30 karma · joined December 10, 2024
My interests include retrocomputing, the history of software engineering, and exploring the philosophical side of tech. Lately, I've been experimenting with Rust, just to keep the neurons firing.
I do like the idea of making these reasoning techniques accessible to everyone. If they really manage to replicate the results of DeepSeek-R1, especially on a smaller budget, that’s a huge win for open-source AI.
I’m all for projects that push innovation and share the process with others, even if it’s messy.
But yeah—lots of hurdles. They might hit a wall because they don’t have DeepSeek’s original datasets.
Is it too entry-level? Looking at the labs, a lot of this seems like stuff a mid-level software engineer (or even a motivated beginner) could pick up on their own with tutorials. Git, Flask, container orchestration... all useful, but pretty basic for anyone who's already worked in production environments. The deeper challenges—like optimizing networking for distributed training or managing inference at scale—don’t seem to get as much attention. Maybe it comes up in the group projects?
Also wondering about the long-term relevance of some of the tools they’re using. Jenkins? Sure, it’s everywhere, but wouldn’t it make sense to introduce something more modern like GitHub Actions or ArgoCD for CI/CD? Same with Kubernetes—obviously a must-know, but what about alternatives or supplementary tools for edge deployments or serverless systems? Feels like an opportunity to push into the future a bit more.
But I hit walls when I needed more complex stuff. Like, if I want to keep state on the client (e.g., a live calculator or sliders updating a table), Htmx feels clunky. Sending a request to the server every time a user adjusts a slider—yeah, no. React or Svelte is a better fit there. And if you're already using those tools. Htmx starts to feel redundant. Why add more when you've got everything in one place?
Also, not sure about the recent patch release - Changing default behavior in a minor update? Feels risky, even if it's "fixing a bug." Imagine waking up to find your body tag wiped because you updated without reading the changelog, yikes. Makes me think twice about trusting it in production.
Butfor MPAs or projects that lean heavily on server-side rendering, it’s a game-changer. You’re not rebuilding the wheel, just enhancing it. Htmx has a sweet spot—it’s just not always the right tool for every job. Depends what you're building, I guess...
Green and Sawhney’s work is especially exciting because it shows how tools from one field—Gowers norms—can unlock progress in another. That kind of cross-disciplinary insight is where breakthroughs happen. And yeah, it’s fair to question funding priorities, but basic research has given us antibiotics, GPS, and even computers. Without it, we’d still be in caves.