. Authors: Jonathan T. Barron, Dan Gnanapragasam, Michael Tschannen (Google DeepMind) arXiv: 2610.31642 · PDF TL;DR Every deep learning framework computes softmax and cross-entropy the same way: subtract the largest logit so exp can’t overflow, then normalise. That trick fixes overflow and leaves two quieter bugs in place. The first, which the authors call Softmax Collapse, hits when the model is very confident....

An on-call engineer at LinkedIn gets paged for a latency spike, pastes the alert link into a coding agent, and a few minutes later has a root cause (a buggy PR in a downstream service), a mitigation waiting for approval, an updated incident ticket and a fix PR. Ajay Prakash, a senior staff engineer at LinkedIn, opens his QCon AI Boston talk with that scenario. He then spends 45 minutes explaining the system behind it....

By 2001 Jim Gray had already won the Turing Award for transaction processing. Butler Lampson’s introduction describes TP as “pixie dust”: sprinkle it on a boring, non-fault-tolerant program and it becomes fault-tolerant and load-balanced. Gray then spends an hour on a different subject, astronomy. Working with Alex Szalay’s group at Johns Hopkins and with Caltech, he had been loading the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) into SQL Server, and this lecture is an early report on that project, the SkyServer....

Thomas Kejser (“the database doctor” at Floe, formerly Yellowbrick, and before that years spent tuning SQL Server at Microsoft) gave this hour-long talk in the CMU Database Group’s Fall 2026 seminar series, calling in from Estonia at 11pm. His subject is FloeScan, Floe’s storage engine. It’s designed around a constraint most lakehouse engines get around by copying data: customers want their data to stay in Iceberg, and they want queries against it to behave like queries against a real database....