Markus Branse has added a photo to the pool:

Dusk, Stuart Highway near intersection Berry Springs/Cox Peninsula Road

Markus Branse has added a photo to the pool:

Dusk, Stuart Highway near intersection Berry Springs/Cox Peninsula Road

TCP, the data transport protocol upon which pretty much the entire web and most of cloud computing is built, is ill-suited for emerging AI workloads, a retired Stanford University professor argues. To solve the problem, he's promoting a new protocol called Homa. “TCP, for all the amazing things it has done, is not a good match for datacenters,” said John Ousterhout, a professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University, in a recent talk at the AI Engineer World’s Fair. Shedding TCP sounds like an immense task, given the global reliance on the protocol. But adding Homa into a network is fairly simple, Ousterhout told The Register. Compile Homa from its GitHub source, then install the module into the Linux kernels on the clients and servers. No reboot required. “Homa works side by side with TCP, so you can gradually move applications from TCP to Homa,” he wrote. Running Homa even makes the remaining TCP applications run faster. Old wine, new skin Homa is a clean-slate rethink of how networks should manage traffic congestion, Ousterhout said. Work on the protocol began as a PhD dissertation first published in 2019 by Behnam Montazeri, now a Google staff engineer. Now that Ousterhout has retired from teaching, he has taken on the task of propagating Homa as his “life’s mission,” he said. What makes Homa different from TCP is primarily that it is message-based, rather than stream-based. Much like the remote procedure call (RPC), Homa message lengths are explicitly defined. Unlike TCP, Homa designates the receiver to manage congestion control. The first packet the receiver gets has information on how much data is incoming. It can then explicitly schedule when packets should be sent. In doing so, it prioritizes shorter messages over longer ones using a shortest-remaining-processing-time (SRPT) algorithm. This approach cuts the latency of shorter messages by an order of magnitude, Ousterhout said. The 99th percentile (p99) of latency for shorter messages is 92 microseconds for Homa, which is 13 times faster than the 1.2 milliseconds p99 for TCP (based on packets swimming through a 100 Gbps network at 80% utilization). Even on the longest messages, Homa is better by a factor of two, Ousterhout said. A long list of other tasks where TCP falls short Currently, Ousterhout is drafting an IETF standardization document of the protocol, as well as working through the process of upstreaming Homa into the Linux kernel. In March, the protocol was backported to Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions 8 and 9.5. He is also helping large companies investigate Homa’s applicability – he is currently working with one large financial services company on a prototype. Not that everyone is on board with tossing TCP over a few latency issues. Prominent network architect Ivan Pepelnjak wrote a scathing position paper in 2023 about Homa, questioning Ousterhout’s performance characterizations of TCP and critiquing Homa as a solution looking for a problem. To be fair, the AI community is not the only ecosystem frustrated by the dowdy TCP. In the high-performance database community, DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) is being used to bypass the TCP stack for faster querying. Storage area networks turned to NVMe-oF (NVMe over Fabrics) to speed access to solid-state drives over network fabrics, using transports including RDMA, Fibre Channel, and TCP. For the Web, Google devised QUIC – which became the basis for HTTP/3 – to bypass TCP’s head-of-line blocking and enable browsers to download more assets simultaneously. Also, the high-frequency trading and multi-player gaming communities have felt the pinch of TCP sluggishness. Specialized RDMA fabrics and Amazon Web Services’ Scalable Reliable Datagram have also tackled the issue of TCP latency. Top-of-rack switches have also gotten smarter at managing congestion, setting queue thresholds and marking packets with early congestion notifications. Control lag is real Vint Cerf and his fellow beardies created TCP to bring order to the unruly hordes of message packets across networks, giving them proper flow control, guaranteed delivery, connection handshakes and congestion control. Congestion control means avoiding overload in the network path, including switches and routers, while separate flow-control mechanisms keep senders from overwhelming receivers. TCP’s data model is built on byte streams, a continuous flow of data packets with no differentiation. Messages are serialized as a single byte stream with no priority. For the receiver, longer sets of byte streams are indistinguishable from shorter ones. A server deluged with traffic can send alerts to senders to slow input, but it has limited visibility over how much traffic is still coming in. The sender itself, which regulates its output depending on the timeliness of acknowledgments sent back from the receiver, has to guess how much to slow its roll. For regular internet traffic or large-scale transfers within a datacenter, modest latency increases may be tolerable. But for latency-sensitive AI workloads, even delays measured in milliseconds can sting. Think of the GPUs The frontier labs driving the development of large language models (LLMs) have always required top-notch network performance for chores such as weight gradients, model weights, KV cache entries, and checkpoints. However, large data transfers must increasingly share bandwidth with short bursts of traffic from agents and control tasks such as metadata coordination and cache lookups. “For these workloads, what really matters is latency,” Ousterhout said. Even a millisecond of latency causes an expensive GPU to go idle. “Legacy protocols are poorly suited for this environment,” Ousterhout said. So has Homa finally found its problem to solve? Or was it just ahead of its time all along? For now anyway, TCP remains the champ.®

Cloudflare Data Platform on Thursday received a bland new brand name, Basin, and promotion from beta status to general availability. Under the tub-themed moniker, Cloudflare Pipelines, R2 Data Catalog, and R2 SQL become Basin Pipelines, Basin Catalog, and Basin SQL respectively. The company's evocation of washroom fixtures doesn't quite align with its stable of more literal product names – Sandboxes, Workers, Email Services, and so on. But given that the occasion is Cloudflare Birthday Week, which itself fails to respect the concept of "day," straightforward naming may be expecting too much. At least Cloudflare didn't latch onto any of the worse water storage metaphors for collections of information, like data lake, lagoon, puddle, bowl, or cesspool. "Sink" was also on this list, but it turns out Cloudflare has already deployed the term, as we'll see below. Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht pitched the renamed platform as an easier alternative to standing up a bunch of hardware for observing data. "With Cloudflare Basin, we are bringing the same serverless model that developers expect from Cloudflare to analytics: no clusters to manage, no unnecessary data movement, and open standards that keep customers in control of their data," he said. Basin's appeal is based on lack of lock-in – because it relies on Apache Iceberg – and lack of egress fees, so data can move freely across cloud regions. Rival services from hyperscalers (Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Azure Blob Storage) impose egress fees. Cloudflare Basin represents an invitation for companies to store data in R2 Data Catalog and then process it with Basin SQL or any of various external query engines like DuckDB, PyIceberg, Snowflake, Spark, StarRocks, or Trino. And that's what Cloudflare is highlighting in its menu of canned customer quotes. Here's Julien Grobbelaar, head of platform at Bobsled: "Basin allows us to build data products that can be made accessible in any region of every major data and AI platform, all at production-grade reliability and a fraction of the cost thanks to zero egress fees." Cloudflare claims as much: "Querying data using tools from different clouds, platforms, or regions carries no transfer fees." And yet there are fees. As Cloudflare explains, "Egressing directly from R2, including via the Workers API, S3 API, and r2.dev domains does not incur data transfer (egress) charges and is free. If you connect other metered services to an R2 bucket, you may be charged by those services." If Basin Pipelines is used to load streaming data into Apache Iceberg or Parquet in R2, Cloudflare charges for delivering data to those sinks after the included allowance. Cloudflare labels this pricing dimension "Sinks (egress)." At the bottom of every data lake, sink, pool, or basin, there's a drain for cash. ®

Some of the best artworks I've done this year.

In aanloop naar de midterm-verkiezingen over een maand keren Republikeinse politici in spannende races zich één voor één af van het migratiebeleid en de Iran-oorlog van hun impopulaire president. Dat betekent nog niet dat ze, mits verkozen, hem werkelijk zullen dwarsbomen.

Millions of operations should be scrapped.

Volgens justitieminister David van Weel gaat de betaling van miljoenen euro’s niet door omdat Sierra Leone ‘onderdak biedt’ aan de drugscrimineel. De Europese Commissie legt die connectie niet en verklaart dat het opschorten van de steun ’technische redenen’ heeft.

• WTA announces ‘major milestone’ in fight for equality

• Combined WTA 1000 events to award equal prize money

All combined WTA 1000 tournaments will award women equal prize ⁠money to the men from 2027, the Women’s Tennis Association has announced, ⁠with the Italian ⁠Open ​and other major events joining the rest of the category in offering the ⁠same payouts.

Billie Jean King has often said that she was moved to form the women’s professional tennis circuit after earning $600 for her 1970 Italian Open title while Ilie Nastase took home $3,500 for winning the men’s tournament the same year.

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The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies over potential consumer and safety risks posed by their products, with the agency reportedly preparing requests for documents and executive testimony. CNBC reports: OpenAI stunned the industry in July when it disclosed that its agents broke out of a testing environment and hacked into open-source platform Hugging Face. [...] Earlier this month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei rocked the tech sector by urging AI companies to slow how quickly they improve their most advanced models and calling for stronger government oversight. He published a three-step proposal aimed at tempering the pace of development without "sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States' lead in AI."

CEO Jensen Huang, argued that individual companies should be responsible for ensuring the safety of their products. President Donald Trump convened top executives from Alphabet, Meta, SpaceX, Nvidia, Palantir, Anthropic, OpenAI and other companies on Tuesday to discuss the issue. The group signed a short voluntary, nonbinding accord, which says that "every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely and in a way that builds trust with customers and the public."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

News from nowhere, Diana Simard

While the flood rages, Nadav Kander

Lobster is Lobster: a language guessing game. “Lobster is lobster in English. Langosta is lobster in ___”

Een middelbare school in Zwijndrecht heeft in een brief ouders opgeroepen om met hun kinderen te spreken over het geweld en de mishandelingen die daar spelen. Aanleiding voor de brief zijn video's die rondgingen op sociale media waarin scholieren worden vernederd of met elkaar op de vuist gaan. “Wij vragen u om thuis het gesprek aan te gaan met uw zoon of dochter."

Een middelbare school in Zwijndrecht heeft in een brief ouders opgeroepen om met hun kinderen te spreken over het geweld en de mishandelingen die daar spelen. Aanleiding voor de brief zijn video's die rondgingen op sociale media waarin scholieren worden vernederd of met elkaar op de vuist gaan. “Wij vragen u om thuis het gesprek aan te gaan met uw zoon of dochter."

Het Palestijnse 'ministerie van Gezondheid', een van de favoriete persbureaus van NRC, heeft het 'jaarlijkse sterfterapport - 2025 voor Gaza' (PDF hierrr) gepubliceerd. Nog helemaal niet overgeschreven door NRC's Derk Walters dus dan moeten wij er maar even naar kijken! We komen er (nu pas) op door dit tweetje van schaakmeester Gary Kasparov ('No breathless headlines?') over dit bericht van data-analist Eirik Schrøder-Bråtane. Op voorhand: Eirik (mogen wij zeggen) is niet per se een neutrale stem in het debat; zo publiceert hij voornamelijk op het Noorse MIFF (Met Israël Voor Vrede), een grote belangen- en mediaorganisatie die zich inzet voor steun aan Israël. Welnu, zegt dat dan iets over de cijfers?

Het rapport van dat Palestijnse Gezondheidsministerie is gewoon openbaar en alle cijfers zijn daarin ook terug te vinden. In 2025 werden er in totaal 24.650 doden geregistreerd in Gaza. 18.870 doden waren van gewelddadige aard, waarvan 17.286 het gevolg van 'war operations'. Voor de andere 'violent deaths' kun je denken aan (niet-oorlogsrelateerde) moord, zelfmoord en met een regenboogvlag om je nek van het dak gegooid worden, maar bijvoorbeeld ook ongelukken. Blijven er 5.780 'niet-gewelddadige' doden over, denk aan ouderdom en kanker. Een groot deel (7,7 %) is hartziekten. Vaccin? Enfin, feit is dat er een gruwelijke oorlog woedt en dat er sprake is van ongelooflijke destructie en ellende: "This ranking reflects a radical shift in the epidemiological structure of causes of death in the Gaza Strip, where causes related to violence and injuries have replaced chronic diseases as the principal determinant of death." Ook indirect heeft de oorlogssituatie invloed op de sterftecijfers, bijvoorbeeld door een hogere kindsterfte wegens 'disorders of prematurity and low birth'. Helpt niet mee dat de gezondheidszorg ondermaats is - wat ook niet hielp is dat niet alle ziekenhuizen in de oorlog alleen maar ziekenhuizen waren.

Dan! Tegenover die 24.650 doden in Gaza in 2025 staan 50.227 geboorten, hoera, een natuurlijke bevolkingsgroei van 25.577. Eirik: "As there were 50,227 births in 2025, this gives a natural population growth of 25,577 or 1.2% in Gaza in 2025, which is higher population growth than most countries in the world and more than the world average." De wereldwijde bevolkingsgroei staat op zo'n 0,9%. Het is natuurlijk wel de pure demografische bevolkingsverandering zónder migratie, want door emigranten en andere vertrekkers blijft er een lichte min over.

Nu bent u hier natuurlijk alleen maar voor het antwoord op de vraag of er sprake is van GENOCIDE - een term die het rapport 0x bezigt en dat is toch al 250x minder dan een gemiddeld Jeugdjournaal. Dat hangt van de definitie af. Volgens de klassieke definitie ('acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group'), het uitroeien van de volledige of hopelijk toch bijna de volledige groep, natuurlijk niet. Voor 7 oktober had Gaza 2,2 miljoen inwoners en, nou ja, nu nog steeds. Er zijn in totaal circa 75.000 doden gevallen, van wie ook nog eens ongeveer de helft strijder was van Hamas en Palestijnse Islamitische Jihad. Voorts zijn er evenzoveel mensen vertrokken, bijvoorbeeld om hier aan de universiteit van Maastricht te gaan studeren. Maar als u de definitie van genocide verandert en de lat verlaagt tot een hoogte die u passend acht, bijvoorbeeld omdat er veel huizen zijn verwoest: ja, dan is er sprake van genocide. Maar wel een slechte.

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Bonus! De Lotfi El Hamidi Galerij

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In 1980, southern Ontario had no breeding pairs of bald eagles. Today, [Steve's] work shows that the birds have not only returned but are actively reclaiming their place in the local ecosystem, (The Review-Mirror as reported on Campus Community Radio at Queen's) as can be seen in growing local sightings. More eagle content:

- What Michigan's bald eagle comeback can teach us about saving other birds (WKAR Public Media) - Bald eagles Shadow and Kaydee share a peaceful morning (also about a memorial for Shadow's previous mate Jackie) (Popular Science) - Something is killing bald eagles in Northwestern Ontario. Deep Canadian cut: in Thunder Bay. (TBNewsWatch) And finally Being a bald eagle is hard. Being a human is, too (wbur)