Notes for January 20-26

I’ve been tinkering with deepseek-r1 for a couple of weeks now, but with its newfound popularity and cries of impending doom for developers, I thought I’d do a little bit of more systematic testing with a trivial use case and post the results. What follows is my notes from a somewhat frustrating three hours of my life where I cajoled it to do a...

This was a pleasant surprise. I look fondly upon my experience with the Original Pebble ten years ago, and it would be nice to have (slightly) more modern hardware that sticks to its simplicity and week-long battery life. My OG is still around (although the bracelet has desintegrated), and I might just dust it off and see if it still works.

LeaderKey is an intriguing macOS launcher that uses a vim-like “leader key” keybinding system to launch applications and run scripts.

This is a little earlier than I expected, but completely in line. Like I wrote over the holidays, there is no more low-hanging fruit. But smarter (and massively cheaper) training strategies seem to yield “nearly as good” results as turning datacenters into massively expensive power sinks, so no wonder the market is jittery. After all, deepseek-r1...

Zed is a developer-oriented editor written in Rust with some AI features and a focus on performance. It is still in early stages of development, but is already quite usable (it has vim bindings, for starters and has a number of interesting features as well as enough extensibility to make it an intriguing alternative to Visual Studio Code.