Linkblog/2025/01/29

Earlier this month, I used Claude to port (parts of) an Emacs package into Rust, shrinking the execution time by a factor of 1000 or more (in one concrete case: from 90s to about 15ms).

Joe Weisenthal: Call me a nationalist or whatever. But I hope that the AI that turns me into a paperclip is American made.

xiaohongshu 💸

Everyone Calm Down About That $5.5 Million Number …

1. DeepSeek is an extremely talented team and has been producing some of the most interesting public papers in ML for a year. I first wrote about them in May 2024, though was tracking them earlier. They did not “come out of nowhere,” at all.
2. v3 and r1 are impressive models. v3 did not, however, “cost $5m.” That reported figure is almost surely their marginal cost. It does not include the fixed cost of building a cluster (and deepseek builds their own, from what I understand), nor does it include the cost of having a staff.

Result in JavaScript, nice.

We’re building a new static type checker for Python, from scratch, in Rust. From a technical perspective, it’s probably our most ambitious project yet. We’re about 800 PRs deep!

vc funding will save the python ecosystem

I’m really glad Astral exists, to be honest, ruff is epic, uv is spectacular, and I really hope this will continue the streak.

It would be great if FastAPI / SQLAlchemy / <insert other big projects here> will have good support for this out of the box, I would expect this to be the case given how a lot of the selling point of ruff was its ability to just be flake8 / black / etc. rules but fast because RIIR.

Currently I find Python type checking more bother than its worth, but I also do look at Python as a do it quick / do it once / do it for yourself sort of language, If I want strictness I’m going either TypeScript or Rust.