I have been working with Python a lot more recently, and it feels like I spend more time fighting packaging than writing code.

Python’s primary package manager, pip, is roughly equivalent to the best 1990s had to offer(Perl CPAN), it makes it depressingly easy to end up with a broken environment.

Pixi: A modern packaging system for Python

pixi is a modern package manager along the lines of deno/pnpm, but for Python. It’s a single binary that you can download and run. It will install Python + native packages within a single subdirectory. It will use pixi.toml file to track dependencies + pixi.lock to track exact versions of transitive dependencies.

13 GiB/s per core!

Sneller posted a blog on HN on how they use AVX-512 to decompress data at 13 gigabytes per second per core.

This a fantastic ad for their “lets turn logs on S3 into cheap database” product. This is a solution I wanted multiple times, will definitely consider them next time the need comes up.

Faster than RAM

Now this post did not get overlooked, but what did get overlooked is that the post engaged the clickhouse CTO. He posted a link to a presentation on how Clickhouse uses compression to process in-memory data faster than RAM bandwidth .

As a result of discussion in these comments, clickhouse might get even faster.

I’m gonna start a column on cool blog posts I found, that got 0 or minimal traction. I suspect I will also have no traction doing that 🤦‍♂️.

The Problem

I really enjoy thoughtful writing on deep technical problems. It’s even better when one sees thoughtful comments, that further contribute new directions to throughts presented. HackerNews is where most of that writing tends to land. Unfortunately it tends to not do well vs trendy, click-baity, etc content. Twitter is even worse.

First, a blog post on my tooling for reading HN.

The Problem

Ukraine had a lot of power outages due to Putin’s bombing of our power infrastructure, I needed to switch to fiber + battery-backup to continue able to able to work.

I’m at a rental apartment and I’m not allowed to drill walls. The idiot that layed the internet into the apartment used a 4-wire cat5 cable to save a few pennies, then cemented it in.

TLDR: I prompt-engineered the system prompt in chatcraft to turn it into a github analytics tool: github analyst chat . Longer Story I suggested to David that we have a newsfeed of new features on chatcraft.org . He replied that we should try to use chatcraft.org to generate those. Found simonw’s blog post on using a public clickhouse instance. Used David’s new “edit system prompt” feature in combination with my “Run Code” feature with the new-sh chatgpt-16k model to chat with the rather wide github history table in clickhouse.

chatcraft.org is my open source project for working with GPT. It completely changed how I work. Cool thing about chatcraft is that it’s completely client-side, almost completely stateless(except for sharing) on serverside. I am also working on a project that uses LLMs to help navigate a knowledge base. Making a wrong tech choice there could kill my project. Few thoughts from that perspective: The 3 YOLOs of LLM development “You only live once” (YOLO) is a modern adaptation of the Latin phrase “Carpe diem,” which means “Seize the day.