The Byzantine Generals Problem is a thought experiment in distributed computing to understand the challenges of reaching a consensus when some nodes may be untrustworthy or unreliable (node behavior). It shows how difficult it can be to coordinate actions when some system members may act…

Photo by Wyron A on Unsplash Before the election, I wrote a whole bunch of posts about why it was a bad idea to elect Donald Trump. But sadly, America elected him anyway. After he won, I wrote a post outlining a best-case scenario for Trump’s second term. The optimistic scenario was that Trump’s…

Jaap Arriens | NurPhoto via Getty Images Large language models like those developed by Microsoft-backed firm OpenAI are set to become commoditized this year amid rapid advances toward next-generation artificial intelligence agents and more nimble, open-source rivals, according to top tech…

2025-01-21 / blinry / CC BY-SA 4.0 / tech Last week, I built a tiny Linux system from scratch, and booted it on my laptop! Here’s what it looked like: Let me tell you how I got there. I wanted to learn more about how the Linux kernel works, and what’s involved in booting it. So I set myself the goal…

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Here is part of the argument: TikTok was briefly shut down earlier this month, and the site faces an uncertain legal future. America’s internet youth started to look elsewhere — and where did they choose? They flocked to a Chinese video site called…

While the digital camera marketplace might be more crowded and offer greater parity than ever before, it’s no surprise to those of us who have covered the industry for the past decade to see that many of the biggest brands still top most of the sales charts. So, as expected, Canon has announced that…

Enjoy software development by embracing deliberate practice. Published inThe Autistic Engineer · 2 min read· Sep 20, 2024 -- Photo by Mike Kenneally on Unsplash Have you heard about the SLOW CODE movement? (not to be confused with ‘low code’ and ‘no code’ approaches). I wish I had during the 15+…

One must imagine Sisyphus happy. –Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus * Remove Ads Each morning, Shadow and I exit the gate at the bottom of the garden and walk out onto the bank of the canal that lies behind our house. He is leashed for the first few seconds, while I make sure the coast is clear. We…

artificial intelligence Chatbot Software Begins to Face Fundamental Limitations January 31, 2025 Recent results show that large language models struggle with compositional tasks, suggesting a hard limit to their abilities. Read Later Multistep logic problems can confound LLMs. Kristina…

Everyone knows serious programs must make data durable. You persist data on disk or in a database so it doesn’t disappear the second your program crashes or your server is restarted. But we also take it for granted that programs themselves aren’t durable. When you restart your server, your data…

Mark Zuckerberg at the Capitol for Trump’s second inauguration. (Tom Brenner/Washington Post via Getty) 🗞️📱👩‍💻 With corporate outlets obeying in advance, supporting independent media is more important than ever right now. Public Notice is made possible by paid subscribers. If you aren’t one already,…

Vanguard is making good on promises to disrupt bond funds and continue to squeeze costs out of equity investing with the largest round of fee cuts in its history. The $10tn money manager announced it would lop between 1 and 6 basis points off the expense ratios of 87 funds, including many of its US…

Python: spy for changes with sys.monitoring 2024-12-30Python 3.12 introduced sys.monitoring, a new framework for “monitoring” tools like debuggers and profilers to hook into. It provides fine-grained control so tools can listen only to certain events on specific lines of code. The framework came…

The Land of Cockaigne, Pieter Bruegel +/- In the present piece, you are about to read the introductory remarks to a series of essays. I did this research a couple of years ago. It was meant as an academic paper and published by a university-related journal. After the peer-review process, however,…

What starts as a good idea in one place often ends up as a good idea in other places. There’s plenty of examples of this, from API design, to language features. One such example which is interesting to look at is list comprehensions - a concept that didn’t even begin life as a programming concept,…

The DeepSeek Narrative Takes the World by Storm DeepSeek took the world by storm. For the last week, DeepSeek has been the only topic that anyone in the world wants to talk about. As it currently stands, DeepSeek daily traffic is now much higher than Claude, Perplexity, and even Gemini. But to close…

Politics Science and Technology United States China Howard W. French January 24, 2025, 7:00 AM Five years ago, Jack Ma was not just one of the world’s richest billionaires, but also—perhaps only after President Xi Jinping—the most famous Chinese person in the world. In the early aughts, Ma built a…

The release of Deepseek R1 shocked the industry. Why? Well, DeepSeek-R1 is an open model that rivals OpenAI's o1 in complex reasoning tasks, introduced using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and RL-focused multi-stage training approach. They not only released the model, but also a research…

Deepseek is a Chinese AI startup whose latest R1 model beat OpenAI’s o1 on multiple reasoning benchmarks. Despite its low profile, Deepseek is the Chinese AI lab to watch. Before Deepseek, CEO Liang Wenfeng’s main venture was High-Flyer (幻方), a top 4 Chinese quantitative hedge fund last valued at $8…

JavaScript Temporal is coming January 24, 20255 minute read Implementations of the new JavaScript Temporal object are starting to be shipped in experimental releases of browsers. This is big news for web developers because working with dates and times in JavaScript will be hugely simplified and…

25 Jan, 2025 This week OpenAI released a new offering called Operator. Operator is basically an AI agent that will browse the web for you. They weren't the first to do it, Anthropic released something called "computer use" a few months back, but with their brand recognition they've caused a stir. My…

January 24, 2025 · 8 min read Ozgun Erdogan Co-founder / Co-CEO VMs are much harder to understand today than they were back in 2009. Linux provides many building blocks for virtualization, but only a select few kernel engineers know how to stitch them together. Further, finding a good design…

Hey! The largest U.S. banks just reported their fourth quarter and full-year 2024 results. And you know what? Banks are doing really well. This made me realize that, unfortunately, despite almost 30 years of trying, Fintech companies have not disrupted banks. At least, not the big ones. Yes, there…

Fitz Roy Massif, El Chalten, Argentina I recently got back from Argentina, where we decided to spend part of our honeymoon. We chose Argentina for our honeymoon because my wife and I met in Patagonia in 2022, and we love the region. Behind the choice was also my desire to see a country undergoing a…

The AI community is abuzz over DeepSeek R1, a new open-source reasoning model. The model was developed by the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which claims that R1 matches or even surpasses OpenAI’s ChatGPT o1 on multiple key benchmarks but operates at a fraction of the cost. “This could be a truly…

Imagine for a moment that we could create a model of the human brain so precise, so accurate, that it could mimic the brain’s intricate neural patterns in real time. Imagine a “silicon brain,” an artificial neural network so advanced that it could decode a human’s thoughts, restore speech to those…

This is a post I began writing last year, but several things got in the way: above all, paternity leave. But also my own increasing dismay at the ways that LLMs were being used by students in the classroom. Ask anyone you know in education: ChatGPT has been a disaster when it comes to facilitating…

It happened on the afternoon of May 4th. A message from a colleague—who has since become a good friend—popped up on my screen, urging me to check my emails. When I opened my inbox, there it was: an email from the COO. The email announced an impending company-wide layoff and mentioned that, within a…

Building resilient distributed applications remains a tough challenge. It should be possible to focus almost entirely on the business logic and the complexity inherent to the domain. Instead, you need to review line-by-line and check: “what if the service crashes here?”, “what if the API we call…

Back to Articles Published January 28, 2025 Update on GitHub Upvote 36 eliebak Elie Bakouch lvwerra Leandro von Werra lewtun Lewis Tunstall What is DeepSeek-R1? If you’ve ever struggled with a tough math problem, you know how useful it is to think a little longer and work through it carefully.…

A new study in PLOS ONE suggests Florida manatees might be more abundant now than ever before in North American human history. Some of the human-driven changes that now threaten them may have actually been responsible for their population growth over the past two centuries. The Florida manatee…

January 24, 2025 Aider supports using a pair of models for coding: An Architect model is asked to describe how to solve the coding problem. Thinking/reasoning models often work well in this role. An Editor model is given the Architect’s solution and asked to produce specific code editing…