weekly-papers

Weekly Paper Notes — the Seminal Paper of the Week for the 2026-10-03 digest. Area: Networking / Systems. Authors: Van Jacobson (Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory), with Michael J. Karels (UC Berkeley) on the revised version Published: Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM ‘88, Stanford, August 1988; Computer Communication Review 18(4), pp. 314–329. DOI: 10.1145/52324.52356 Why the paper still matters In October 1986 the link between Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and UC Berkeley, about 400 yards apart and three gateway hops, went from 32 kbit/s to 40 bit/s....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-10-03 CS paper digest. Area: NLP. Authors: Rulin Shao, Shannon Zejiang Shen, Junjie Oscar Yin, Yuetai Li, Minheng Wang, Hamish Ivison, Radha Poovendran, Nathan Lambert, Teng Xiao, Mike Lewis, Wen-tau Yih, Luke Zettlemoyer, Pang Wei Koh (University of Washington, Meta Superintelligence Labs, MIT, Trillium Labs) arXiv: 2609.37725 · PDF · Code TL;DR A standard language model’s context only grows: each turn appends the model’s output, c_{t+1} = c_t ⊕ f(c_t)....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-10-03 CS paper digest. Area: Distributed Computing. Authors: Stuart H. Sul, Nash Brown (Stanford, Cursor Research), Henry Wildermuth, William Lin, Federico Cassano (Cursor Research), Christopher Ré (Stanford) arXiv: 2609.36070 · PDF · Code TL;DR Mixture-of-Kittens (MoK) is the MoE training kernel Cursor uses to train Composer on GB300 NVL72 racks. The paper’s opening finding is uncomfortable for anyone who has invested in MoE communication libraries: on a 72-GPU NVLink domain, existing expert-parallel systems built for InfiniBand often lose to a naive PyTorch + NCCL baseline, and in nearly half of the evaluated configurations the naive baseline beats every alternative....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-08-29 CS paper digest. Area: AI / Machine Learning. Authors: Lukas Kuhn, Lucas Maes, Giuseppe Serra, Quentin Le Lidec, Yann LeCun, Randall Balestriero, Florian Buettner (German Cancer Research Center / DKTK / Goethe University Frankfurt, Mila, Université de Montréal, Brown University, Courant Institute NYU, AMI Labs) arXiv: 2608.27395 · PDF · Project page TL;DR Self-supervised video encoders have been expensive twice over: video carries an order of magnitude more tokens than an image, and the dominant methods add machinery on top of that cost purely to keep representations from collapsing....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-08-29 CS paper digest. Area: Operating Systems / Systems. Authors: Rui Ueyama (The University of Tokyo) arXiv: 2608.23228 · PDF · Code TL;DR mold is a Unix/Linux ELF linker built around one commitment: every major pass is a data-parallel loop over a homogeneous array, and nothing important is left sequential. The enabling move is decoupling input parsing from symbol resolution....

Weekly Paper Notes — the Seminal Paper of the Week for the 2026-08-29 digest. Area: Operating Systems. Authors: Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson (Bell Laboratories) Published: Communications of the ACM, Vol. 17, No. 7, July 1974, pp. 365–375. DOI: 10.1145/361011.361061 Why the paper still matters Most influential systems papers describe something large. This one describes something conspicuously small, and the smallness is the argument. The system it presents ran on a PDP-11/45 with 144K bytes of core, of which the resident kernel occupied roughly 42K — about 16K words of code and data....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-08-22 CS paper digest. Area: Operating Systems / Serving Systems. Authors: Chaokun Chang, Yukun Zhou, Kaihua Fu, Dakai An, Tianyu Feng, Hanfeng Lu, Sheng Yao, Pu Guo (HKUST), Yinghao Yu (Alibaba Group), Yizhou Shan (ByteDance), Bo Li, Binhang Yuan, Wei Wang (HKUST) arXiv: 2608.15127 · PDF TL;DR Every serving system in production today — vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM — was designed around a single assumption: the unit of work is a token-generation request, and the GPU is where the time goes....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-08-22 CS paper digest. Area: AI / ML. Authors: Nayeon Kim, Hojin Lee, Yunju Bak, Jaesun Park, Boseop Kim, et al. arXiv: 2608.20061 · PDF · Published at COLM 2026 TL;DR Choosing the learning rate for a frontier pretraining run is one of the highest-stakes, least-principled decisions in the field. At trillion-token scale a single sweep is unaffordable, so labs guess, extrapolate by folklore, or burn compute they’d rather spend on tokens....

Weekly Paper Notes — the Seminal Paper of the Week. Area: Distributed Computing. Authors: Douglas B. Terry, Marvin M. Theimer, Karin Petersen, Alan J. Demers, Mike J. Spreitzer, Carl H. Hauser — Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Published: SOSP ‘95 — Proceedings of the 15th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pp. 172–182 DOI: 10.1145/224056.224070 Why the paper still matters There is a version of distributed systems history in which “eventual consistency” arrives with Dynamo in 2007, gets popularised by the NoSQL wave, and is eventually formalised by CRDTs....

Weekly Paper Notes — Seminal Paper of the Week. Area: Databases. Author: E. F. Codd (IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose) Published: Communications of the ACM, Vol. 13, No. 6, June 1970, pp. 377–387 DOI: 10.1145/362384.362685 Why the paper still matters Codd’s paper is eight pages long, contains no system, no benchmark, and no evaluation section. It would very likely struggle to get past a modern program committee. It is also, by a wide margin, the most economically consequential paper in the history of computer science — the entire relational database industry, SQL, the query optimizer as a discipline, and by extension most of what we call “data infrastructure” descend from it....