🤖 China's ChatGPT Rival

Hey everybody,

This week, I’ve put together a page on my site to track Black Friday deals for developers, I also share nuanced takes on coding assistants, the art of choosing the right tools, and a deep dive into memory-safe programming.

Quick Links

🎉 Black Friday Deals For Developers
I’ve created a page on my site to track Black Friday deals for Software Developers and IT professionals. I’ll keep it updated with the best finds as they come in!

🤔 On not using copilot
Tom MacWright shares a balanced take on coding assistants: useful, but not essential. While he occasionally uses tools like Claude for tasks like shell scripting, he doesn’t rely on them daily. However, he acknowledges their growing appeal, as many respected developers use them extensively. His blog thoughtfully explores narratives surrounding LLMs.

🆕 How we choose technologies
Technology is just a tool to create what people want, but overthinking kills momentum. For PostHog, a 60-person remote and async team, shipping fast isn’t optional. While there’s no perfect way to choose tools, their approach balances speed and practicality over drawn-out procurement processes.

🧠 Can chatgpt-o1 complete a junior frontend developer's task?
Can ChatGPT-o1 handle junior front-end developer tasks solo? A recent blog says no, while useful, LLMs still need human oversight for engineering work. The post stirred debate, many agree, but some critics argued the experiment was unfair since the LLM wasn’t allowed to iterate, unlike human developers.

🤖 China’s AI model to rival OpenAI’s o1
China’s DeepSeek has unveiled a groundbreaking “reasoning” AI model, DeepSeek-R1, designed to rival OpenAI’s o1. Unlike typical models, reasoning AIs fact-check themselves, taking extra steps to avoid errors. DeepSeek-R1 mimics o1’s approach by planning tasks and executing them in stages for better answers. The model has already shown vulnerabilities, including being jailbroken to share illicit instructions. It also restricts politically sensitive queries.

More Reading

• A fun blog post on generating random mazes with JavaScript.

• Bluesky is on the verge of overtaking Threads.

• Getting Over Not Being A Good Enough Programmer.

• Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang.

A New Era for C and C++?

In my latest video, we take a look at how C and C++ advocates are coping with all this memory safe discussion, and what these developers are doing to actually make C and C++ memory safe.

While the CISA and FBI want to do away with these "memory unsafe" languages, C and C++ developers are starting to implement their own solutions.

We'll talk about this, as well as 3 solutions that are in play now today.

Until next week,

Travis.