SDF Chatter

BSDCan 2025 Keynote: Hardware Support for Memory Hungry Applications by Margo Seltzer

For nearly 60 years, we lived in a CPU-centric universe. Today, we are on the brink of a transition -- GPUs are the new golden child and those children demand unprecedented amounts of DRAM to satisfy modern data-hungry applications. I'm going to talk about these hardware trends and what they mean for those of us who build systems.

Speaker bio: Margo Seltzer is Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems and the Cheriton Family chair in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests are in systems, construed quite broadly: systems for capturing and accessing data provenance, file systems, databases, transaction processing systems, storage and analysis of graph-structured data, and systems for constructing optimal and interpretable machine learning models.

She is the author of several widely-used software packages including database and transaction libraries and the 4.4BSD log-structured file system. Dr. Seltzer was a co-founder and CTO of Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB, the recipient of the 2021 ACM Software Sytems award and the 2020 ACM SIGMOD Systems Award. She is a past President of the USENIX Assocation and served as the USENIX representative to the Computing Research Association Board of Directors. In 2019 recipient of the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award.

For more information, please visit:

 https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/

#bsdcan

can’t say i remember much from using winME. maybe i blocked it out, haha.

I built these bleachers from recycled pallets. I use them for container gardening (tomatoes and eggplants this year).

Today was very hot (30C) and this bun was laying down back there when I got back from work. I set out a tray of fresh water just in case bun’s feeling a bit dehydrated.

A player on Big Brother said that both her parents ran track and so she was "literally born on the track". Unless your mother went into labour on the track and gave birth right there, you were not literally born on the track!

Album: Da Devil's Playground: Underground Solo

Genre: Hip Hop

Style: Gangsta, Horrorcore, Memphis Rap

I think the server components need a reboot or some part of the system needs to be looked at. Seems to have been getting worse as the week has gone on....

Did we ever figure out the best course of action to get the instance mod from SDF to look at it?

I can't believe I had to deal with this! I just opened an article in Firefox on my Android, and the damn site bombarded me with a staggering 912 cookies! 912! And of course, I was forced to accept whatever they call "essential" cookies, or suffer through the nightmare of toggling each one off individually. But here’s the worst part—they weren't even organized! No, they were scattered everywhere, forcing me to scroll endlessly through this mountain of cookies just to find the few I actually wanted to disable. It’s infuriating! How can anyone tolerate this level of intrusive, irresponsible design? This is an outright invasion of privacy, and it’s sickening!

PS. Apparently I'm not usually angry enough so I used https://goblin.tools/Formalizer to make it more ranty. Completely my experience, angrified.

This is my first attempt at making art with something other than my thumb or Unity.

Album: Coal Chamber

Genre: Rock

Style: Nu Metal, Alternative Rock, Hard Rock, Hardcore

Tags:

• 2025070800 (Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 6a, Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel 7a, Pixel Tablet, Pixel Fold, Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro, Pixel 8a, Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL, Pixel 9 Pro Fold, Pixel 9a, emulator, generic, other targets)

Changes since the 2025070700 release:

• update to BP2A.250705.008 vendor files (July 2025 Pixel monthly release)
• disable temporary unconditional system crash notifications since we've gotten the initial feedback we needed since releasing our port to Android 16 (users can enable this themselves via Settings > Security and privacy > More security and privacy > Notify about system process crashes)
• NFC: always show standard confirmation dialog before opening a URL instead of it only being enabled for a small subset of users
• temporarily remove NFC auto-turn-off feature since it can cause NFC HAL or system_server crashes in rare edge cases and we need to entirely reimplement it inside of the NFC APEX module to avoid the problems (there were rare issues reported prior to Android 16 but 1 user reported an NFC HAL crash loop on Android 16 making it clear we need to drop this until we redo it in a better way)

... but won't if one has a custom theme loaded, as far as I can tell. The post is my attempt at a solution.

High-level EU courts apparently assume all those who read their acronym-littered opinions and judgements are Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who already know what the acronyms stand for.

I’m not a lawyer but this seems sloppy from a legal standpoint because an acronym that is never expanded is ambiguous. It creates room for confusion and misinterpretation in the worst case, and in the very least wastes the reader’s time on investigation.

Have lawyers and judges not been trained on this? As a technologist, my training included the good practice of expanding every single acronym the first time it appears, as I did above with “SME”, as well as the extra diligent but optional practice of including a section at the end with all expansions.

I realise that the whole legal industry is made up of mostly tech illiterates. Geeks have the advantage of being able to use LaTeX with the acro package¹, which enables us to write acronyms without thinking about where it first appears because the software automatically expands the first occurrances (or as we specify). Legal workers have probably limited themselves to dumbed down tools like MS Word which probably does not automate this, but nonetheless it’s the writer’s duty to see that acronym expansion happens.

Abbreviations:

SME: Subject Matter Expert

¹ In LaTeX, the preamble would have \DeclareAcronym{sme}{short=SME, long=Subject Matter Expert} and throughout the document each instance would be written as \ac{sme}.