systems

A year ago Greg Kroah-Hartman told a security conference the Linux kernel was issuing 50 CVEs a week and everyone thought that was insane. The kernel is now issuing 33 a day. His Kernel Recipes 2026 talk is aimed at kernel developers and maintainers, not the general public, and its refrain is “do not panic.” What makes it worth an hour is that he backs the refrain with raw data: he got the full report behind this year’s most publicised AI bug hunt and went through it line by line....

Most conversations about making agents better are really conversations about making models better. Alex Krentsel — a Berkeley systems PhD student working with Martin Casado and Ankur Goyal — spends this Latent Space episode arguing the opposite: the model is fine, and the leverage now lives in the harness, the “body we provide to the brain.” Exo, the project he introduces, is an agent that can safely edit every aspect of itself at runtime....

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....

Andy Pavlo opens CMU’s database systems course with a claim that reframes most of what practitioners argue about online: the problems are not new. The hardware changed; the problems didn’t. This week’s Classic of the Week is his Lecture 1 — course information plus a compressed history of database systems from the 1960s to the present. It’s the single best hour for understanding why databases look the way they do, and it comes with an implicit warning: if you don’t know this history, you will spend your career re-litigating settled debates....

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....

Weekly Video Notes — Classic of the Week. A foundational talk revisited, with source video and key frames embedded throughout. Most Turing Award lectures are a victory lap through the technical contribution. Stonebraker refuses. He shows up without the tie the videographer asked for (“that just isn’t me”), announces that the audience isn’t a database crowd so he’ll have to teach them some database first, and then delivers 75 minutes braiding two stories together: the design and near-death of Postgres, and a tandem bicycle trip he and his wife rode across America....

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....

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....

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....

Jonathan Blow gave this hour-long talk at DevGAMM in 2019, and in the seven years since it has quietly become one of the most-cited critiques of modern software engineering. Blow — the game designer behind Braid and The Witness, and the creator of the Jai programming language — makes a claim most programmers instinctively resist: technological knowledge is not on a monotonic climb. Civilizations lose capabilities all the time. Ours is probably losing them right now, and software is one of the leading indicators....