Koukou Roukou

The 2nd edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, by @martinkl and me, is finished and sent to the printers! Ebooks available next week, and print books in 3–4 weeks. Sigh of relief. 😅 (BTW, this is a good opportunity to support your favourite local bookshop!)

On DeepWiki and increasing malleability of software. This starts as partially a post on appreciation to DeepWiki, which I routinely find very useful and I think more people would find useful to know about. I went through a few iterations of use: Their first feature was that it auto-builds wiki pages for github repos (e.g. nanochat here) with quick Q&A: deepwiki.com/karpathy/nanoc… Just swap "github" to "deepwiki" in the URL for any repo and you can instantly Q&A against it. For example, yesterday I was curious about "how does torchao implement fp8 training?". I find that in *many* cases, library docs can be spotty and outdated and bad, but directly asking questions to the code via DeepWiki works very well. The code is the source of truth and LLMs are increasingly able to understand it. But then I realized that in many cases it's even a lot more powerful not being the direct (human) consumer of this information/functionality, but giving your agent access to DeepWiki via MCP. So e.g. yesterday I faced some annoyances with using torchao library for fp8 training and I had the suspicion that the whole thing really shouldn't be that complicated (wait shouldn't this be a Function like Linear except with a few extra casts and 3 calls to torch._scaled_mm?) so I tried: "Use DeepWiki MCP and Github CLI to look at how torchao implements fp8 training. Is it possible to 'rip out' the functionality? Implement nanochat/fp8.py that has identical API but is fully self-contained" Claude went off for 5 minutes and came back with 150 lines of clean code that worked out of the box, with tests proving equivalent results, which allowed me to delete torchao as repo dependency, and for some reason I still don't fully understand (I think it has to do with internals of torch compile) - this simple version runs 3% faster. The agent also found a lot of tiny implementation details that actually do matter, that I may have naively missed otherwise and that would have been very hard for maintainers to keep docs about. Tricks around numerics, dtypes, autocast, meta device, torch compile interactions so I learned a lot from the process too. So this is now the default fp8 training implementation for nanochat github.com/karpathy/nanoc… Anyway TLDR I find this combo of DeepWiki MCP + GitHub CLI is quite powerful to "rip out" any specific functionality from any github repo and target it for the very specific use case that you have in mind, and it actually kind of works now in some cases. Maybe you don't download, configure and take dependency on a giant monolithic library, maybe you point your agent at it and rip out the exact part you need. Maybe this informs how we write software more generally to actively encourage this workflow - e.g. building more "bacterial code", code that is less tangled, more self-contained, more dependency-free, more stateless, much easier to rip out from the repo (x.com/karpathy/statu…) There's obvious downsides and risks to this, but it is fundamentally a new option that was not possible or economical before (it would have cost too much time) but now with agents, it is. Software might become a lot more fluid and malleable. "Libraries are over, LLMs are the new compiler" :). And does your project really need its 100MB of dependencies?

⚡️В файлах Эпштейна найдена загадочная женщина, которая отказалась покидать остров

We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor. It ran uninterrupted for one week. It's 3M+ lines of code across thousands of files. The rendering engine is from-scratch in Rust with HTML parsing, CSS cascade, layout, text shaping, paint, and a custom JS VM. It *kind of* works! It still has issues and is of course very far from Webkit/Chromium parity, but we were astonished that simple websites render quickly and largely correctly.

RIP Stack Overflow.

I don't do Software Engineering anymore. Nobody does. It's a time when the truths of Software Engineering have been cancelled. The common ground now, pushed by the ever-growing crowd of deniers, is that we no longer need to write good software. That good code has no value. That hitting the market requires anything but good code. The truth is that Software Engineering works for everything aimed at the future. But the current industry's goals are short: build some shit, sell it, and hop on the next shit. There is no application or service creation anymore. You don't see any big useful app emerging, like 10-20 years ago. Everything in our industry today is either a short-lived grift or a heavy, buggy, corporate-driven monopolist shit that is here to enslave us. Software Engineering is no more.

Forget what you know about DeFi, Kaigen changes the game… Be part of it, join the waitlist: kaigen.ai

@levwalkin Все знают, что с кормёжкой животных нужны чёткие протоколы с синхронизацией, потому что этим мордам верить нельзя.

Программист на Коболе, будучи незаменимым для человеком для ряда крупных банков в США, заработал кучу денег и на старости лет попросил себя заморозить до 10000 года. В какой-то момент просыпается, спрашивает: - Какой сейчас год? - 3500. - А фигли вы меня разморозили, я же в 10000 просил?! - Понимаете какое дело, нам срочно понадобился программист на Коболе...

Merry Christmas to all our fellow mathematicians! (v/@DiegoKuonen)

@threadingdie @biocad_ltd Спасибо за инфо. Было бы интересно узнать, в каких вузах/ на каких факультетах курируйте.

@avinograd @biocad_ltd спасибо, приятно слышать:) получить профессию, связанную с биофармацевтикой или биоинформатикой:) тут зависит от того, что больше интересно:) у нас если что есть сотрудничество с некоторыми вузами (курируем магистерские программы). но найм в целом обычный, из разных вузов:))

ещё вчера на обучение баловались с PyMOL - это такая утилита для визуализации молекул и работы с ними. в моих рабочих задачах она редко требуется, потому на обучениях, когда удаётся осмысленно поиграться, радуюсь как ребёнок #biocadlife @biocad_ltd

А почему мне раньше никто не рассказывал, что уже лет 20 есть такой охуенный инструмент как user story map?

@pepel_klaasa Геймер, гейзер, счётчик Гейгера, Билл Гейтс, Глория Гейнер, Гейдар Алиев, "Гей, славяне"

@Bertrand_Meyer RIP

We lost a titan of programming languages, programming methodology, software engineering and hardware design. Niklaus Wirth passed away on the first of January. We mourn a pioneer, colleague, mentor and friend.

I'm happy to announce that the PDF of Haskell, The Craft of Functional Programming (3rd edition) is available to view and download for free. Later in the year I'll revise it and make it available as an online text. But for now, here it is, uncorrected: simonjohnthompson.github.io/craft3e/craft3…

Я ебал, день II

@papazaitsa Я на бумажке начинал программировать и ничего, выучился

New release of Async Profiler 👏👏👏 @AndreiPangin