Bas' Take on Tech: OpenAI, e/acc, PyCon

Hi there,

thanks for reading my tech newsletter about the recent buzz in tech.

Have a great week ahead!

🤖 (Open)AI (again)

In a probably unnoticed act of honesty, OpenAI has admitted that “AI” is probably still miles away from being “intelligent”. As I have written here several times, LLMs are a remixing of content, not a deliberate creation by an intelligence. Admittedly, this looks very impressive, but it is a far cry from the dystopian rule of machines. However, OpenAI set up a team to prevent precisely this rule by machines - and has now fired them. Obviously a marketing stunt that was no longer needed.

But in case anyone was wondering why remixing works so well and what role “Whisper” speech recognition played in this, although speech recognition has less to do with LLMs and more to do with traditional machine learning: By the end of 2021, OpenAI had read the internet and moved on to transcribing all sorts of YouTube videos and also using them as training data. Please support this channel by hitting the subscribe button!

Meanwhile, while some people have jumped off the OpenAI bandwagon (Ilya Sutskever, Jan Leike, Evan Morikawa), it has come to light that OpenAI, which has just released GPT 4o, is committing its employees to a lifetime ban on criticism.

I’m not the only one who is bearish on OpenAI. Here is another hot take.

🐍 PyCon & Python 3.13

Three years ago, the Python Language Summit 2021 was about making CPython faster. A lot of improvements have been made since. Most notably, PEP 703 adds an experimental flag to remove the GIL in Python 3.13.

PyCon 2024 was happening last week in Pittsburgh, PA. I would have loved to attend, but I couldn’t make it. Glyph Lefkowitz has an interesting field guide on “How to Pycon” on his blog. This applies to other conferences equally well and is a great bookmark for your next one.

For now, I have heard some great things about these talks in particular:

• What makes a Python debugger possible and how can we make it 100x faster

• Ruff: An Extremely Fast Python Linter and Code Formatter, Written in Rust

• Continuous Deployment and Release of Django Apps

• Hatch: The only tool you need

• PEP 683: Immortal Objects - A new approach for memory managing

• pytest for unittesters

• Event-Driven asyncio: A Case Study of Trio's API

• Overcoming GIL with subinterpreters and immutability

• Combining Django ORM & FastAPI in a Single App

• CPython's Compilation Pipeline

• SPy (Static Python) lang: fast as C, Pythonic as Python

• Building FPGA-based Machine Learning Accelerators in Python

• A low latency deepdive of Python with Cython

• Sync vs. Async in Python: Tools, Benchmarks, and ASGI/WSGI Explained

• Building a JIT compiler for CPython

🇪🇺 EU (again)

The EU Digital Markets Act (and to some extent the GDPR) attempts to regulate “Big Tech” to promote users’ rights. As with all regulations, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Of course, “Big Tech” is “complying” in “creative” ways, such as Meta’s Pay to Play or Apple’s compliance plans that include complicated fees and restrictions. The EFF has seen that the well-intentioned actionism actually made the situation worse. There is another disparity between goals and unintentional consequences going on in the US with Article 230.

Pieter Levels has some interesting analysis pieces on his Twitter, including an analysis of the age of European vs American big companies or the Euro as currency.

His e/acc initiative (European Accelerationism) pointed out two objectives that revolve around founding bureaucracy and taxes.

That – at least – is an actionable thing that could be lobbied into legislation. However, there is a fundamental difference in the mindset of how regulation should work. On the one hand, we have (more or less) free markets, like in the US and a dictatorial centrally planned system to foster aggressive growth at all costs like in China. Europe’s “a bit of both” attitude could be crushed in between.

📰 More headlines

• Bend (parallel high-level language that looks like Python)

• Static Python Language

• Trial HIV vaccine triggers elusive and essential antibodies, pointing the way toward a successful vaccine

• How Google Does Code Reviews

• Design Docs at Google

• Beating Jeff's 3.14 Ghz Raspberry Pi 5

• Adobe Photoshop Source Code (2013)

• VMWare Fusion Pro now available free for personal use

🚀 What else?

I have changed this newsletter from “occasional” to at least once every two weeks. The new format not only contains curated news and insights from the tech world but also sets the stage for fellow developers. 

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