file descriptors

The author of copyparty introduces the FOSS file server he has built over five years, demoing its features such as resumable uploads, WebDAV and deduplication. The video itself is shown running on a demo server.

Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore, the creators of ZFS, present 'ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems' at the 2008 SNIA Software Developers' Conference. They explain the design, including copy-on-write, checksumming and avoiding the write hole.

Dave Chinner's linux.conf.au 2012 talk on XFS scalability, covering pain points with large numbers of files and complex metadata, and the work to fix XFS metadata performance.

A Microsoft Research talk on BetrFS, a file system built on B-epsilon trees, a write-optimized data structure. It covers WODS such as LSM-trees, how to design a file system around them, and benchmark wins over ext4 and xfs.

Marshall Kirk McKusick gives a talk at EuroBSDCon tracing filesystem and storage development from 1979 to today, using the BSD Fast Filesystem as the focus. It covers early disk-geometry optimization through later contiguous layout and small-file performance work.

Tom Scott explains why Windows does not let you name a file CON, tracing the reserved device names back to backwards compatibility with DOS.

Benno Rice's linux.conf.au 2020 talk asks whether UNIX was the best design we could have had. He looks at what alternatives existed, what was gained and lost, and what could be re-learned, including the limits of treating everything as a file.

A short screen capture of SGI's File System Navigator (FSN, also called Fusion) running on IRIX 6.5 on an Octane. It shows the 3D file browser seen in Jurassic Park.

Brian Warner, author of magic-wormhole, presents the tool at PyCon 2016. He explains how a few secret words let two computers securely transfer files, covering the cryptography (NaCl, SPAKE2) and library use.

Robert Collins explains why rustup installs were painfully slow on Windows and how changes to rustup and Windows cut install time from 3m30s to 14s. The talk covers NTFS, small files and the cost of antivirus hooks on file close.

An Empire Files episode giving a timeline of Zionist settlement, the Nakba and Israel's expansion over Palestinian land, presented from a critical, anti-colonial viewpoint. It previews Abby Martin's reporting in Palestine.

Kent Overstreet's Linux Foundation talk about writing a filesystem in Rust. Its Q&A segment, where Rust-for-Linux developers ask about interface semantics, became widely cited.

A one-minute clip of the Jurassic Park scene where a girl navigates the FSN 3D file manager on an SGI system and declares it a Unix system.

An Empire Files documentary by Abby Martin presenting a critical account of the Afghanistan War, from the CIA's role in the 1980s to the stalemate of the 2010s and 2020. It argues the war was driven by imperial interests.

Elm creator Evan Czaplicki's talk on how a file grows and when to split code up. He argues for keeping code in one file until it hurts and warns against premature extraction.

A philosophy lecture by Professor Moeller on the philosophy of identity. It builds on a discussion of Abigail Thorn's video and covers authenticity, sincerity and how online profiles reshape identity.

Musician Benn Jordan explains and demonstrates adversarial noise that poison-pills music files against AI training and scraping.

A scene from the film Disclosure showing its virtual reality interface, including a 3D file system visualizer.

Herb Sutter's CppCon 2015 plenary on writing safe, modern C++ by default using the C++ Core Guidelines. It includes a demo of lifetime-checking static analysis tooling.

Jason Scott of textfiles.com tells the story at DEFCON 17 of being sued for two billion dollars by a scammer who plagued him and others for over a decade. The talk is tragic and funny, covering what he learned about misleading schemes.

An episode of Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj exposing how tax-prep companies like TurboTax make filing confusing and costly even though many Americans can file for free. It combines comedy with reporting on lobbying and dark patterns.

Rob Pike presents Upspin at Gopherfest 2017, an experimental framework for naming and sharing files and data securely and uniformly across a global namespace. It is a project written in Go rather than about Go.

A clip from the BBC Fun to Imagine series in which Richard Feynman is asked how magnets work and explains why 'why' questions depend on a shared framework of understanding and cannot always be answered in layman's terms.

Netflix engineer Drew Gallatin's EuroBSDcon 2022 talk quantifies the older FreeBSD optimizations that let Netflix serve web traffic at 800Gb/s, including TSO, LRO, VM page cache zones, asynchronous sendfile and unmapped mbufs.

Allan Jude of Klara presents work on making ZFS scale on fast NVMe storage, covering fixes to the TaskQueue interface and removal of bottlenecks. The talk was given at EuroBSDcon 2022 and describes raising write throughput from about 3 to over 7 GB/sec.

A 2019 Android Dev Summit session on the scoped storage model in Android 10. It gives a plan overview and best practices for apps adapting to the new restrictions.

Empire Files host Mike Prysner responds point by point to John Oliver's Last Week Tonight episode on Venezuela, arguing it distorted the country's situation and the role of the US government.

Dylan Beattie's conference talk explores the history and mess behind plain text: encodings, Unicode, line endings and the many ways text goes wrong. It argues that the tidy idea of plain text hides a lot of complexity underneath everyday software.

The first stream in the Emacs From Scratch series, building a custom Emacs configuration from zero while teaching basics. It covers a usable baseline setup and the packages for completion, themes and productivity.

A short demo of Code Bubbles, an IDE interface built around editable code fragments in bubbles instead of files. It was a research prototype for Java development.

Tom Caputi presents the design of native encryption for ZFS at the OpenZFS Developer Summit, including design decisions and how authentication uses checksum fields.

An OpenZFS office hours session with ZFS co-creator Matt Ahrens answering questions on topics such as hole birth time, send/receive buffers, device removal, block pointer rewrite and performance with many snapshots.

A clip from Jurassic Park in which Lex says, "It's a Unix system, I know this," while navigating a 3D file system view.

Jason Scott of Archive Team describes how a loose band of volunteers rushes to copy sites like Geocities, Friendster and Yahoo Video before their owners delete them. The talk covers the tactics they use and the argument that this data is history worth saving.

Emery Berger explains why performance is hard to measure and deliver on modern hardware, showing how code layout and alignment can swamp optimization effects. He presents Stabilizer for statistically sound evaluation and Coz, a causal profiler.

Russ Cox gives a 23-minute tour of the Acme text editor from Plan 9, showing its mouse-driven interface, executing commands from text, and its filesystem-based interface to other programs.

A thoughtbot meetup talk by Max Cantor on getting most of what popular plugins provide using only built-in Vim features. It covers autocomplete, file jumping, filesystem navigation, build integration and snippets, with slides and a vimrc available.

Juan Pedro Bolivar Puente explains immutable and persistent data structures in C++ and how they support value semantics. He presents the Immer library, rrb-trees, and a prototype text editor that opens a huge file instantly.

A demo of writing technical documents in Emacs Org mode using org-babel, so that code blocks and generated content stay consistent when things change. The author shares the demo files and his dotfiles.

Slaughterbots is a short sci-fi film in which swarms of cheap autonomous drones are programmed to kill targets by profile. It was made as arms-control advocacy against autonomous weapons.