Weekly Video Notes — a short article distilling one talk from the weekly digest. Source video and key frames embedded throughout. Sara Hooker has done the full tour — PhD, DeepMind, several frontier labs, a research career built on efficiency at scale. Which is what makes this talk land: it’s an insider arguing that the system that produced her is an unreasonably narrow filter, and that the economics of the current moment are finally prying it open....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-08-15 CS paper digest. Area: Operating Systems / Systems. Authors: Yuan Si (University of Waterloo), Yufeng Lin (Independent), Daming Li (Independent), Jialu Zhang (University of Waterloo, corresponding) arXiv: 2608.12103 · PDF TL;DR A trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model routes each token through a small, input-dependent slice of its weights — in the production model studied here, an accepted token costs on average 1585 expert reads of 17....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-08-08 CS paper digest. Area: Distributed Computing / Computer Architecture. Authors: Jirong Yang, Peizhe Liu, Jovan Stojkovic (UT Austin); Chaojie Zhang (Microsoft Azure) arXiv: 2608.04458 · PDF TL;DR Datacenter servers have been optimized for two workload shapes: CPU-centric services (web serving, key-value stores, analytics) and monolithic LLM inference, where a GPU does dense tensor math and the host merely feeds it....

Fourteen years on, this is still the talk that most reliably rewires how an engineer thinks about their own work. It is remembered for the live-coding demos — and those demos did seed a decade of tooling, from hot reload to Swift Playgrounds to every notebook environment you use. But the demos are the setup. The talk’s actual argument arrives in the last fifteen minutes, and it is not about programming at all....

Weekly Paper Notes — the Seminal Paper of the Week for the 2026-08-08 CS paper digest. Area: Programming Languages / Concurrency (rotating away from a long run of distributed-systems picks). Author: C. A. R. Hoare (Queen’s University, Belfast) Published: Communications of the ACM, Vol. 21, No. 8, August 1978, pp. 666–677 DOI: 10.1145/359576.359585 Why the paper still matters If you have written ch <- v in Go, spawned an Erlang process and sent it a message, wired up an actor in Akka, or reasoned about a Rust mpsc channel, you have been programming in a dialect of a language sketched in eleven pages of CACM in 1978....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-08-08 CS paper digest. Area: Systems / Networking. Authors: Sarah McClure (UC Berkeley), Tegan Wilson (Northeastern), Brad Karp (UCL / Google), Michael Mitzenmacher (Harvard), Sylvia Ratnasamy (UC Berkeley), Scott Shenker (UC Berkeley / ICSI), Minlan Yu (Harvard) arXiv: 2608.01707 · PDF TL;DR Every large ML training system sits on one of two interconnect families: the fat-tree Clos that GPUs inherited from datacenter networking, or the torus that TPUs inherited from HPC....

There are perhaps a trillion active SQLite databases in the world. Roughly half the filesystem I/O on the phone in your pocket goes through it. And it is maintained by three committers. That ratio — planetary deployment, three-person team — is the actual subject of this talk. Richard Hipp, SQLite’s creator, spends 54 minutes explaining the machinery that makes it possible, and the answer is not cleverness. It is a testing regime borrowed wholesale from the avionics industry, plus a willingness to redesign the product itself so it can be tested at all....

Stanford’s CS329A is one of the few graduate courses aimed squarely at the thing practitioners are actually building right now: agents that improve themselves. This first lecture is the map — a compressed tour from GPT-3-era scaling laws to the agentic loop inside Claude Code, delivered by two instructors who worked on the models in question. Akanksha Chowdhery is an adjunct professor at Stanford and researcher at Reflection AI; Azalia Mirhoseini is an assistant professor in the CS department who worked on Gemini at Google DeepMind and on Claude at Anthropic....

Almost every distributed database you touch today inherited something from a single 2007 SOSP paper. Cassandra is essentially its open-source descendant; Riak, Voldemort, and a decade of “eventually consistent” architecture trace back to the same document. This Papers We Love Tokyo session — the chapter’s inaugural talk, presented by Corrina Sivak — is a rare thing: a walkthrough by someone reading it as a working engineer rather than as an authority, complete with audience interruptions, honest “this might be a gap in my understanding,” and a genuinely useful comparison of what the paper described versus what AWS actually ships today....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-08-01 CS paper digest. Area: Systems / Networking. Authors: Evyatar Cohen, Jose Yallouz, Mark Silberstein, Isaac Keslassy (Technion); Alexander Shpiner (NVIDIA); Sylvia Ratnasamy, Isaac Keslassy (UC Berkeley) arXiv: 2607.26340 · PDF TL;DR Mixture-of-Experts models route each token to a small subset of experts, which turns every MoE layer into a highly skewed all-to-all communication phase across the GPU fabric....