Sparse Notes

Weekly Paper Notes — Seminal Paper of the Week for May 24–30, 2026. After a multi-week streak of systems classics (Raft, MapReduce, Lamport, ARIES), this week rotates to AI / ML. Authors: Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin (Google Brain / Google Research / University of Toronto) Venue: NeurIPS 2017 arXiv: 1706.03762 · PDF Why this paper Picking Attention Is All You Need as a Seminal Paper of the Week in 2026 feels almost too on-the-nose — the Transformer is the architectural substrate underneath every frontier LLM, every modern diffusion model, every state-of-the-art protein folding system, every reasoning model whose chain-of-thought you have ever read....

Weekly Video Notes — Classic of the Week. A foundational talk worth re-watching, paired with key frames and a short essay on why it still matters. Fifteen years after it was delivered, Rich Hickey’s “Simple Made Easy” remains the single best talk on software complexity ever recorded. The thesis is one sentence — simple and easy are different things, and conflating them is the root cause of most accidental complexity....

Weekly Video Notes — a short article distilling one talk from the weekly digest. Source video and key frames embedded throughout. In this 1h10m Latent Space conversation, Cognition CTO Walden Yan and engineer Cole Murray walk through what they’re calling Devin’s “80% moment” — the point at which an autonomous coding agent can land production-grade PRs on real codebases at a rate that changes how teams work. Cognition is reporting a 7× increase in merged PRs for teams that adopt their background-agent workflow, and the conversation digs into why hand-held in-IDE coding is no longer the frontier....

I have more ideas than time. My side-project backlog is full of things I genuinely want to explore: “Is a Crossplane Composition plus function-sequencer really equivalent to a hand-written Kubebuilder controller?”, “Can Temporal reliably drive a Deep-Agent loop?” and more recently “Can TigerData run on CNPG without a custom operator?” In theory, these just need a focused weekend. In reality, between work, chasing after my kids in playground, and sometime my wife need a husband as well, my window for “sitting at a desk to explore” is maybe two evenings a week....

Weekly Video Notes — a short article distilling one talk from the weekly digest. Source video and key frames embedded throughout. Cursor just published the 2026 edition of its Developer Habits report, drawing on aggregate data from millions of Cursor users. In this 16-minute walkthrough, a Cursor engineer reads the report live and annotates it with personal commentary from 10+ years building software. It’s the closest thing the industry has to a quantitative snapshot of how coding agents are reshaping day-to-day engineering work....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the May 24–30, 2026 CS paper digest. Area: NLP / Theory. Authors: Jon Kleinberg, Anay Mehrotra, Amin Saberi (Cornell / Yale / Stanford) arXiv: 2605.30324 · PDF TL;DR A line of theoretical work asks: given examples from an unknown target language drawn from a known countable collection, can a learner eventually output only new valid strings from that language? Prior results — including Kleinberg & Mullainathan’s 2024 paper that triggered the modern wave — assume the learner remembers the entire example history....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the May 24–30, 2026 CS paper digest. Area: AI / ML. Authors: Lukas Aichberger, Sepp Hochreiter (JKU Linz / NXAI) arXiv: 2605.30343 · PDF TL;DR Modern reasoning LLMs scale test-time compute by emitting long chains of thought — but every “thought token” is forced to round-trip through the autoregressive decoder, conflating internal computation with external communication. Reasoning in Memory (RiM) instead inserts blocks of fixed special tokens that act as scratch space for the model’s working memory....

🔁 Seminal Paper of the Week — a foundational classic chosen to anchor the May 17–23, 2026 weekly digest. Area rotated to Databases this week. Authors: C. Mohan, Don Haerder, Bruce Lindsay, Hamid Pirahesh, Peter Schwarz (IBM Almaden, 1992) Venue: ACM Transactions on Database Systems, Vol. 17, No. 1 DOI: 10.1145/128765.128770 TL;DR ARIES is the recovery algorithm. It combines write-ahead logging (WAL), steal + no-force buffer management, physiological logging, and a three-pass restart (Analysis → Redo → Undo) with compensation log records (CLRs) that make undo idempotent....

Weekly Video Notes — a short article distilling one talk from the weekly digest. Source video and key frames are embedded throughout. Bjarne Stroustrup designed C++ at Bell Labs in the early 1980s and has spent the four decades since shepherding it through standardization, a thousand committee fights, and a parade of would-be successors. This nearly two-hour conversation covers the whole arc — origin story, the Bell Labs research culture, the philosophy of “negative-overhead abstraction,” the politics of memory safety, and the handful of decisions he genuinely regrets....

DeepMind’s roughly six-minute overview video, “Generating novel scientific hypotheses with Co-Scientist,” opens not with a product demo but with a confession from scientists: the firehose of new literature has long since outpaced the humans trying to drink from it. One researcher describes having “hundreds of Chrome tabs and papers open.” Another says the amount of knowledge needed to stay at the frontier of a field now doubles roughly every two months....