Changelog News 129

Author: jerodsanto

news/changelog-news-129.md

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+**Jerod Santo:**
+
+What up, nerds? I'm Jerod and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, January 27th, 2024.
+
+On one hand, there's [The Stargate Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stargate_Project): a joint venture by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, et al that's aimed at investing **$500 billion** over four years to build out infrastructure that "will secure American leadership in AI."
+
+On the other hand, there's [DeepSeek-R1](https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1): a Chinese AI lab's MIT-licensed reasoning model that gives OpenAI's o1 a run for *its money* and only cost **$5.6 million** to train.
+
+It's Big Money vs Big Brain. I'm jealous of both...
+
+Ok, let's get into this week's news.
+
+**Break:**
+
+**Jerod Santo:**
+
+[DeepSeek-R1's epic pull request](https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/pull/11453)
+
+Speaking of Big Brain... Xuan-Son Nguyen opened a pull request to Georgi Gerganov's llama.cpp repo that doubles the speed for WASM by optimizing SIMD instructions with the following PR comment:
+
+> Surprisingly, 99% of the code in this PR is written by DeepSeek-R1. The only thing I do is to develop tests and write prompts (with some trails and errors) ..
+>
+> Indeed, this PR aims to prove that LLMs are now capable of writing good low-level code, to a point that it can optimize its own code.
+
+I can't judge whether this is *good* low-level code or not, because I don't know what good low-level code looks like, but Georgi and Xuan-Son sure are impressed! Xuan-Son also shared [the prompts](https://gist.github.com/ngxson/307140d24d80748bd683b396ba13be07) they used to get the desired results.
+
+This, of course, resulted in a long [X thread](https://x.com/ggerganov/status/1883888097185927311) where both humans & robots debate and meme whether or not "it's over" for folks like us or not quite yet...
+
+**Break:**
+
+**Jerod Santo:**
+
+[Tailwind CSS v4.0 is official](https://tailwindcss.com/blog/tailwindcss-v4)
+
+Adam Wathan:
+
+> Tailwind CSS v4.0 is an all-new version of the framework optimized for performance and flexibility, with a reimagined configuration and customization experience, and taking full advantage of the latest advancements the web platform has to offer.
+
+This looks like it was a massive undertaking. It has a new high-performance build engine, simplified installation, automatic content detection, reimagined CSS-first configuration, and too much more to list here.
+
+**Break:**
+
+**Jerod Santo:**
+
+[The most influential papers in C.S. history](https://terriblesoftware.org/2025/01/22/the-7-most-influential-papers-in-computer-science-history/)
+
+Matheus Lima opens up the history books to create this (admittedly subjective) list of influential papers, dating all the way back to 1936!
+
+> These seven papers (sorted by date) stand out to me mostly because of their impact in today’s world.
+
+For each paper, Matheus provides the big idea and why he thinks it still matters to this day. Here's the quick list:
+
+1. “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (Alan Turing, 1936)
+2. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” (Claude Shannon, 1948)
+3. “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks” (Edgar F. Codd, 1970)
+4. “The Complexity of Theorem-Proving Procedures” (Stephen A. Cook, 1971)
+5. “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication” (Vinton G. Cerf & Robert E. Kahn, 1974)
+6. “Information Management: A Proposal” (Tim Berners-Lee, 1989)
+7. “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” (Sergey Brin & Larry Page, 1998)
+
+He also provides a bonus list of five papers that almost made his list, finishing with this:
+
+> These days, we’re flooded with new stuff: fresh languages, mind-blowing AI breakthroughs, quantum leaps, and the JavaScript framework of the week. It’s all super exciting, but here’s the thing: foundations matter. Without them, we’re just piling on new toys without fully understanding the ground we’re building on.
+
+**Break:**
+
+**Jerod Santo:**
+
+It's now time for Sponsored News!
+
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+
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+
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+
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+
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+
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+
+**Break:**
+
+**Jerod Santo:**
+
+[AI is creating a generation of illiterate programmers](https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-illiterate-programmers)
+
+Namanyay Goel has a confession to make:
+
+> A couple of days ago, Cursor went down during the ChatGPT outage.
+>
+> I stared at my terminal facing those red error messages that I hate to see. An AWS error glared back at me. I didn’t want to figure it out without AI’s help.
+>
+> After 12 years of coding, I’d somehow become worse at my own craft. And this isn’t hyperbole—this is the new reality for software developers.
+
+He doesn't think he's the only one who's become a human clipboard, a mere intermediary between his code and an LLM.
+
+> We’re not becoming 10x developers with AI.
+>
+> We’re becoming 10x dependent on AI. There’s a difference.
+>
+> Every time we let AI solve a problem we could’ve solved ourselves, we’re trading long-term understanding for short-term productivity. We’re optimizing for today’s commit at the cost of tomorrow’s ability.
+
+Does this sentiment resonate with you? See also [this recent paper on metacognitive laziness](https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjet.13544)...
+
+**Break:**
+
+**Jerod Santo:**
+
+[How to improve WFH lighting to reduce eye strain](https://rustle.ca/posts/articles/work-from-home-lighting)
+
+Russell Baylis is NOT an ergonomist or optometrist. He's just a Worker-From-Home-er who is susceptible to eye strain, eye pain, and dizziness. In this post, Russell shares what he's learned about optimizing home lighting to reduce eye strain. Here's the quick list:
+
+1. An even, diffused lighting environment is best for the eyes
+2. When it comes to light brightness, too much is just as problematic as too little
+3. Use natural light wherever possible
+4. Quality of artificial light matters
+5. The best lighting for camera, is not necessarily the best lighting for ergonomics
+6. Even the perfect lighting environment will fatigue you — take breaks, and take care of yourself
+
+Click through to see renderings of the changes he made to his environment and steal some of these ideas to improve your WFH life, just like he did.
+
+**Break:**
+
+**Jerod Santo:**
+
+That's the news for now, but also join the 23k+ bright, incredibly good looking people who subscribe to our companion newsletter for even more news worth your attention. Such as: you probably don't need query builders, a great primer on Kalman Filters, and build your own airtags with openhaystack. Get in on it at changelog.com/news
+
+ICYMI, last week we published two great shows: Ashley Jeffs on going from open source to acquired. One listener called it, "very funny, and a great guest choice + interesting story!"
+
+And Fall Out Boy sorry Fallthrough Boys, Kris Brandow and Matthew Sanabria joined me on Changelog & Friends to discuss tools we're switching to, whether or not Go is still a great systems programming language choice, user-centric documentation, the need for archivists & more.
+
+Find those in your feed and look forward to this week when we are joined on Wednesday by Glauber Costa to talk about Limbo, a complete rewrite of SQLite in Rust, and on Friday by Dan Moore for an "It Depends" style conversation on modern auth strategies.
+
+Have a great week! Leave us a 5-star review if you dig our work, and I'll talk to you again real soon.