I like this paper. It doesn't just naively measure TCP vs QUIC, but also tries to map the results to the underlying mechanisms. But "ouch" on the fairness tests.
The dangers of just throwing garbage data at a machine learning model. (And in a medical setting, even!)
What happens if you switch the example code of a difficult systems programming course from gnarly '80s style C to modern C? Apparently the students are able to implement much more complex memory allocator features.
(They also changed the malloc test suite at the same time. But it seems hard to believe that the tests would have a major effect here).
> The correct solution to the “integer printing is too slow” problem is simple: don’t do that.
...
> However, once you find yourself in this bad spot, it’s trivial to do better than generic libc conversion code. This makes it a dangerously fun problem in a way… especially given that the data distribution can matter so much.
Paul Khuong on fast integer -> decimal string conversions.
Reporting on some mysterious ongoing Linux development. Just how bad a security bug does this have to be, if they're willing to take a 5% system-wide performance hit to work around it?
Insane retro-hardware maintenance.
A funny story about extreme capitalism in an MMO setting, the kind you'd expect to be a digression in a good Neal Stephenson novel. I have no idea whether this is actually true or not, but it probable doesn't matter either way :)
Input-to-display latency measurements for 40 years of computers.
How the voxel physics engine of Roblox works.
And then for physics of a different kind... Basically modeling crowds of people as a fluid dynamics system.